I’ve always called it “getting mail-blasted on the information superhighway” but not many dictionaries include this alternative usage, and Merriam-Webster filed for a restraining order against me.

So much for dissing on AIs for not being able to count.

no, I’m still going to do that.

yeah, that sure makes it infeasible 👀

uh-huh. do you have the source data for that infographic?

it’s a bit hard to read because it’s ridiculously low-res (almost a full quarter of a megapixel), but I can at least make out the caption, which says “European cities with district heating systems (population)”

from that alone I suspect it’s a bit misleading - it’s ambiguous whether the population they’re highlighting is the population of the city total, or the population served by the district heating system.

eg, if there’s a city with 100k population, and a college campus in that city that serves 1000 students with district heating, does that show up on the map as a dot representing 1k population? or 100k?

as I said, this depends heavily on high population density. I don’t doubt that it can work in European cities, or on American college campuses (because those tend to be some of the few places in the US that have population density approaching a European city, as well as the political tolerance for that sort of centrally managed infrastructure)

but the OP I replied to was talking about trying to do district heating in suburban / exurban Texas. I don’t know if you’re from the US, or if you’ve ever been to Texas. if you haven’t, you probably don’t understand the sheer scale of the sprawl we’re talking about here. go pick one of the cities on that infographic, look up its population density (in people per square km), and compare it to the population density of suburbs in Dallas / Fort Worth. if they’re even within an order of magnitude of each other, I’ll give you a cookie.

could we not use the data center as water heaters and distribute the hot water to households?

is that technically possible? sure. it’s called district heating. that wikipedia article mentions examples of it being used in the Roman empire, 14th century France, the 19th century US Naval Academy, and early 20th century MIT campus.

in practice…houses already have a “regular” water connection running to them. in order for this to be practical, you’re talking about having to run plumbing for a 2nd hot water connection. to every house.

come up with an estimate for how much you think that would cost. then go look up the actual cost that Flint spent on replacing their primary water connection pipes. then go look at your estimate again.

when it’s feasible, usually you see it on a college campus, or somewhere else with high population density and a centrally-located physical plant providing the hot water / steam.

we’re talking about data centers in Texas here. they’re probably in some warehouse district in exurban sprawl, and the homes you’d theoretically want to run the pipes to would all be detached single-family homes in suburbs miles away. hope your pipes are well-insulated.

on one hand, if you’ve been following news about Substack at all, this is not particularly surprising:

November 2023: Substack has a Nazi problem

January 2024: Substack faces user revolt over anti-censorship stance on neo-Nazis

but on the other hand…this is the kind of thing that will be surprising to a lot of people who aren’t savvy media consumers. if they thought about Substack at all they probably thought of it as just “that website with all the newsletters”.

many of those people had the Substack app installed on their phones.

they got a push notification. the icon of the push notification was a swastika.

imagine looking at the list of notifications on your phone and just…seeing a whole-ass swastika.

I would compare this to the time Elon Musk called that cave diver in Thailand a “pedo guy”. he was a shitbag before that, he was a shitbag after that, but that was still a watershed moment when a lot of people had the sudden realization of “oh, huh, this guy’s a shitbag”.

Substack has been a Nazi bar for a few years now. they started allowing customers of the bar to hang up flags on the front patio. today was the day they hung up a Nazi flag.

I’m having trouble following the example the LLM generated for you in your screenshot…I’m not terribly familiar with TypeScript but MyUnionType should be a union of types and instead it seems to be a union of…1 or 2?

maybe you can share some example code of the unexpected behavior that you wrote, rather than something the fancy random number generator wrote?

According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle

…

According to the Chronicle article

…

“Once that water evaporates, it’s just gone,” Mace told The Austin Chronicle.

one of my journalism pet peeves - they don’t link to that original source article, from only 4 days ago, but this entire article is basically just a rewrite / rewording of it. all of the sources quoted are from the Austin Chronicle, they don’t seem to have done any original reporting.

and on the sidebar, the top link on “Editor’s Picks” is “10 Most Successful Shark Tank Products” which is pretty obviously just an ad disguised as an article. so this “Techie Gamers” website seems like a pretty shitty clickbait farm.

a lot of the discussion about “require age verification to view adult content” tends to oversimplify “adult content == pornography”

which in turn means opposition to these laws gets dismissed / trivialized as “oh, so you want children to look at porn then?”

I think it’s an important reminder that “adult content” is much broader than 13 year olds who want to go to PornHub and search “boobies”

remember the William Gibson quote “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”

that applies to the negative effects of the future, not just the positive ones

Musk’s MechaHitler chatbot is powered by methane-gas burning turbines

It’s been known that xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has been using around 15 portable generators to help power its massive supercomputer in Memphis without yet securing permits. But new aerial images obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center show that number is now far higher. The group says these gas turbines combined can generate around 420MW of electricity, enough to power an entire city.

I’m old enough to remember when my techno-optimist friends were talking about how “you may not like Elon Musk, but you have to give him credit for helping solve climate change”

the sources quoted/linked in the article:

Maarten Sap told CNN.

When CNN tested three popular AI chatbots

CNN asked each chatbot

KhudaBukhsh told CNN.

Cameron Berg and Judd Rosenblatt from AE Studio wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, told CNN

it seems pretty clear that this “news” site is just summarizing articles from more reputable outlets so they can get their own ad revenue from them.

and the cherry on top:

After the controversy, Musk acknowledged the problem on his social media platform X.

with a link to…https://x.com. not to any one particular tweet. just a link to the website.

I had suspicions that this was AI-generated slop, but that proves it in my mind. no human journalist would embed a link like that.

I am basing that on both what I see on the news and what is happening to people all around me.

what news sources are you consuming?

because if you’re getting the message from the news that economic collapse is imminent and all currencies are going to be worthless and we will need to fall back to a barter-based economy…that is a function of choices you’ve made in your news diet, much more than it has anything to do with anything actually happening in the real world.

and what specifically is happening to people around you that you’re referring to? do you have a pen-pal in Weimar-era Germany who you’re communicating with through a time portal? or are you talking with other people who have the same news diet as you do and forming a self-reinforcing worldview?

direct link to the paper, rather than this Gazeon clickbait: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813

We study vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, reaching 40% for some subcorpora.

99% of users on Lemmy instances are extremely fearful of AI and lack the courage to accept reality

hi. I see you registered your account here 2 days ago. welcome to Beehaw.

posting comments that boil down to “99% of you are stupid but luckily I’m here to educate you” is probably going to wear out your welcome pretty fast.

haha Streisand Effect go brrrrr

https://www.iceblock.app/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iceblock/id6741939020

(currently no Android version, unfortunately)

With NHS mental health waitlists at record highs, are chatbots a possible solution?

taking Betteridge’s Law one step further - not only is the answer “no”, the fucking article itself explains why the answer is no:

People around the world have shared their private thoughts and experiences with AI chatbots, even though they are widely acknowledged as inferior to seeking professional advice.

as with so many other things, “maybe AI can fix it?” is being used as a catch-all for every systemic problem in society:

In April 2024 alone, nearly 426,000 mental health referrals were made in England - a rise of 40% in five years. An estimated one million people are also waiting to access mental health services, and private therapy can be prohibitively expensive.

fucking fund the National Health Service properly, in order to take care of the people who need it.

but instead, they want to continue cutting its budget, and use “oh there’s an AI chatbot that you can use that is totally just as good as talking to a human, trust us” as a way of sweeping the real-world harm caused by those budget cuts under the rug.

Nicholas has autism, anxiety, OCD, and says he has always experienced depression. He found face-to-face support dried up once he reached adulthood: “When you turn 18, it’s as if support pretty much stops, so I haven’t seen an actual human therapist in years.”

He tried to take his own life last autumn, and since then he says he has been on a NHS waitlist.

tl;dw is that you should say “please” as basically prompt engineering, I guess?

the theory seems to be that the chatbot will try to match your tone, so if you ask it questions in a tone like it’s an all-knowing benevolent information god, it’ll respond in kind, and if you treat it politely its responses will tend more towards politeness?

I don’t see how this solves any of the fundamental problems with asking a fancy random number generator for authoritative information, but sure, if you want to be polite to the GPUs, have at it.

like, several lawyers have been sanctioned for submitting LLM-generated legal briefs with hallucinated case citations. if you tack on “pretty please, don’t make up any fake case citations or I could get disbarred” to a prompt…is that going to solve the problem?

short answer: no, not really

long answer, here’s an analogy that might help:

you go to https://yourbank.com/ and log in with your username and password. you click the button to go to Online Bill Pay, and tell it to send ACME Plumbing $150 because they just fixed a leak under your sink.

when you press “Send”, your browser does something like send a POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with a JSON blob like {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "ACME Plumbing", "amount": 150.0} (this is heavily oversimplified, no actual online bank would work like this, but it’s close enough for the analogy)

and all that happens over TLS. which means it’s “secure”. but security is not an absolute, things can only be secure with a particular threat model in mind. in the case of TLS, it means that if you were doing this at a coffee shop with an open wifi connection, no one else on the coffeeshop’s wifi would be able to eavesdrop and learn your password.

(if your threat model is instead “someone at the coffeeshop looking over your shoulder while you type in your password”, no amount of TLS will save you from that)

but with the type of vulnerability Jellyfin has, someone else can simply send their own POST request to https://yourbank.com/send-bill-payment with {"account_id": 1234567890, "recipient": "Bob's Shady Plumbing", "amount": 10000.0}. and your bank account will process that as you sending $10k to Bob’s Shady Plumbing.

that request is also over TLS, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s security for a different level of the stack. the vulnerability is that you are logged in as account 1234567890, so you should be allowed to send those bill payment requests. random people who aren’t logged in as you should not be able to send bill payments on behalf of account 1234567890.

oh, this one’s pretty easy, actually

a normal AI tells you it’s safe to eat one rock per day

an AI agent waits for you to open your mouth, and then throws a rock at your face. but it’s smart enough to only do that once a day.

Casey Newton reviewed OpenAI’s “agent” back in January

he called it “promising but frustrating”…but this is the type of shit he considers “promising”:

My most frustrating experience with Operator was my first one: trying to order groceries. “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting it to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from? What kinds of groceries do I want?

It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.

At that point, I told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store in San Francisco. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.

After a surreal exchange in which I tried to explain how to use a computer to a computer, Operator asked for help. “It seems the location is still set to Des Moines, and I wasn’t able to access the store,” it told me. “Do you have any specific suggestions or preferences for setting the location to San Francisco to find the store?”

they’re gonna revolutionize the world, it’s gonna evolve into AGI Real Soon Now…but also if you live in San Francisco and tell it to buy you groceries it’ll order them from Iowa.

click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, “Don’t Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success”

their pricing page is here.

I’m paying 10 USD/month for their unlimited plan, there’s also a 5 USD/month tier but I’m sure that I would exceed its 300 searches/month limit.

so it’s not dirt-cheap, but not stupidly expensive either. I can afford it, and I’m happy to pay it because it’s a business model that I would like to see succeed.