eesmith

First, the numbers I quoted were only for data centers: "The CFI identified around 140 (50 GW) data centres, the majority of which are likely to receive a Gate 2 offer. 71 (around 20 GW) data centres reported they have achieved financial commitment with FID."

That's 50 GW potential demand, of which I quoted only the 20 GW with financial commitment, to be conservative. That in a country where current peak demand was 45 GW, which is how I got the 50% number.

Second, the report says that the data center growth is primarily for AI: "The significant growth in data centres, driven by investment in artificial intelligence and the expectations for its economic and social potential, is a global challenge."

(What large amount of non-AI data center growth do you know about?)

Third, it highlights that while there will be other demands, these lag behind the more immediate demand for data center power:

"Data centres must be central to any solutions we implement. Data centre growth has brought into sharp focus the challenges within the demand connections process. However wider electrification of the economy and the associated rise in electricity demand, would, over time, have exposed these challenges. This would have made demand connections reform unavoidable."

There is no way to get from those numbers to conclude the AI power use per capita per diem is "a tenth of a kettle of tea."

Why should I need to trust a corporate white paper/preprint from an AI company? Why should I need to trust a CEO from an AI company? What fine points are omitted?

But, let's do it this way. How does something with the energy demand of only a tenth of a kettle per day per person put such a strain on the UK's grid - a country which boils many kettles every day - that there's a demand to increase power generation by 50%?

Ofgem reported earlier this year, at https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2026-02/2026-02... :

"NESO received a total of 229 responses to its CFI. The CFI identified around 140 (50 GW) data centres, the majority of which are likely to receive a Gate 2 offer. 71 (around 20 GW) data centres reported they have achieved financial commitment with FID."

and

"Since November 2024, total contracted offers in the demand queue rose sharply from 41 GW (17 GW Transmission, 24 GW Distribution) to 125 GW (97 GW Transmission, 29 GW Distribution) in June 2025. For comparison, peak electricity demand in GB on 11 February 2026 was 45 GW."

It's almost as if scaling up the median Gemini text prompt use from last year's preprint has very little bearing on the total AI power use.

After all, we know there are far more AI uses than the two presented options of "thirty Gemini queries per day" and "every adult makes one AI video a day".

> is your question about why someone might say allocating limited resources to a use that is used by large numbers of users simultaneously 24x7 is different than allocating the resource to something to be used 5% of the time by a single user?

No. The whole point of gruturo's top-level comment which started this thread was that Altman clearly does not apply the same logic to housing, any generic "limited resources" logic cannot be what he is referring to.

Even if it were, I don't know what those numbers are. How many users? Where does the 5% number come from? How does it compare to other forms of allocation (eg, housing, or personal car ownership vs. mass transit) where we've long since decided that an unequal level of access is well within reasonable cultural norms?

As far as I can tell, this is a made up scenario to justify his use of centralized data centers, and it implies a strong centralized planning state should be preferred over a (well-regulated) free market.

In war time we know the government decides where rubber goes, how food is rationed, and can enforce travel restrictions. But this ain't war time, and Altman isn't the War Production Board to decide these matters.

If the question really concerns the ~24x7 use for a large number of users, vs. the limited benefit of a few, then use that centralized planning state to cut CO2 emissions so the next generations of humans will not suffer so much. That's another clue how we know this point isn't really about generic concepts of resource allocations.

I chose 32 GB as the high-end of that range, so I could have something concrete.

We are indeed talking the same quote: “But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,”

I'm fine with having misinterpreted it, but, what does that 5% number mean for global DRAM allocation, how is it determined, and how do you apply the same measure to extra homes?

I use my bicycle far less than 5% of the time, so what does that say about bicycles from a global allocation perspective, and why should that change anything?

> The scenario you laid out seems incredibly uncommon

I was trying to demonstrate how there are at least two very different ways to define what '5% of the time' means. The inspiration for that was a friend who donated processing time to GIMPS, but I don't know how much memory GIMPS needs these days, and the details were beside the point.

I also don't have a 3,000 sq. ft. house.

X-Face was designed in the 1980s as a way to include selfies in email and Usenet message. ;) I didn't start using the internet until after then.

> But the Gmail address I got when I was in university? Still works.

My email address is older than GMail. Through my domain. Google can shut down tomorrow just as easily as Facebook.

> The first email was sent in 1971 by a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who also decided that we should use the @ symbol to separate usernames from host names.

That's ... not quite true. That was the first ARPANET network mail, but email is older. Eg, https://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html describing MAIL on CTSS in the mid-1960s.

Altman said that people use all of the computer's 32G of memory at most (pulling a number perhaps out of his ass) 5% of the time.

You referred to using a home at least 5% of the time. If I live in only two rooms totally 150 sq ft of my 3,000 sq ft house for 19 days of the year than I use 5% of the house for at least 5% of the year.

I trust you see those two 5%s are very different things.

Consider if I had a 32 GB desktop w 2GB for OS, set up to donate CPU cycles to a distributed computing project. I 100% of the time use the RAM on the desktop, even when I use just over 5% of the RAM.

Note also that Altman said nothing about how often people use less than their entire RAM. If I have 32 GB because I regularly use 28 GB and want some in reserve, then knowing that I only need the extra 4 GB about 5% of the time doesn't mean it's worthwhile to take away 4GB and have my code crash 5% of the time.

(That is, an outhouse with a great view, which is different than finding ones which are architectural masterpieces.)

I can find no trace of those results online. Perhaps someone here has better success?

> Last year, Adrian Ramsay, then a Green co-leader, criticised government support for Sizewell C. “The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable,” he said.

Classic negawatt approach, to use Amory Lovins' term.

Seems, though, like most people would rather build impressive infrastructure than improve what's already there. Grid expansion and new energy production development have far more cachet than paying a bunch of people with white vans to go around fixing up houses.

For one, it means extra work by the sqlite developers, to track the ever-changing Unicode spec, or your releases.

For another, the MIT license of the generated code is incompatible with the public domain dedication of sqlite.

For a third, sqlite is often part of a larger system, which will likely have its own way of doing Unicode. If there's a mismatch between the supported Unicode versions then there may be subtle errors not easily caught in testing. While if only ASCII is supported, leaving it up to the application programmer to implement the correct collation method, then that's easy to detect and resolve.

These are just the thoughts I have. I have no affiliation with the sqlite project.

That is, do you compile and distribute the version from sqlite.org or do you depend on someone else to package it for you?

If the former, then change the compile flags.

If the latter, isn't the problem that your distro/packaging provider didn't enable the flags you wanted? Complain to them.

As a quick look, I see https://github.com/karlb/sqlite-icu claims "includes a loadable icu extension module for sqlite. This allows other python packages to use this extension without requiring dependencies outside of the python ecosystem". I've never tried it.

There are also alternate sqlite bindings for Python, like https://github.com/coleifer/cysqlite .

"The lower(X) function returns a copy of string X with all ASCII characters converted to lower case. The default built-in lower() function works for ASCII characters only. To do case conversions on non-ASCII characters, load the ICU extension."

FAQ item (18) Case-insensitive matching of Unicode characters does not work, at https://sqlite.org/faq.html :

"The default configuration of SQLite only supports case-insensitive comparisons of ASCII characters. The reason for this is that doing full Unicode case-insensitive comparisons and case conversions requires tables and logic that would nearly double the size of the SQLite library. The SQLite developers reason that any application that needs full Unicode case support probably already has the necessary tables and functions and so SQLite should not take up space to duplicate this ability.

"Instead of providing full Unicode case support by default, SQLite provides the ability to link against external Unicode comparison and conversion routines. The application can overload the built-in NOCASE collating sequence (using sqlite3_create_collation()) and the built-in like(), upper(), and lower() functions (using sqlite3_create_function()). The SQLite source code includes an "ICU" extension that does these overloads. Or, developers can write their own overloads based on their own Unicode-aware comparison routines already contained within their project."

With "else he may" as a search time, I found other examples in archive.org, like https://archive.org/details/sim_christian-intelligencer_1835... from 1835 .

The Wiktionary entry at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/else lists three use forms;

  Adjective: When all else fails, read the instructions
  Adverb: How else can it be done?
  Conjunction: Then the Wronskian of f and g must be nonzero,
    else they could not be linearly independent.

The "someone else" and "nothing else" examples you listed are the adjective form.

The "or" in "or else" is the conjunction, not the "else".

You should be looking for something like " "Yea , but what am I ? a scholar, or a schoolmaster, else some youth".

Another thing to check would be if earlier uses were only in binary exclusive cases, like "One if by land, else two if by sea", or also with 3 or more terms, like "One if by land, two if by sea, else three if by air."

I don't know how to carry out this sort of search.

The author wrote: "I can't use "else" as a conjunction in normal speech, only in computer programs."

No doubt people use 'else' as a conjunction now, due to the influence of programming.

To show the author is completely wrong requires finding pre-1959 uses of 'else' in a conjunction.

The Civil Rights Act which created the EEOC does not require or permit an employer to break the law to accommodate a request, even if it is reasonable and with no burden.

Instead, the law must be challenged directly.

"An accommodation may cause undue hardship if it is costly, compromises workplace safety, decreases workplace efficiency, infringes on the rights of other employees, or requires other employees to unwillingly do more than their share of potentially hazardous or burdensome work." - https://www.eeoc.gov/religious-discrimination

Otherwise we would all be joining a religion which require 360 days of religious festivities each year.

We see this with people who believe it is a religious requirement to share their faith at work, even when their co-workers say they don't want to hear it.

We see this with people who say their religious belief says they don't take orders from a women, even if that woman is their boss.

If your transhumanist religion compels you to share PII with your machines in a way which breaks the law, then there's likely an undue burden.

If it means you need access to a power plug during lunch so your devices can scan your brain for 10 minutes - almost certainly not an undue burden.

"Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation."

Those non-economic rights are referred to as moral rights, and you apparently want to get rid of them as well.

As the old saying goes, "You are unique, just like everyone else." Which is why I never said the current time has nothing unique, but rather "There's nothing special enough".

The player piano roll transformed copyright, with White-Smith Music Publishing Company v. Apollo Company leading to the Copyright Act of 1909.

The Linotype machine, microfilm, the photocopier, the cassette tape, the floppy disk, the internet, hip-hop sampling, p2p file sharing - every single one of these challenged existing ideas of copyright. Some of these also got people to call for copyright abolition.

With no indication of how the subjects were selected.

Social class and musical education are obvious confounding variables, while they only looked at age and gender.

They cite Virgil Griffith, which https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/boxtr... categorizes as "noted Internet data miner Virgil Griffith". https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... says he scraped data from Facebook and compared it to average school SATs. There's a Wikipedia page about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Griffith . Looks like he got out of prison last year.

Google Scholar knows of no citations to the paper, nor favorable reviews for Griffith's analysis.

The JEP paper, available directly at https://jep.ro/images/pdf/cuprins_reviste/74_art_4.pdf , comes across to me, a non-expert, as low quality.

David L. Ross as Galloway? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/David_Ross

https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-writer-who-c...

> Back in 2017, Holbrook wrote an essay for Huffington Post entitled, "I Can't Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems." The writer had discovered that two of her poems were part of the Texas STAAR state assessment tests, and she was a bit startled to discover that she was unable to answer some of the questions.

> One reason was simple inaccuracy. One question asked why the poet had inserted a stanza break in a particular spot-- and then didn't insert a stanza break in the testing materials. But there was a second issue. Holbrook is a performance poet, and she had inserted the break at the point where, in live readings, she pauses. That choice was not one of the choices available on the test.

> In fact, much of Holbrook's issue with the questions was a sort of existential dilemma. Several questions asked, directly or indirectly, for the test taker to judge the author's intentions. The author knew some of her intentions, sort of remembered others, and had others that were layered and complex. But the manufacturers of the test--who had never asked her about any of this--provided only four choices that did not allow her to choose the answer that she knew to be correct.

This leads to questions like: Is the author more or less privileged than the test writers? Are the test writers more or less privileged than the students taking the test? If they are of equal privilege then how can there be a standardized test concerning the author's intent?

Well, look at that. An essay about the benefits of slave trade and colonialism, while making no mention of slave labor or oppressed people.

Yet the literary criticism of Borges's short story points out how the two texts have different messages.

For Cervantes, this is a book for the people, written in the language of the people.

For Menard, this is a book for specialists, who would understand the old Spanish language.

In the 20th century of Bertrand Russell and William James, the philosophical concepts that an educated writer like Menard would know are far different than 16th century Spain, so an expression like "history, the mother of truth" has different meanings.

Since you mention Homer, if I were to write of the wine-dark sea you would know I am referring to Homer. It brings along cultural connections, including its own Wikipedia page.

While when Homer uses it, it doesn't have those connections.

The idea that a text stands alone is a formalist style known as New Criticism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism .

> New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of New England, which focused on the history and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors, taking this approach under the influence of nineteenth-century German scholarship. The New Critics felt that this approach tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities in favor of teaching about external factors. ...

> It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were "uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature."

Borges's story is a commentary about this debate.

While the linked-to essay in the Chronicle made no mention of the long discussion of the relevant literary theories, seemingly insisting that analytical writing somehow stands outside that debate, by simply ignoring the debate.

What is more macho, getting coffee yourself, or telling the (almost certainly female) secretary to do it for you? Getting coffee is a menial job.

What is more macho, changing your baby's diaper, or expecting your wife to do it? Changing a diaper is a woman's job.

What is more macho, polishing your own shoes, or paying the shoeshiner?

What is more macho, carrying your own luggage, or paying a porter?

These are menial jobs, often done respectively by poor children ("shoeshine boy") and Black people. (White train passengers once called each Pullman porter "George", following the slaveholder tradition of referring to a slave by the master's name!)

By using a porter you show social dominance, and imply you are rich enough that their payment is a trifle.

(On a tangent, "Qué es más macho, pineapple o knife?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d9YAz3A4pc by the inestimable Laurie Anderson.)

I looked in archive.org and found nothing on that specific topic, but learned that wheeled luggage existed in the 1940s, at https://archive.org/details/sim_quote_april-13-19-1947_13_16... from 1947:

"INVENTIONS: Wheeled suitcase can be rolled instead of carried. Two small wheels, attached on one end near the bottom when case is standing in ordinary position, touch the floor when suitcase is tilted by means of extensible handle on the top near the other end [Science Service]"

But I'm also thinking about the wheels available at the time - 1950s rollerskates used metal or wooden wheels, as I recall. Rubberized polymer wasn't available for another decade. Metal wheels on luggage seems a poor combination.

I also think porters were much more common, which meant many of those "macho" men could easily pay someone to carry their bags to the room, or airplane.

> On 9 October 2026, the United States imposed new sanctions on the ICC. The sanctions bar the ICC from U.S. financial services, technology companies and transactions in U.S. dollars, and require U.S. businesses and individuals to wind down their businesses with the ICC in six months.