data centers and supercomputing facilities, which consume voracious amounts of electricity and water Memphis is on the Mississippi. Evaporating the volume of the Mississippi at Memphis with graphics cards would be a pretty impressive feat. kagis https://snoflo.org/flow/report/tennessee/ TENNESSEE FLOW REPORT August 22 2025 Streamflow levels across Tennessee are currently 92.0% of normal, with the Mississippi River At Memphis reporting the highest discharge in the state with 354000cfs 345,000 cubic feet of water per second is a pretty substantial amount of water. EDIT: Water has a heat of vaporization of 2.23 kJ/g. 345k ft³ water is 9.7×10⁹ cm³, so 9.7×10⁹g That's about 2.2×10¹⁰kJ to vaporize it (disregarding the specific heat of water, just the heat of vaporization). 1kJ ≈ 0.28 Wh. So 6,160,000,000 Wh to vaporize the water going through in a second. 3,600 seconds in an hour. So at a flow rate of 345k ft³ that'd sink about 22 trillion watts through vaporization alone. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/node/1925 In 2024, the world wide energy consumption was about 186,000 TWhs 8760 hours in a year. So global average power usage is about 21 TW. If we put the entire world's generated electricity towards heat to vaporize the Mississippi at Memphis, it'd still fall a bit short. EDIT2: I also inadvertently transposed two digits (should be 354,000 ft³/sec rather than 345,000 ft³/sec) in transcribing the initial flow rate, so it'd fall slightly shorter.

Homestuck is the only reason I need

https://github.com/corollari/linusrants?tab=readme-ov-file#linusrants

@technocrit While I agree with the main point that "AI/LLMs has/have no agency", I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren't intelligent... we aren't so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no "exclusivity" of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there's no such thing as non-deterministic "intelligence". We're just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we're the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it's below. If you don't, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.-----First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they're not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it's all "made of star stuff", it's all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves...Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).It's bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we're essentially no different than our fancy "tools", be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as "Markov Chains" and "Artificial Neural Networks".Then, there's also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we're exclusive in that regard, but we're not, we're just fooling ourselves!IMHO, every time we try to argue "there's no intelligence beyond humans", it's highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as "Homo sapiens"). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of "deities" or "extraterrestrials" among a "primitive, wild life".Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of "senses" ("Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, ..." "my senses deceive me" is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte's conclusion, "Cogito ergo sum", is highly anthropocentric, it's often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly "exclusive" nature of human intelligence on the ability to "feel".Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of "evil" (both the Hobbesian line regarding "human evilness" and the Epicurean paradox regarding "metaphysical evilness"), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly "soul-bearing beings") are no different from a "souless" machine, because we're both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don't care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn't dare to gaze into the abyss yet.I'm someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as "biological organism", one of which "managed" to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We're biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to "fear Death", even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we're are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards "cosmic chaos" (entropy, as defined, "as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly").

What are you on about with this? Last news post 2013?

Appreciated, but do you think the authorities want to win the war on drugs?

Both waiting and not Both alive and not Both lying or not Both existing or not