sfilmeyer

>How much energy does a car factory use? What about a chip fab? A hospital? A battery manufacturer?

tl;dr: rough napkin math and basic googling, 20 MW for a car factory, 100 MW for a chip fab, 2 MW for a hospital, and 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center. Water usage is equivalent to 14 car factories, 52 hospitals, or 18,000 people at home.

Good questions! You made me curious. In the process of looking, I came across this[0] reddit post with a chart comparing various industrial uses. For car assembly specifically, Honda has some nice global data here[1], and their total energy consumption is about 990 MW, split roughly equally between direct and indirect consumption. That's split across something like 60 factories! If I just look at direct energy consumption, that's less than 20 MW per factory.

This[2] has a chip fab at 100 MW. This[3] has an average hospital at 1.7 MW, with the largest use just being heating. I didn't try to look up battery manufacturers. This[4] has a typical apartment at 0.77 W/square foot, which would mean just 0.2 MW for an apartment the same size as the data center in the article.

I think a more interesting distinction is water usage. The linked article says that the Fireball LLC datacenter used 548 megagallons of water in 2025. Assuming that aligns with the "water consumption" rather than "water withdrawal" numbers from Honda, that's over 20% as much as the entire global operations of Honda equivalent to 14 factories (adjust by about a factor of two if we should be comparing to water consumption). Alternatively, it's equivalent to 52 hospitals[5] or 18,000 people in their homes[6].

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1tes0rr/ai_data_cen...

[1]https://global.honda/en/environment/initiatives/data/

[2]https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_serv...

[3]https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/pba/health-care.p...

[4]https://electricityplans.com/how-much-electricity-does-an-ap...

[5]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5058574/ for water usage per square meter for hospitals

[6]https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2017/1131/ofr20171131.pdf for water per person per year

You had me curious about what I was tested for, also in the northeastern USA in the 2010s. It looks like they included Hep C when my PCP ordered STD tests in 2015, along with most of the tests the other commenter mentioned. I'm glad they caught yours in time to treat it well!

Merchants often pay a chargeback fee on top of refunding the main charge. Additionally, merchants with lots of fraud or other chargeback issues are likely to be dropped by payment processors or see their general fees with payment processors get more expensive.

I suspect this is a real problem for charities, though. If those bots are using stolen credit cards, the "donations" are going to cost the charities money after they pay extra fees to the credit card processors. Nonprofits are sometimes used to test stolen credit cards before making more profitable fraudulent transactions, so there's a real risk of it costing them money if they get rid of the captcha but don't replace it with something sufficiently high quality, even after accounting for the occasional lost donation.

This article claims 104 mph, not 24 mph: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/timeline-air-canada-collis...

This also requires knowing how much it will shrink, and accurately gauging if I've left enough buffer when trying something on at the store.

Wikipedia has some notes on why least squares, and how you might get there from other assumptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares#Statistical_test... .

Also, quadratics are just much easier to work with in a lot of ways than higher powers. Like you said, even powers have the advantage over odd powers of not needing any sort of absolute value, but quartic equations of any kind are much harder to work with than quadratics. A local optimum on a quartic isn't necessarily a global optimum, you lose the solvability advantages of having linear derivatives, et cetera.

I feel like there's a bit of a jump from "tech-savvy" to de-soldering things on an expensive piece of home electronics. As it stands now, though, I agree that turning off the smart TV features seems to be the way to go for most people.

Troy Hunt has been running Have I Been Pwned for years. He even uses the k-anonymity model to allow you to search if a password has been pwned without giving him the password if you don't trust him.

I get your general point, but he's been a leader in this space and walking the walk for a decade. I'm not even into security stuff or anything particularly related to this, and I still recognized his name in the OP domain.

I enjoyed reading the article, but I'm pretty thrown by the benchmarks and conclusion. All of the times are reported to a single digit of precision, but then the summary is claiming that one function shows an improvement while the other two are described as negligible. When all the numbers presented are "~5ms" or "~6ms", it doesn't leave me confident that small changes to the benchmarking might have substantially changed that conclusion.

Thank you! You're right that's the sort of "hacked together" solution that looks cool but beyond my abilities, and I appreciate the first two links.

Can you link an example of a window unit ERV? I tried searching briefly, and came across some folks hacking together units to make them work with windows or adding their own ducting, but nothing analogous to a simple window air conditioning unit. As a renter of an apartment in a very much not modern home, I don't really see anything that seems like it would work.

That makes sense along the lines of their second proposal, but doesn't address the concerns of the first. Part of democracy means voting for the folks who govern you, but a prisoner might be left unable to vote in an election for the local state or municipal governments.

>2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

This definitely isn't a thing that every company does (or even close to every company).

> What’s Apple’s default time frame for security support?

This isn't thaaaaat far out of support. Their last security update for iOS 15 was just earlier this year, and they only dropped iPhone 6s from new major versions with iOS 16 a few years ago. As someone who has kept my last few iPhones for 5+ years each, I definitely appreciate that they keep a much longer support window than most folks on the Android side of things.

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but you seem like you're talking about privatizing this research whereas the other commenter seems to be talking about public cuts leading to a reduction of research. Just because something gets cut doesn't mean it gets outsourced elsewhere.

I'm a man, and had wonderful experiences with my many (mostly male) roommates, with only occasional hiccups. Saying adult men cannot live together seems pretty excessive.

On the spectrum of illegality, things can get a lot more extreme than a bit of copyright infringement.

As a counterpoint, what fraction of the future engineers who will touch the project are likely to be able to competently edit the finite automata based version without introducing bugs and what fraction will be able to competently edit the if statement that checks the particular policy?

I'm not in near deep enough to have any ideas what you're talking about, and the link didn't really help. Can you explain?

Who is Tim Peters? How were they slandered? What did the author do that you disliked? Who is Glyph Lefkowitz? Why is citing Glyph Lefkowitz an indictment of the author?

>dangerously high levels of mercury

All the better for a tuna substitute!

More seriously, from your article

>4.86 mg/kg in liver tissue from a snake that was 4.7 m long but overall averaged 0.12 ± 0.19 mg/kg in tail tip

Tuna looks like it's about 0.39 mg/kg, so the liver tissue is suuuuper high but the tail tip is just normal high mercury.

Comments like this remind me I might be the only person in Massachusetts honestly calculating my use tax for my tax return every year.

>On the other hand, even 0.01% is not acceptable when the system is responsible for human lives.

I've got bad news for you about a whole lot of medical tests and interventions if 0.01% is unacceptable for you. I get your point that the stakes might be higher with medical technology than in some other fields, but you're still setting the bar too high.

The first pathogen I saw mentioned by name while skimming through the linked article was H. Pylori, where the false-positive and false-negative rates for various currently used tests are several dozen times worse than that at about 0.30-0.90% [0]. Even just being hospitalized in and of itself has failure rates. Just eyeballing some of the numbers at [1] and elsewhere, I suspect that at least 0.01% of hospitalizations result in a death attributable to a hospital acquired infection.

[0] https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2019/0701/p16.html [1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthcare-associated-infections/php/dat...

For those who don't know, the rind can also be just plain eaten. Maybe I'm just a heathen, but I find it far too delicious to ever waste on a pot of soup.

Nice, I really enjoyed listening to a couple of the ones you added. They were at the top of the page when I loaded it, and I listened to and enjoyed them before connecting them with your comment.

I don't think "consumer gadget" comes across particularly negatively or dismissively, and don't see this playing out at all like the Ratner's case.

Also, it seems like you might be a bit anchored to the low end of the smartwatch price spectrum from your own preferences, but I don't think it's particularly expensive among major smartwatch brands. Apple has by far the biggest market share, but I also tried to piece together how it compared to other companies with leading market share according to this chart[0]. It's a couple years out of date, but from looking at more recent data I don't think the market leaders have changed all that much. I might have made some mistakes navigating the websites of the various brands to piece together the comparison.

1) Apple - $150 is cheaper than all their models 2) Samsung - cheaper than all but one model 3) Huawei - similar to their second cheapest 4) imoo - $20 more than their cheapest model 5) amazfit - the cheaper brand you already mentioned 6) Garmin - cheaper than all their models

You're already using the cheapest smartwatch brand in those top 6 brands, so while $150 might feel expensive to you it's actually on the cheaper end of major smartwatch brands.

As a side note, this was all a bit interesting to learn about as someone dedicated to my $15 casio dumb watch.

[0]https://www.statista.com/chart/15035/worldwide-smartwatch-sh...

How is the book a smartphone training guide? I've read it a few times with my toddler and enjoyed it, and felt like it was a very different experience from screentime (which they don't really get). I don't think it would have been enjoyable at 6 months old, since it's more about the kid doing things (encouraging them to help shake the book, et cetera) than just reading straight through.

I thought plows were more about tilling than flattening, but I'm no expert.

Yeah, but I don't want my hard drive in an external enclosure for my laptop. I'm writing this comment from a macbook air, which is comfortably in my lap, thankfully only plugged into power.

I get that folks are going to make suboptimal choices in the heat of the moment, and I could see myself similarly making a dumb choice in the rush of an airplane evacuation. I don't think we should judge anyone's character too harshly, but that doesn't keep us from discussing what the actual optimal choices are.

>The plane isn't even full of smoke yet

The plane previously had some pretty impressive flames in the process of landing, and depending one what sort of fire gets going there might not be time for everyone to get out. That being said, insulin isn't actually a valid excuse nor are very important legal documents. Every second counts, and could be the difference between life and death for passengers and crew not yet evacuated. There's a reason that air traffic controllers ask pilots in emergencies for the number of "souls on board" referring to living humans and not important legal documents or medicine.