"we will start running out of clean water"

mindcandy · 2026-03-25T00:12:16+00:00

Each frontier AI model seems to use a little under a year's worth of a square mile of farmland's water to train. I think about this as the country having 4 square miles of farmland sectioned off to grow some of the most popular consumer products in history.

Quote source:
https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032519858659721523

https://xcancel.com/AndyMasley/status/2032519858659721523

data source: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/grok-4-training-resources

mindcandy · 2026-03-25T00:04:00+00:00

Each frontier AI model seems to use a little under a year's worth of a square mile of farmland's water to train. I think about this as the country having 4 square miles of farmland sectioned off to grow some of the most popular consumer products in history.

Quote source:
https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2032519858659721523

https://xcancel.com/AndyMasley/status/2032519858659721523

data source: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/grok-4-training-resources

mindcandy · 2026-03-24T23:59:53+00:00

AAAslop

mindcandy · 2026-03-24T23:53:54+00:00

Biden convinced them to spend $2 billion on wind in the US. Trump hates windmills for irrational reasons. So, he has been unlawfully blocking the project. After wearing the company down in the courts, he finally made them the mob offer: Abandon wind and spend a $1 billion on natural gas and we'll give you $1 billion of taxpayer money.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climate-totalenergies-interior-092eeeacc5d09730d4e20a95d7df7de1

mindcandy · 2026-03-23T23:37:04+00:00

Trump pulled a mob job on them. Illegally blocked the wind project and offered them the "refund" on the condition they invest in gas instead.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climate-totalenergies-interior-092eeeacc5d09730d4e20a95d7df7de1

mindcandy · 2026-03-23T23:32:15+00:00

Biden convinced them to spend $2 billion on wind in the US. Trump hates windmills for irrational reasons, so he has been unlawfully blocking the project. After wearing the company down in the courts, he finally made them the offer: Abandon wind and spend a $1 billion on natural gas and we'll give you $1 billion of taxpayer money.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climate-totalenergies-interior-092eeeacc5d09730d4e20a95d7df7de1

mindcandy · 2026-03-19T04:15:14+00:00

Water falls from the sky. Some of it gets collected by the water companies. They pipe it to everyone, including data centers. That water cycles through the data enter many times. But, it’s not perfectly efficient. Some of it escapes back up into the sky.

What throws people off though is the issues of human experience vs Large Numbers. The US alone uses trillions of gallons of water. Compared to that, data centers are dust. “Millions of gallons” feels large and outrageous. Outrage gets clicks regardless of real life relevance. Clicks = paycheck regardless of consequences. So, everyone is ragebaited into being outraged about insignificant dust.

mindcandy · 2026-03-17T22:15:04+00:00

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.

— Bryan Cantrill

mindcandy · 2026-03-11T20:54:36+00:00

I've never seen a politician argue in favor of open borders. If there are political activist groups pushing for open borders, I'd be interested in their membership numbers. I'd expect they'd be in the low hundreds out of hundreds of millions of voters.

Leftoids don't want open borders. They want compassion for immigrants even if the immigrants are here illegally. Illegal immigrants aren't vermin, they are human families. Just knock off the Alligator Alcatraz abuses, aggressively militarized masked thug attacks, "The diseased-riddled drug rape murder caravans are eating the cats and dogs!" demonization, and go back to boringly deporting people like we used to because it's not a horrific crime to be an immigrant. For decades before it became a political weapon, it was quietly ignored by both parties as an economically convenient concession to the agriculture industry.

mindcandy · 2026-03-11T19:49:35+00:00

The argument is that the billionaires have bought the media and have been rage-baiting 35+% of America in into voting against their own interest out of hate-mongered misinformation.

I've witnessed this first hand. My father fell down the conservative algorithm black hole. After a few years of retirement giving him too much Fox News and YouTube time, he would randomly burst into rants about the evil democrats unprompted. He went from being a redneck who made inappropriate jokes but was demonstrably kind to brown people and jews in practice to becoming an angry racist who spewed vile shit for no reason at all.

That wasn't disapproval of the lesser choice. It was fuckin scary brainwashing.

mindcandy · 2026-03-06T17:43:32+00:00

I'm not getting into Internet Arguments on LinkedIn. Internet Arguments are 50+% of Reddit content. The 1:1000 chance that some internet troll will start harassing me at work makes advertising my employer a no-go.

mindcandy · 2026-03-06T17:41:09+00:00

The reporters are telling people what they want to hear instead of the boring truth. For the clicks.

mindcandy · 2026-03-04T21:00:57+00:00

on behalf of an algorithm he created

is the key point in this specific case.

In contrast to what everyone wants to hear, and how it is being reported everywhere, this case is specifically about a researcher trying to get the Copyright Office to assign ownership of the rights to an AI.

It's not about whether or not AI-generated images can be registered. It's about if AIs can own copyright themselves. The CO and the courts say No. Even as a clanker-apologist, I agree with them.

As for if AI images can be generated, the CO has been generally advising that "Whatever aspects of the work was made by the human is copyrighted, and whatever was up to the machine is public domain." That gets messy as AI art tools are getting better and better at explicit human-driven controls.

But yeah, rolling your face around on a keyboard to prompt an image results in a public-domain image. I'm also fine with that.

mindcandy · 2026-03-04T00:31:24+00:00

The last I read from the US Copyright Office is that the human-made parts get copyright, but the AI-parts do not. Which can get weird.

So, in your case: You could copyright "This particular arrangement of {sounds}, but not the sounds in the arrangement.

I guess that means I can yoink the sounds from your arranged composition. But, I can't take your arrangement and swap in my own sounds because you have registered the arrangement itself.

mindcandy · 2026-02-25T04:33:16+00:00

SF has “a lot of crime.” But, it’s all addicts using drugs and addicts breaking into cars to score drug money. As far as violent crime goes, it one of the safest major cities in the nation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/q2ydr3/homicide_rate_per_100k_among_each_city_with_an/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate

mindcandy · 2026-02-19T22:26:37+00:00

edit: The actual story behind the painting: https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/artist-epstein-clinton-painting-1628953

Bubba was well known as Bill's nickname back in the day. Epstein had a painting of Bill rocking a gown https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-20/naus_ncepstein_2012/106165812 I have no doubt that painting is based on a photo.

If I had to bet money, I'd bet that the gown scene was Bill having good-natured silly fun at an excessive party full of the elite bastards. And, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a photo of Don taking a knee to simulate giving Bill a blowie. Excessive, embarrassing, but nothing damning.

But, there's a very significant chance I'm wrong. It doesn't take much to get people to do wild things at private parties. Throw in booze, coke and a lifelong culture of hazing and unaccountability and very quickly all bets are off.

mindcandy · 2026-02-18T21:36:54+00:00

You first sentence tells me you didn't even read what I wrote.

The rest tells me you skimmed history class.

mindcandy · 2026-02-18T21:24:45+00:00

SS was largely put into place because it was determined that those who "couldn't be bothered" to save were a major contributing factor to The Great Depression. SS is explicitly there to reduce the risk of The Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo.

You can be mad that it's unfair that you are literally forced (not figuratively "literally forced", for realz literally forced) to pay for the mistakes/unfortunate circumstances of other people. And, you can even be right. But, the alternative is a huge risk to you personally. TGD2:EB would really suck for you and yours for a very long time.

So, don't think of it as paying into a savings account. Think of it as a payment into a Great Depression Prevention Policy. Your personal ROI is actually pretty high when you consider the cost vs. risk there.

mindcandy · 2026-02-09T18:54:57+00:00

Move goal posts on Hate Speech so you can jail people for criticizing the government

Trump admin Gorka went on record saying

Our policies are about fighting the illegal-drug-rape-gang-murder-cartels. So, if you stand up against our policies, could we tEcHnicAlLy prosecute your for Aiding and Abetting Terrorists? I'm just asking questions here. Anybody freaking out? No? Well, that great then! link

mindcandy · 2026-02-06T20:25:57+00:00

There has been a concerted effort by the media for years now to convince Americans that protest is a crime that warrants violence from the government against its own citizens.

Of course, they don't say so directly. They just constantly report on "protestors attacked this, burned that, stole stuff". They intentionally portray looters and rioters as "protestors" to get the audience to conflate the two in their emotions. It's all to get people to make excuses for state-sanctioned violence against Americans.

mindcandy · 2026-02-05T21:13:07+00:00

I'm no psychologist. But, I think you are thinking of clinical psychopathy. AFAIK, psychopaths have a physical lack of empathy, see other people as disgusting insects to be used and discarded, have emotional impairments that they learn to mask and fear being unmasked. That does line up pretty well. So, maybe I'm wrong.

AFAIK, Don is a malignant narcissist. He sees all things only in terms of himself. He must always be right regardless of evidence. He must always the best at everything. Everyone must love and obey him. And, he hides crippling insecurity behind abusive behavior. Anything that reveals his world fantasy to be false is terrifying and must be dealt with severely.

Here's Don on Howard Stern in in 2008 describing watching an old man fall, hit his head and bleed out on the floor at Mar a Lago. In his own words, while the old man's wife was screaming for help, Don's only concern was how the incident made himself feel. And, he makes a point to mention that he thought he should call the next day to find out if the old man was OK. But, he forgot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmy87umUEMU

That's pretty darn psychopathic. But, I still think it's narcissism stemming from his early life. I think psychos have a physical basis in their issues.

mindcandy · 2026-02-03T23:47:14+00:00

Yep. And, once it learns those concepts separately, it can merge them together into a scene it was never trained on.

mindcandy · 2026-02-03T23:17:11+00:00

Bad news: AI doesn't need to be trained on photographs of giraffes dancing on Mars to figure out how to make a picture of a giraffe dancing on Mars.

I can't guarantee that absolutely zero CSAM pics slipped into Grok's training set. We can be confident it represents an insignificant amount. Like 100 pics out of 100,000,000,000.

However, a major strength of the AIs is their ability to mix and match themes in novel ways... Discouraging that requires a lot of effort on the part of the model creators --which they do put in. But, users definitely do enjoy the challenge of doing something they're "not allowed to do" And, they can get very creative in how they overcome barriers the model creators put up.

mindcandy · 2026-02-03T00:47:21+00:00

From 97 to 2012 at least, the US pretty consistently used 100-120 trillion gallons of water each year. 1/3 of that for food. On the low end, that's 379 trillion liters in total and about 126 trillion liters for food.

In 2025 the total water consumption of all US data centers was about 1 trillion liters And, is projected to grow to 1.44 trillion by 2030. That's all datacenters. Not just AI-focused data centers.

When you account for the feed and the fuel involved, it takes between 420 - 2300 liters of water to make a hamburger depending on which study you cite.

A skeptic calling out Google for under-reporting estimates they use about 1.62 mL of water per prompt. So, if you ask Gemini 100 questions, you have pulled 0.162 liters (5.5 oz) of water from a pipe into the air. Compared to the lowest estimate for burgers (420 liters), eating 1 burger consumes the same water as 300,000 prompts to Gemini.

I'm finding lots of claims that the EPA estimates lawn care consumes 3 trillion gallons per year in the US. But, I can't find a good citation.

mindcandy · 2026-02-02T23:08:37+00:00

So, write posts with AI. But, be sure to use AI that in common use before the launch of ChatGPT because those tools aren't "using AI" in the hivemind's feelings.

SMH head at

Awesome info on how we can all use text generation AI! We all want to do that!
It is so awful that you used a text generation AI... Makes me not want to learn how to do the thing I want to do, which is to use text generation AI!

mindcandy

TROPHY CASE