riskable
@riskable@programming.dev
- Comment on Advocates raise alarm over Pfas pollution from datacenters amid AI boom 1 day ago:
Does anyone have the data on the total number of data centers that were being built over time? I’m not convinced that AI is causing that many more data centers to be built. From everything I’ve read, is just that they’re putting more GPUs into them.
- Comment on Advocates raise alarm over Pfas pollution from datacenters amid AI boom 1 day ago:
WTF? Have you ever been in a data center? They don’t release anything. They just… Sit. And blink lights while server fans blow and cooling systems whir, pumping water throughout.
The cooling systems they use aren’t that different from any office building. They’re just bigger, beefier versions. They don’t use anything super special. The Pfas they’re talking about in this article are the same old shit that’s used in any industrial air conditioner.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a data center uses 10 times more cooling as an equivalently sized office building. I don’t know about you, but everywhere that I’ve seen data centers, there’s loads and loads of office buildings nearby. Far more than say 10 for every data center.
My point is this: If you’re going to be bitching about pfas and cooling systems, why focus on data centers (or AI, specifically) when there’s all these damned office buildings? Instead, why don’t we talk about work from home policies which would be an actual way to reduce pfas use.
This article… Ugh. It’s like bitching that electric car batteries can catch fire, pretending that regular cars don’t have a much, much higher likelihood of catching fire and there’s several orders of magnitude more of them.
Are Pfas a problem? Yes. Are data centers anywhere near the top 1000 targets for non-trivially reducing their use? No.
Aside: This is just like the articles bitching about data center water use… Data centers recycle their water! They have a great big intake when they’re done being built but then they’re done. They only need trivial amounts of water after that.
- Comment on Amazon's strict RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document and insiders 4 weeks ago:
We continue to believe that teams produce the best results when they’re collaborating and inventing in person,
First of all, that’s 100% bullshit.
Secondly, what about individuals‽ Ya know, the people that make up “the team.”
Studies have shown that individuals produce the best results when they’re working alone and not bothered regularly by office bullshit.
…but let’s get more specific, because Amazon is talking about innovation and “inventing”: Study after study has shown that the kind of “group brainstorming” that Amazon is referring to here produces worse results that having individuals work on ideas alone then pooling them together afterwards.
Literally the opposite of what they’re claiming.
Amazon: Believe your own bullshit at your peril. Well, at the loss of tech talent I guess 🤷
- Comment on Chhoto URL v6.3.0 is out now: A simple, blazingly fast, selfhosted URL shortener with no unnecessary features; written in Rust. 4 weeks ago:
You’ve obviously never tried to get any given .NET project working in Linux. There’s .NET and then there’s .NET Core which is a mere subset of .NET.
Only .NET Core runs on Linux and nobody uses it. The list of .NET stuff that will actually run on .NET Core (alone) is a barren wasteland.
- Comment on Chhoto URL v6.3.0 is out now: A simple, blazingly fast, selfhosted URL shortener with no unnecessary features; written in Rust. 4 weeks ago:
If it’s written in C# that’s a huge turn-off though because that means it’s likely to only run on Windows.
I mean, in theory, it could run on Linux but that’s a very rare situation. Almost everything ever written in C# uses Windows-specific APIs and basically no one installs the C# runtime on Linux anymore. It’s both enormous and a pain in the ass to get working properly for any given C# project.
- Comment on Chhoto URL v6.3.0 is out now: A simple, blazingly fast, selfhosted URL shortener with no unnecessary features; written in Rust. 4 weeks ago:
As an information security professional and someone who works on tiny, embedded systems, knowing that a project is written in Rust is a huge enticement. I wish more projects written in Rust advertised this fact!
Benefits of Rust projects—from my perspective:
- Don’t have to worry about the biggest, most common security flaws. Rust projects can still have security flaws (anything can) but it’s much less likely for certain categories of flaws.
- Super easy to build stuff from scratch. Rust’s crates ecosystem is fantastic! Especially in the world of embedded where it’s a godsend compared to dealing with C/C++ libraries.
- It’s probably super low overhead and really fast (because Rust stuff just tends to be like that due to the nature of the language and that special way the borrow checker bitches at you when you make poor programming choices haha).
- It’s probably cross-platform or trivially made cross-platform.
- Comment on Chinese social media platforms roll out labels for AI-generated material 4 weeks ago:
Also, stuff that gets mis-labeled as AI can be just as dangerous. Especially when you consider that the AI detection might use such labels to train itself. So someone who’s face is weirdly symmetrical might get marked as AI and then have hard time applying for jobs, purchasing things, getting credit, etc.
I want to know what counts as AI. If someone uses AI to remove the background in an image or just to remove someone standing in the background is technically generative AI but that’s something you can do in any photo editor anyway with a bit of work.
- Comment on The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs For Young People Just Got Stronger 4 weeks ago:
Meh. Nothing in this article is strong evidence of anything. They’re only looking at a tiny sample of data and wildly speculating about which entry-level jobs are being supplanted by AI.
As a software engineer who uses AI, I fail to see how AI can replace any given entry-level software engineering position. There’s no way! Any company that does that is just asking for trouble.
What’s more likely, is that AI is making senior software engineers more productive so they don’t need to hire more developers to assist them with more trivial/time consuming tasks.
This is a very temporary thing, though. As anyone in software can tell you: Software only gets more complex over time. Eventually these companies will have to start hiring new people again. This process usually takes about six months to a year.
If AI is causing a drop in entry-level hiring, my speculation (which isn’t as wild as in the article since I’m actually there on the ground using this stuff) is that it’s just a temporary blip while companies work out how to take advantage the slightly-enhanced productivity.
It’s inevitable: They’ll start new projects to build new stuff because now—suddenly—they have the budget. Then they’ll hire people to make up the difference.
This is how companies have worked since the invention of bullshit jobs. The need for bullshit grows with productivity.
- Comment on That's an impressive drop. Any ideas why? 5 weeks ago:
I’m guessing this graph matches closely with anime viewing… The true amplifier of Japan’s population decline!
To solve this crisis, we must make catgirls real and unleash an army of bland
protagonistsyoung men with almost no personality that possess some overpowered skill. Such as the ability to stay thin despite the ready availability of sugary/processed foods. - Comment on UN experts denounce enforced disappearances of Palestine civilians seeking aid 5 weeks ago:
The group of seven experts called for an end to the atrocities and expressed concern that the enforced disappearances will discourage Palestinians from accessing food distribution points, increasing the risk of starvation.
Is there any doubt at this point that this is Israel’s plan? As in, yes: That’s the idea. This is how genocide happens. Israel wants the Palestinians gone. Dead. Done. Over with.
If there’s no Palestinians in Gaza they can absorb it into Israel which was the entire point of imprisoning them there in the first place.
They’re following the American playbook on this one. Not Hitler’s. The Israeli government is betting that 100 years after the (successful) genocide, no one will care what they did. Because by then, it’ll long since be too late.
The thing is: In 100 years no one will care because some other conflict will have replaced this one. My guess: It’ll be Isrealis VS Israelis in a great big civil war that will go on seemingly forever. It’ll go on so long, in fact, that peoples of the future will stop thinking of the two sides as one people and will start referring to them with terms like, “Palestinians” and “Jews”.
- Comment on In shower today: "I bet my YouTube account is older than most of the people on YouTube." ...Yes, yes it is. 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 5 weeks ago:
Training an AI is orthogonal to copyright since the process of training doesn’t involve distribution.
You can train an AI with whatever TF you want without anyone’s consent. That’s perfectly legal fair use. It’s no different than if you copy a song from your PC to your phone.
Copyright really only comes into play when someone uses an AI to distribute a derivative of someone’s copyrighted work. Even then, it’s really the end user that is even capable of doing such a thing by uploading the output of the AI somewhere.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
Ugh, if only that worked for longer than like a month.
Eventually all these materials you can throw under throw rugs to make them stickier end up failing. Catastrophically.
Make sure to get a throw rug that has the non-slip feature sewn in. Make sure it’s nice and heavy too and never put it in the dryer (it’ll ruin the non-slip part). You should probably air dry throw rugs anyway, actually 🤷
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
The rug threw you. That’s why they’re called that!
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
Xerox is a bad copy of themselves from decades prior.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
Try this and the result may shock you!
Doctors hate it!
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
…and people that work with resin and 3D printerers.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.
Ahahahahahahaha! Oh man, you got a good laugh out of me this morning 🤣
- Comment on Uhm 5 weeks ago:
For images, it’s not even data collection because all the images that are used for these AI image generation tools are out on the internet for free for anyone to download right now. That’s how they’re obtained: A huge database of (highly categorized) image URLs (e.g. ImageNET) is crawled/downloaded.
That’s not even remotely the same thing as “data collection”. That’s when a company vacuums everything they can from your private shit. Not that photo of an interesting building you uploaded to flickr over a decade ago.
- Comment on Uhm 5 weeks ago:
This is sad, actually, because this very technology is absolutely fantastic at identifying things in images. That’s how image generation works behind the scenes!
esp32-cam identifying a cat, a bike, and a car in an image
ChatGPT screwed this up so badly because it’s programmed to generate images instead of using reference images and then identifying the relevant parts. Which is something a tiny little microcontroller board can do.
If they just paid to license a data set of medical images… Oh wait! They already did that!
Sigh
- Comment on DM me on Spotify: Spotify launches a messaging feature. 5 weeks ago:
Zawinski’s law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.
This is just the modern equivalent: Intra-site messaging.
- Comment on US | Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it 5 weeks ago:
I guess it’s time to bring back flag burning.
What better way to demonstrate that America is “the land of the free”?
What better way to demonstrate that it’s not the land of the free, by prosecuting such a trivial thing.
- Comment on Caption this. 1 month ago:
Frogamagogery
- Comment on It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes 1 month ago:
I hate Microsoft and Excel but that date thing is exactly the kind of stuff that AI would be great at.
Just not the kind of AI Microsoft probably plans to put in Excel 🤷
- Comment on Japan's 1st osmotic power plant begins operating in Fukuoka 1 month ago:
Well it’s certainly not sad news!
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 1 month ago:
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 1 month ago:
Linux users: “See what we mean?”
Windows users: “La la la! I can’t hear you! Losing my data is clearly better than having to learn something new!”
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
No cap!
- Comment on Why people say they have a "boy cat" or a "girl cat" but when the cat grows up, they don't call is a "man cat" or "woman cat"? 1 month ago:
Because that would be a cattasrophe!
- Comment on Caption this. 1 month ago:
Donut transform the soccer ball!
