Skynet or: How I learned to stop worrying and love AI

[romad1]

15 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

I saw a headline in one of our local papers (Daily Press, Newport News) that Virginia houses 35% of the data centers in the U-S with communities looking for their share of the action.

I found this map of where they all are. NoVA is #1 Richmond area not far behind...

https://www.datacentermap.com/usa/virginia/

Our power bills are getting insane from all this.  Happy to subsidize your poorly constructed searches ya illiterate jerks. 

[Screwball]

10 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Big plants with big cooling towers can be a problem in agricultural regions because they concentrate the phosphates, nitrates, etc, that tend to be in water in agricultural areas and then slam them back to the local waste water treatment system (and that's assuming they are in complete control of their toxics). If the community was using recovered water or they discharge into rivers upstream of other communties' intakes, that can put water systems way out of compliance for safe drinking water or even safe irrigation use. They need to forced to put in their own tail water treatment systems and not give them permits to discharge into low capacity rural municipal systems with little or no review/oversight. 

This is one place where Big Brother is almost never big enough.

I know a guy who works at our local sewer plant. There is also the problem with capacity. During large storms that happen twice in 20 years we were at peak capacity the plant could handle. Add in data centers that use a considerable amount of water, what then? Who pays for the sewer plant expansion? You must plan for peak demand plus). We know who, us. And our sewer rates are off the charts now.

[gehringer_2]

2 minutes ago, Screwball said:

I know a guy who works at our local sewer plant. There is also the problem with capacity. During large storms that happen twice in 20 years we were at peak capacity the plant could handle. Add in data centers that use a considerable amount of water, what then? Who pays for the sewer plant expansion? You must plan for peak demand plus). We know who, us. And our sewer rates are off the charts now.

It's *always* about privatization of profits and socialization of costs isn't it?

Edited Wednesday at 03:52 PM by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

I have tracked my electric bill for over 3 years, even reading my meter daily for a year to check the power company. Our cost of electricity is up 9.6% per kWh over the last year. That's a double in 7 1/2 years.

[Screwball]

1 minute ago, gehringer_2 said:

It's *always* about privatization of profits and socialization of costs isn't it?

We will see. Not only here, but other places there seems to be a push back from the people. Good. Let's see what happens.

But then again, politicians work for money, not for us.

[CMRivdogs]

I just went to ChatGPT and asked about the possibility of using TeSlaa at the Tight End position. I was informed he was an offensive lineman. 

Now I understand why he hasn't see much playing time. I should have followed up whether he could be used at center

[gehringer_2]

40 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

I just went to ChatGPT and asked about the possibility of using TeSlaa at the Tight End position. I was informed he was an offensive lineman. 

Now I understand why he hasn't see much playing time. I should have followed up whether he could be used at center

so I've been putting together an unraid NAS at home and it wasn't sending me a daily email summary like I thought I had it programmed to do. So I asked google AI why my Unraid server mail wasn't going out via gmail. It spit back a very nice step by step procedure starting on my google account page, but none of the menu entries it listed were there. Now this is google AI, the application is chrome - a google app, and the target was gmail, a google service, and google AI didn't know squat about what was actually there. Boggles the mind.

Now I do have to admit that it did give me the clue I needed. The bot mentioned the term 'application password', which sounded relevant to this non-artificial 'I', so when I put that term into the search box on the chrome account settings page, it took me to where I needed to go.

I think this was another temporal awareness issue. I believe this is something that google has changed relatively recently (I had not had to go this route when I set up my previous NAS) and the bot threw up old info - probably because there were a lot of references to it out there, but it had no awareness it had been obsoleted. This seems to be a real stumbling block for the large language models.

Edited Wednesday at 05:57 PM by gehringer_2

[pfife]

.... and the models themseves go stale.  Im pretty sure theyre also training ai on output from ai ( cannibalistic)

I think unmaintaned llms that are doing important things is gonna be a real problem

[Tiger337]

On 12/5/2025 at 11:24 AM, Screwball said:

Since there is a thread about this now, I would be curious when talking about our own experience with AI, which AI app did you use?

There seems to be quite a few. I did a Google search and got this;

I've used Co-pilot (comes with Windows 11), Grok (Twitter's version) and Google's Gemini. Make one wonder how the results from the same query would vary across platforms.

I like Perplexity, because it provides sources.  

[Screwball]

5 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I like Perplexity, because it provides sources.  

I obviously have no idea, but with my limited experience I would guess some platforms do certain things better than others. I can tell within the same platform it does much better with some things than others.

All new. I don't know when, but at some point I'm going to inform my Aussie AI buddy his name is HAL, for various reasons. :-)

[Dan Gilmore]

Ask him to open the pod bay door.

[chasfh]

16 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I like Perplexity, because it provides sources.  

Don’t most if not all LLM agents provide sources? I know ChatGPT has links.

[Tiger337]

5 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Don’t most if not all LLM agents provide sources? I know ChatGPT has links.

Chatgtp did not used to to have links which is why I stopped using it.  It's good to hear that it now does.  

edit: I just compared chatgtp to perplexity on a couple of searches.  Perplexity gave sources and chatgtp did not.  So, maybe chatgtp sometimes gives sources but not consistently.  

Edited 16 hours ago by Tiger337

[chasfh]

maybe whatever chatgtp is doesn't give sources, but chatgpt definitely does. 😉

 

[Screwball]

This stuff reminded me of an article I read years ago. April 2000 to be exact. It was in Wired magazine which is now pay only so you can't get to the article there, but here is a .pdf of the same article. Written by Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of Sun Mircosystems and author of the Java Language specification. Long article about technology, including Ted Kaczynski, and where it all may be heading from the view back in 2000.

Why the future doesn't need us - Wired Magazine April 2000 - 18 pages