I don't see why it shouldn't be even more automated than that, with LLM ideas tested automatically by differential testing of components against the previous implementation.
Defining tests that test for the right things requires an understanding of the problem space, just as writing the code yourself in the first place does. It's a catch-22. Using LLMs in that context would be pointless (unless you're writing short-lived one-off garbage on purpose).
I.e. the parent is speaking in the context of learning, not in the context of producing something that appears to work.
I'm not sure that's true. Bombarding code with huge numbers of randomly generated tests can be highly effective, especially if the tests are curated by examining coverage (and perhaps mutation kills) in the original code.
> I don't see why it *shouldn't be even more automated
In my particular case, I'm learning so having an LLM write the whole thing for me defeats the point. The LLM is a very patient (and sometimes unreliable) mentor.
So, if you search for some text that occurs at the end of one chunk, will it then preview a following chunk? And could chaining these chunks give you the entire book?
If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.
You're talking about in-book search (TFA is about search across all books), and yes that was indeed once a known technique for extracting whole or nearly whole books.
That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them), and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book beyond the standard preview pages.
But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and built up their collections...
Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for evaporative cooling. What part is nonsense?
If the data center is built somewhere with ample water supplies this isn't an issue. If it's pulling from groundwater this can be a huge issue. Groundwater isn't infinite and is being depleted in many areas.
In the USA, data centres consume about 164 billion gallons of water annually [1]
Irrigation consumes 118 billion gallons per day [1] and thermoelectric power plants a further 133 billion gallons per day.
There's enormous amounts, and there's enormous amounts. If you really want to get mad about water being wasted, look up what californian alfalfa growers pay for their water.
New datacenter projects are usually closed loop now.
From your first citation:
> Closed-loop cooling systems enable the reuse of both recycled wastewater and freshwater, allowing water supplies to be used multiple times. A cooling tower can use external air to cool the heated water, allowing it to return to its original temperature. These systems can reduce freshwater use by up to 70%.
Citation please, I don’t buy it. Evaporative cooling towers almost double the efficiency of heat rejection vs a closed loop system. I don’t see any data center operator giving up those operating cost efficiency gains just to save some water, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, I still don’t buy it. No data center operator is going to use almost twice as much electricity to operate their cooling system if they could install evaporative cooling towers and almost double the efficiency of heat rejection. You can remove 7W of heat for 1W of electricity with a cooling tower, it’s 4W for 1W with a closed loop system. I could see them doing it in a humid area where you can barely get any cooling from evaporation due to the air being satured, but that only covers the Deep South and Florida in the US.
I don’t care if some company operating data centers claim that they’re aiming for closed loop cooling systems when the economics favor open loop cooling. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome, the incentive to increase profit by using cooling towers will beat out the abstract good feeling you get from not using evaporative cooling towers and paying almost twice as much to reject heat from your data center which you only operate to make a profit.
It's not a question of quantity but of distribution.
I'm not defending the waste of water that is growing alfalfa in the desert for export, but there are plenty of places datacenters are built where the water they use is impactful.
They can both be bad. Unlike the legal mess that is US irrigation water rights, data centers are also a lot easier to do something about.
I guess it's possible to have a condensing station, but generally speaking you'd need to supply input energy to allow it to cool down and condense somehow. The bigger question here is if a datacenter using evaporative cooling where does the moisture go? If it just feeds a cloud system that rains on nearby fields, it's not much different than irrigating crops. If it feeds clouds that go offshore and rain into the ocean, it's similar to just diverting drinking water into the ocean
I must be missing something, why can't it be entirely closed loop like a water radiator in an old car? A simple fan running through large radiator cores would certainly condense within the system, keeping the water in the system
A closed loop system has a COP of 4, adding in cooling towers almost doubles that to 7. You can reject 1.75x more heat for the same amount of electricity by adding evaporative cooling towers.
> I was under the impression they capture the evaporation, let it cool, and recycle it?
So, how do they get rid of the latent heat of evaporation that's released when the water recondenses?
The whole point of evaporative cooling is to soak up that latent heat and release it later, out in the environment, when the water recondenses somewhere else.
It's kind of like why Dune's stillsuits don't work.
The reason they consume water is the same reason space is a bad place to put data centres, getting rid of the heat is a challenge. Having only radiative heat dissipation is going to severely limit space based manufacture and computing, it puts significant constraints on the space station already.
The "drought vs no drought" conversation hides the fact that a significant percentage of the water in the central valley aquifer has been pumped out for agriculture and other uses. Even if we stopped that tomorrow it would not recharge quickly, and the surface water is not sufficient for current demand.
CA is not in a drought right now. CA has been in conditions of persistent drought, with no more than a year or two of respite, for two decades. The last sustained period of sustained at-or-above-desired-level precipitation ended in 2007.
My logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!"
If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
Some pedantry first: you're describing "water shortage", which is a resource management issue, and not "drought", which is purely a precipitation thing.
But yes: you need to manage resources if we want to live in the environment. The way you don't do that is by announcing "there is no drought in california" and then proceeding to use the water falling today without recognizing that we're almost certainly still in a period of sustained drought and that such consumption isn't any more sustainable in the current La Niña cycle than it was last year or next.
Yes, all shortages can be solved by using less of the resource that we have a shortage of. But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Drought is simply a way of saying less water came from the sky than was expected. Obviously if less water comes for an extended period of time, you just call it the new normal and stop calling it a drought.
> But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Not sure where you're going with this metaphor. We absolutely should be helping out people who are financially struggling with advice about how to manage their funds. Don't go clubbing if you're behind on your rent. Cook your own food instead of grabbing another burger. Talk to a bank about consolidating your credit cards.
And of course we do. And it works, and is helpful.
But somehow you don't see that, or how it might apply to thing like "change crop and livestock choices to reflect resource availability" or "change taxation strategy to the externalities are borne fairly and not by consumers"?
You can always use resources more efficiently, you just have to invest and make traeoffs. No one is saying that the region can’t live with less water, farmers just have to change to products that make them less money. So while California is the ideal place to grow walnuts, they need water so maybe the world can just do without? Yes, that’s always a possible answer, it isn’t a simple easy choice to make though.
You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.
It’s like telling a poor person that they should do an hour of cooking after their second 8 hour shift in one day rather than grabbing a burger and that will be better for them, no trade off at all.
> You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.
There are indeed easy things that can be done that make things better. There are harder things that can be done that make things better still.
Obviously everything has costs and tradeoffs. You're the one with the maximalist position that apparently no regulation of water usage in southern California is acceptable because of... something about being mean to poor people or whatnot.
I guess my point is that yes, there is a lot we can do to avoid using water but no, none of those options are free. It isn't fair to say that "this is just a made up problem" when the solutions have costs and you have to pick between them carefully.
It was done deliberately in the USSR, in a process known as Underground Coal Gasification. Oxygen and steam are injected to convert the coal to syngas (CO + H2) which is brought up to the surface. This allows exploitation of coal deposits that are not suitable for conventional mining.
I wonder what they'd do if the US starts reducing NATO commitments. A perception that Europe is using financial blackmail to keep the US in NATO would have interesting effects on US politics.
Anyway, it's been clear to me that this sort of thing was Trump's plan all along. The goal is massive and permanent reduction in the size of the federal government. If that requires crashing the US ability to borrow more money, and crashing the value of the dollar, that's a price he's willing to make the US pay. US reputation abroad is of absolutely no importance to him; indeed, it's a negative, since a positive reputation allows borrowing that sustains the large federal government he hates.
The lesson for Europe is that depending on the US to defend them was a poisonous mistake, even if a very seductive one.
A post-crash US would be poorer, but also much more economically competitive. This would tend to encourage investment, so it's an interesting question how far the dollar would actually decline.
I wouldn't want to be in South Korea or Taiwan (or Japan, really) in this scenario.
Trump likes to frame is as if Europe said: "Please, USA, protect us, and we will just parasite on you and abuse our relationship to our advantage". Whereas in fact the whole story is the other way round. For example there were limits on the size of German army not that long time ago. And the USA did everything so that its interests are well represented n Europe. Now that Trump plays his "We don't need anyone" theme, the former allies of the USA are forming their own alliances, reduce spending in the USA and no longer feel obliged to turn a blind eye on things that were bothering them for decades.
The only reason why other countries sent their soldiers to stupid wars in Afghanistan and Irak that made no sense then and make no sense now was because they were honoring their commitments and saying OK, we send people to die but if the worst come and Russia attacks us, The USA will do their part. Now Trump openly says all this was for nothing. All trust in the USA is gone as nobody knows what Trump does when he wakes up next day. So we quietly work on making the best of the current situation.
I'm less interested in performative statements and more interested in underlying motivations and incentives. It's not a question of who is "right" but of what the actors get out of it.
Of course Europe was leaning on US defense. This enabled resources to be diverted to social spending instead, something that has become all the more vital as populations age. And it's not clear what the US gets out of defending Europe now. There's no perceived Soviet juggernaut and Russia can't even conquer Ukraine.
> There's no perceived Soviet juggernaut and Russia can't even conquer Ukraine.
It looks a bit like that to be the case, but legally Russia still isn't at war with the Ukraine, according to their own internal law. Hence the use of mercenaries and "volunteers" and the pinky promise that conscripts are not used near the Ukraine.
> Europe was leaning on US defense. This enabled resources to be diverted to social spending instead
While each of these statements seems true, there is an imprecise implication that the USA was sponsoring Europe's social security. There are several problems with this implication, starting from the fact that the USA wanted to be present in Europe and benefited from it. Sure, increasing military budgets means less money is available for other things, including social spending, but increasing it from 2% to 5% like they're doing now or even 9% doesn't mean that Europe stops offering free healthcare and education to its citizens. So while I understand why Trump is promoting this narrative, it is his typical lie.
> depending on the US to defend them was a poisonous mistake, even if a very seductive one.
It was a decision that was necessary to not loose the second world war to Germany and/or the Sovietunion. Until 30 years ago separating from the US would have meant allowing the Sovietunion to expand to the Atlantic. Separating from the US has been an open discussion for the last 30 years, but it was always felt to be a security risk and the US has actively used its soft power to remain the status quo.
If someone doesn't get a vaccination, and as a result gets infected, and then as a result passes the disease to someone else, then this should be treated as equivalent to harming someone by causing an accident through reckless driving.
What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.
>What is needed here are laws making it a crime to conceal that you have or had a communicable disease, so infections can be tracked and fault determined.
Absolutely not. We tried this with HIV and it just incentivizes people to not seek treatment, and then they spread the disease more.
Yes and many are being repealed because they were written before modern antiretrovirals and before the medical consensus that undetectable = untransmittable (U=U).
It should be a crime to accuse someone who is innocent of any intent to cause harm, and a crime to manufacture evidence to that effect, because basically you could never prove that Alice infected Bob, let alone with malicious intent.
It is hysterical and illogical for people to make these accusations. Get real.
Intent is not needed. Causing awful consequences to others through negligence is already a crime. After all, did a drunk driver intend to run over that child?
EDIT: typo fixed, thx
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