I’ve been loving the series, just working my way through the last book now, and already getting the feeling in the OP from seeing that there’s not that much book left anymore :(

I somehow at the same time feel that it has no right being this good, but also enjoy it a ton. It’s a weird feeling but I’ll take it - it really appeals to my taste.

From the blog you quoted yourself:

Despite improving AI energy efficiency, total energy consumption is likely to increase because of the massive increase in usage. A large portion of the increase in energy consumption between 2024 to 2023 is attributed to AI-related servers. Their usage grew from 2 TWh in 2017 to 40 TWh in 2023. This is a big driver behind the projected scenarios for total US energy consumption, ranging from 325 to 580 TWh (6.7% to 12% of total electricity consumption) in the US by 2028.

(And likewise, the last graph of predictions for 2028)

From a quick read of that source, it is unclear to me if it factors in the electricity cost of training the models. It seems to me that it doesn’t.

I found more information here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

Racks of servers hum along for months, ingesting training data, crunching numbers, and performing computations. This is a time-consuming and expensive process—it’s estimated that training OpenAI’s GPT-4 took over $100 million and consumed 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power San Francisco for three days.

So, I’m not sure if those numbers for 2023 paint the full picture. And adoption of AI-powered tools was definitely not as high in 2023 as it is nowadays. So I wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers were much higher than the reported 22.7% of the total server power usage in the US.

Not even remotely close to this scale… At most you could compare the energy usage to the miners in the crypto craze, but I’m pretty sure that even that is just a tiny fraction of what’s going on right now.

It’s getting downvoted to oblivion because it ignores many things, namely the fact that a lot of drug research worldwide is state-funded. There are many cases in which pharmaceutical companies use public funds for R&D, and then go on to sell the drug at steep prices, raking in immense profits.

Meanwhile the public has to either cough up the bucks, or wait until the patent expires to have affordable options.

Or use yEnc: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YEnc

JS “idiomatic” way to cast to boolean. But could just be written as !window.chrome instead.

That is the fallacious paper millionaire argument. They have more than enough liquidity, can take loans against their “non-liquid” wealth, and are anyway working with multi-year plans to sell assets and have enough liquidity. I believe this is also explained in https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ and there they also explain that the US market cap is bigger than their stocks and so. So they could sell a lot in one go, of course losing “efficiency”, but the market would be able to cope without any issue.

I think we are on the same side here judging from the rest of your comment, but I find it important to refute this typical argument, because it does not help that there is some sort of billionaire apologism by saying that they “don’t actually have this money in their bank account to spend”.

Hate speech is not “saying that you hate something”…

Is there a Lemmy equivalent to /r/beetlejuicing yet?

https://youtu.be/4IIVfoDuVIw

The downvotes are just typical Reddit/Lemmy superiority complex, whenever some science stuff that “most people don’t know” shows up, anyone saying anything different gets downvoted a ton.

Source/opinion/joke, doesn’t matter, just going against the hivemind.

What about the videos recorded in Ecuador, where the same reservoir is drained on both sides of the equator and the water spins in different directions?

Edited to add the link since other users asked for it down in the replies: https://youtu.be/4IIVfoDuVIw

Edit2: check the replies below, the video is good at debunking this. But it’s not super easy to notice

Haha baited XDDDD LUUUL

Mostly yes, but they’re in general oversimplified (for obvious reasons)

But it’s more about offensive cyber security than necessarily the Linux part. The Linux part is just file system navigation and not much more, the rest is the “hacking” part, and that’s what I’m talking about

Disclaimer: I did not complete it, but I got pretty far, and I worked in the cyber security area.

I would however say it’s not a good place if you want to learn as that’s not really the game’s focus. There are better resources out there like overthewire and linuxjourney for that

Wait, you’re not AI too?

Shared branches should always only move forward. Most Git-* systems support stuff like protected branches.

I personally like tidying up your own feature branch with rebasing and then merging it into main (preferably using only FF merges). However this is not scalable for some larger projects, and for example monorepos also make this hard to accomplish. In those cases the solution ends up being squash+merge.

The extra information about the squashed commits is usually persisted to these systems (GitHub PRs, GitLab MRs, etc) so you don’t really lose much, I guess. Although I do prefer keeping it all in plain git.

Nice reference

Hasn’t been the case anymore for quite some time, even though I think it has quite generous sudo rules. But yes, it’s not meant to be your main OS but instead more like a toolbox you use in liveboot/VM/etc.