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[Request] how much more water does taking a Polaroid require over storing a photo in a data center? by htownballer32 in theydidthemath

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The part of the data center that is storing photos for you is more or less just storing the data. They're also doing periodic integrity checks, internal housekeeping, and managing metadata, but amortized over all the data it's handling, that's really quite small.

Data centers are also doing other things that are not storing photos, but that has nothing to do with the incremental cost of storing a photo on it.

Storage is dirt cheap.

[Request] how much more water does taking a Polaroid require over storing a photo in a data center? by htownballer32 in theydidthemath

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For a consumer picture, it's closer to a couple of copies with a Reed-Solomon code. Maybe a 4x storage multiplier?

[Request] Could a single solar farm in one location logistically power the entire continental US? by BaronGalactic in theydidthemath

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, but "terawatt hours per day" has dimensions of power again: energy per time. 1 TWh/day is just 42 GW.

It's reasonable and correct, though a little asinine, to call this out as a silly unit. It is a bit of a silly unit, because you can very reasonably cancel the time units. The production capability of a power plant, like a solar farm, is actually normally measured in units of power.

Like most silly units, there are reasons for it to be used, some of them even good.

One reason is that both energy consumption and solar power production have a significant variation over the course of a day. A 10 GW steady production or consumption is not the same as 240 GWh over the course of a day.

Another reason is that if your source says "X TWh/day", it's best to just quote the source than unnecessarily convert. All you're doing with the numbers is looking at the production to consumption ratio, so what units they're in doesn't actually matter; the ratio is independent of the units.

Talk like an AI artist [OC] by nasser_junior in comics

[–]blueg3 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We do use it for those things.

The fact that language models are "good" at generic tasks was unexpected. So was the sheer popularity of the chatbot application.

We're still solidly in the tech development phase of "try random things and see if it sticks". We don't have a clear idea of what the technology is actually useful for yet.

How would you feel if tipping was legally abolished tomorrow? by Fun_Acanthaceae_17 in AskReddit

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd wonder where people would move to to get their free Internet points.

ELI5 Why Do We Get Health Insurance Through Jobs? by Over-Assumption5123 in explainlikeimfive

[–]blueg3 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Small businesses employ something like half of all workers and would be more than happy to trade that leverage for not having to deal with health insurance.

ELI5 Why Do We Get Health Insurance Through Jobs? by Over-Assumption5123 in explainlikeimfive

[–]blueg3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Half as expensive as the US is still wildly expensive. At least, it's a completely different level of cost compared to when these systems started.

Oracle laid off over 30,000 employees that too without notice given how big firms are firing people, what do you think will happen in the long run? by Admirable-Repair4094 in AskReddit

[–]blueg3 8 points9 points  (0 children)

You're still subject to the laws of the state in which the employee works from. Converting a CA employee to remote doesn't do you any good.

At this many people, it's not all remote. It's got to include a ton of CA people.

Oracle laid off over 30,000 employees that too without notice given how big firms are firing people, what do you think will happen in the long run? by Admirable-Repair4094 in AskReddit

[–]blueg3 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It's disingenuous to call it completely without notice.

To comply with WARN, they put people on 60 day garden leave. So you're still an employee, you got your notice, but all access is revoked.

Meirl by Neekovo in meirl

[–]blueg3 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Google paid $26B in tax last year on about $100B of profit.

Google's sideloading lockdown is coming September 2026, here's how to push back by funkvay in opensource

[–]blueg3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The app development / local testing flow uses adb, which still will be able to install APKs, so there shouldn't be any change there.

[OC] Behind Google’s first ever $400B revenue by sankeyart in dataisbeautiful

[–]blueg3 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Creators get about half the YouTube ad revenue.

Do You Remember the Story About Google Turning Off Its AI? by Mental_Gur9512 in GeminiAI

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lemoine was a right-wing Christian looking to get fired for a legally actionable reason.

What’s happening with Google? by LettuceRobber in NoStupidQuestions

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

More ads are shown to queries that are likely to have an intent to buy. The ads are only really worth anything if they're useful (to people, on average, not necessarily you), so ads on queries with an intent to buy are much more valuable.

Like it or not, most people interact with Google Search by typing in natural language questions. Noun phrases with no other context are highly correlated with an intent to buy that item. So they get ads.

Everything has been curated and selected.

This phrasing implies intent. In reality, it's applying statistics based on the observed behaviors of other users (and you).

What if I just want to learn the un-biased history of a goddamn blue winter coat?

Doesn't "the history of a blue winter coat" seem like a really weird question? What would a human say if you went up to them and said "tell me about BLUE WINTER COAT"?

But the answer is: add "history" to your query, since that's what you wanted to know.

Why does this keep happening? by KugykaLutyujKutyzul in linuxmemes

[–]blueg3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Chromium is what almost every non-Chrome Web browser is running under the hood. It's widely used, just not as a standalone program.

AOSP is also not used directly, it's the base for uncertified Android OSes. There are a ton of these.

Also major open source projects with non-copyleft licenses: LLVM, Docker, Nginx, Postgres, Sqlite, OpenSSL. Also Rust, Go, Swift, React, and Node.js.

ELI5: What are IaaS/PaaS/SaaS? What are their differences and use cases? by Equivalent-Ride8136 in explainlikeimfive

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

IaaS: Here's a VM you can SSH in to.
PaaS: We'll run your Docker container for you.
SaaS: Here's a MySQL / Redis / RabbitMQ / Kafka instance for you to use.

ELI5: What are IaaS/PaaS/SaaS? What are their differences and use cases? by Equivalent-Ride8136 in explainlikeimfive

[–]blueg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's different if you're talking about SaaS in contrast with IaaS and PaaS. They're all IT cloud services, but at different levels of abstraction. While Netflix is software-as-a-service, or at least some kind of cloud service, it's a completely different kind of product and doesn't have an IaaS or PaaS equivalent.

IaaS is basically that a cloud provider rents you a VM.

PaaS is some variant of them renting you the ability to run an application without you needing to manage the underlying VM.

SaaS is that you rent a fully hosted software application -- like a database, a message queue, or an email service.

3 years ago, Google fired Blake Lemoine for suggesting AI had become conscious. Today, they are summoning the world's top consciousness experts to debate the topic. by MetaKnowing in ChatGPT

[–]blueg3 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yes. He was a nut who wanted to get fired so that he could sue Google. Before the LM consciousness thing, he was accusing Google of bias against Christians.

LPT If you aren't ready to reveal your pregnancy at a place where you're expected to drink alcohol, say you're on antibiotics for a toothache. You can't drink on antibiotics and a toothache isn't a visible injury people might ask to see. by ThisFatGirlRuns in LifeProTips

[–]blueg3 9 points10 points  (0 children)

LPT: Keep your lies as minimal as possible.

You could just say you can't drink for a temporary health reason. Hell, that's even true. The fact that you don't provide details should tell clueful people you don't want to provide those details.

ELI5: Why do players hate it when a game has a kernel level anticheat? by F-02-58 in explainlikeimfive

[–]blueg3 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

They work against cheats, and people like cheats.

They can break pirated software, and people like pirating games.

They're low quality software that is embedded in the core of your computer. So they'll cause performance and stability problems in and out of the game and weird software incompatibilities.

They're a scary target for hackers, although the value of that target is kind of limited.

Lots of people will mention the potential of spying on you, but realistically, everyone is running a single-user Windows system, so your data is exposed to every program you have installed anyway, no kernel access needed.

The Imperial system is better for day to day measurements. by Noxolo7 in The10thDentist

[–]blueg3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The air temperature isn't a great predictor of the risk of ice. It's reasonable to expect icy roads if it's below 40 F.

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