I think that if I were Google, Meta, and Vodafone, I’d go build an app to measure a phone’s lifetime playing video and then promote that as a benchmark. Things that are the path of least resistance to measure tend to get measured more than those that are a pain to measure.
Thank you kindly, good sir.
Datacentres also rely on water, to help cool the humming banks of hardware. In the UK the Environment Agency, which was already warning about a future water shortfall for homes and farming, recently conceded the rapid expansion of AI had made it impossible to forecast future demand.
Research carried out by Google found that fulfilling a typical prompt entered into its AI assistant Gemini consumed the equivalent of five drops of water – as well as energy equivalent to watching nine seconds of TV.
I mean, the UK could say “we won’t do parallel-processing datacenters”. If truly and honestly, there are hard caps on water or energy specific to the UK that cannot be dealt with, that might make sense.
But I strongly suspect that virtually all applications can be done at a greater distance. Something like an LLM chatbot is comparatively latency-tolerant for most uses — it doesn’t matter whether it’s some milliseconds away — and does not have high bandwidth requirements to the user. If the datacenters aren’t placed in the UK, my assumption is that they’ll be placed somewhere else. Mainland Europe, maybe.
Also, my guess is that water is probably not an issue, at least if one considers the UK as a whole. I had a comment a bit back pointing out that the River Tay — Scotland as a whole, in fact — doesn’t have a ton of datacenters near it the way London does, and has a smaller population around it than does the Thames. If it became necessary, even if it costs more to deal with, it should be possible to dissipate waste heat by evaporating seawater rather than freshwater; as as an archipeligo, nearly all portions of the UK are not far from an effectively-unlimited supply of seawater.
And while the infrastructure for it doesn’t widely exist today, it’s possible to make constructive use of heat, too, like via district heat driven off waste heat; if you already have a city that is a radiator (undesirably) bleeding heat into the environment, having a source of heat to insert into it can be useful.:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-centre-heating/
Data centres, the essential backbone of our increasingly generative AI world, consume vast amounts of electricity and produce significant amounts of heat.
Countries, especially in Europe, are pioneering the reuse of this waste heat to power homes and businesses in the local area.
As the chart above shows, the United States has by far the most data centres in the world. So many, in fact, the US Energy Information Administration recently announced that these facilities will push the country’s electricity consumption to record highs this year and next. The US is not, however, at the forefront of waste heat adoption. Europe, and particularly the Nordic countries, are instead blazing a trail.
That may be a more-useful strategy in Europe, where a greater proportion of energy is — presently, as I don’t know what will be the case in a warming world — expended on heating than on air conditioning, unlike in the United States. That being said, one also requires sufficient residential population density to make effective use of district heating. And in the UK, there are probably few places that would make use of year-round heating, so only part of the waste heat is utilized.
looks further
The page I linked to mentions that this is something that London — which has many datacenters — is apparently already doing:
And in the UK, the Mayor of London recently announced plans for a new district heat network in the west of the city, expected to heat over 9,000 homes via local data centres.
The charge read: “On February 5 2023 you possessed an extreme pornographic image, which portrayed, in an explicit and realistic way, a person performing an act of intercourse with an animal, namely a fish, which was grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character, and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that such a person or animal was real.”
^ Disgusting garbage of no cultural merit
Wikipedia: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
The work influenced later artists such as Félicien Rops, Auguste Rodin, Louis Aucoc, Fernand Khnopff and Pablo Picasso.[15] Picasso drew his own private version in 1903, which was displayed in a 2009 Museu Picasso exhibit titled Secret Images, alongside 26 other drawings and engravings by Picasso, displayed next to Hokusai’s original and 16 other Japanese prints, portraying the influence of 19th century Japanese art on Picasso’s work.[16] Picasso also later fully painted works that were directly influenced by the woodblock print, such as 1932’s Reclining Nude, where the woman in pleasure is also the octopus, capable of pleasuring herself.[17][18]
^ Influential classic work
I’d also bet against the CMOS battery, if the pre-reboot logs were off by 10 days.
The CMOS battery is used to maintain the clock when the PC is powered off. But he has a discrepancy between current time and pre-reboot logs. He shouldn’t see that if the clock only got messed up during the power loss.
I’d think that the time was off by 10 days prior to power loss.
I don’t know why it’d be off by 10 days. I don’t know uptime of the system, but that seems like an implausible amount of drift for a PC RTC, from what I see online as lilely RTC drift.
It might be that somehow, the system was set up to use some other time source, and that was off.
It looks like chrony is using the Debian NTP pool at boot, though, and I donpt know why it’d change.
Can DHCP serve an NTP server, maybe?
kagis
This says that it can, and at least when the comment was written, 12 years ago, Linux used it.
The ISC DHCP client (which is used in almost any Linux distribution) and its variants accept the NTP field. There isn’t another well known/universal client that accepts this value.
If I have to guess about why OSX nor Windows supports this option, I would say is due the various flaws that the base DHCP protocol has, like no Authentification Method, since mal intentioned DHCP servers could change your systems clocks, etc. Also, there aren’t lots of DHCP clients out there (I only know Windows and ISC-based clients), so that leave little (or no) options where to pick.
Maybe OS X allows you to install another DHCP client, Windows isn’t so easy, but you could be sure that Linux does.
My Debian trixie system has the ISC DHCP client installed in 2025, so might still be a factor. Maybe a consumer broadband router on your network was configured to tell the Proxmox box to use it as a NTP server or something? I mean, bit of a long shot, but nothing else that would change the NTP time source immediately comes to mind, unless you changed NTP config and didn’t restart chrony, and the power loss did it.
I don’t think that the grid frequency is used for PC timekeeping. You have internal timekeeping circuits. AC power stops at the PSU, and I don’t think that there’s any cable over which a time protocol flows from the PSU to the motherboard.
After all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.
I think that the current crop of systems is often good enough for a header illustration in a journal or something, but there are also a lot of things that it just can’t reasonably do well. Maintaining character cohesion across multiple images, for example, and different perspectives — try doing a graphic novel with diffusion models trained on 2D images, and it just doesn’t work. The whole system would need to have a 3D model of the world, be able to do computer vision to get from 2D images to 3D, and have a knowledge of 3D stuff rather than 2D stuff. That’s something that humans, with a much deeper understanding of the world, find far easier.
Diffusion models have their own strong points where they’re a lot better than humans, like easily mimicking a artist’s style. I expect that as people bang away on things, it’ll become increasingly-visible what the low-hanging fruit is, and what is far harder.
Slate Star Codex has an article from back when, “I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup”.
It’s talking about a variety of things, but one point at the core of it, a point that I think is pretty interesting, is that people tend to have social groups that are extraordinarily politically-clustered and highly non-representative of their countries as a whole…and often don’t realize it.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.
And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.
About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.
People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.
I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.
To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.
Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.
It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.
There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”
In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”
But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.
I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.
(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)
For me, the “holy shit, I live in a bubble” moment was the first time I started looking up polls on ghosts. Like, if you asked me what percentage of Americans believed in ghosts, I’d have probably guessed…I don’t know, somewhere south of one percent, maybe? I mean, just extrapolating from my social circle and my own experiences. Sure, if we were talking medieval times, people maybe believed in ghosts and witches and stuff, but in 2025? Nah. We know, more-or-less, how the universe works now, and the supernatural is just something fun to joke around about, right?
But that’s not what polling finds at all. Depending upon how you ask the question in your poll, you’ll get different levels, but it’s a lot, north of a third of society.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4400922-americans-ghosts-aliens-devil-survey/
Nearly half of U.S. adults, 48%, believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Slightly fewer, 39%, express a belief in ghosts, while between 24% and 29% say they believe in six other supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, communication with the dead, clairvoyance, astrology, reincarnation and witches.
looks at MEGA hat in image
I distinctly remember, back with early Trump, when the MAGA thing was being done, joking about how people could do it in Europe and call it MEGA. I did not expect it to actually happen.
At least some of this is due to the fact that we have really appallingly-bad authentication methods in a lot of places.
The guy was called via phone. Phones display Caller ID information. This cannot be trusted; there are ways to spoof it, like via VoIP systems. I suspect that the typical person out there — understandably — does not expect this to be the case.
The fallback, at least for people who you personally know, has been to see whether you recognize someone’s voice. But we’ve got substantially-improving voice cloning these days, and now that’s getting used. And now we’ve got video cloning to worry about too.
The guy got a spoofed email. Email was not designed to be trusted. I’m not sure how many people random people out there are aware of that. He probably was — he was complaining that Google didn’t avoid spoofing of internal email addresses, which might be a good idea, but certainly is not something that I would simply expect and rest everything else on. You can use X.509-based authentication (but that’s not normally deployed outside organizations) or PGP (which is not used much). I don’t believe that any of the institutions that communicate with me do so.
Using something like Google’s SSO stuff to authenticate to everything might be one way to help avoid having people use the same password all over, but has its own problems, as this illustrates.
Ditto for browser-based keychains. Kind of a target when someone does break into a computer.
Credentials stored on personal computers — GPG keys, SSH keys, email account passwords used by email clients, etc — are also kind of obvious targets.
Phone numbers are often used as a fallback way to validate someone’s identity. But there are attacks against that.
Email accounts are often used as an “ultimate back door” to everything, for password resets. But often, these aren’t all that well-secured.
The fact that there isn’t a single “do this and everything is fine” simple best practice that can be handed out to Average Joe today is kind of disappointing.
There isn’t even any kind of broad agreement on how to do 2FA. Service 1 maybe uses email. Service 2 only uses SMSes. Service 3 can use SMSes or voice. Service 4 requires their Android app to be run on a phone. Service 5 uses RFC 6238 time-based one-time-passwords. Service 6 — e.g. Steam — has their own roll-their-own one-time-password system. Service 7 supports YubiKeys.
We should be better than this.
should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.
Maybe. But the point he was making is that the typical person out there is probably at least as vulnerable to falling prey to a scam like that, and that that’s an issue, and that sounds plausible to me. I mean, we can’t have everyone in society (a) be a security expert or (b) get scammed.
The first comment in response is probably the most important bit:
In addition: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.
I’m not sure if it’s what was used here, but a lot of areas have some kind of generic “nuisance” law, which basically serves as a general purpose “someone is doing something obnoxious that affects us and we want to provide law enforcement with a way to make them stop” tool.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance
Under the common law, persons in possession of real property (land owners, lease holders etc.) are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their lands. However this doesn’t include visitors or those who aren’t considered to have an interest in the land. If a neighbour interferes with that quiet enjoyment, either by creating smells, sounds, pollution or any other hazard that extends past the boundaries of the property, the affected party may make a claim in nuisance.
Legally, the term nuisance is traditionally used in three ways:
- to describe an activity or condition that is harmful or annoying to others (e.g., indecent conduct, a rubbish heap or a smoking chimney)
- to describe the harm caused by the before-mentioned activity or condition (e.g., loud noises or objectionable odors)
- to describe a legal liability that arises from the combination of the two.[2] However, the “interference” was not the result of a neighbor stealing land or trespassing on the land. Instead, it arose from activities taking place on another person’s land that affected the enjoyment of that land.[3]
The law of nuisance was created to stop such bothersome activities or conduct when they unreasonably interfered either with the rights of other private landowners (i.e., private nuisance) or with the rights of the general public (i.e., public nuisance)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance_in_English_law#Public_nuisance
EDIT: Okay, found a news article that mentions what they’re being investigated for:
Thames Valley Police said in a statement Tuesday night that they arrested four adults “on suspicion of malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor.” The police added they will conduct an investigation into the incident, and that all four people arrested remain in custody.
Probably this law, though it doesn’t sound to me, on the face of it, like it’d qualify:
Malicious Communications Act 1988
It addresses communications “in electronic form”, but I don’t think that in the everyday sense of the word, a projection would count.
EDIT2: I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if they don’t wind up with this actually going anywhere, and just wanted some sort of legal rationale to make them stop it for the moment.
LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can’t exactly predict what they’ll say.
I mean…they can have non-deterministic outputs. There’s no requirement for that to be the case.
It might be desirable in some situations; randomness can be a tactic to help provide variety in a conversation. But it might be very undesirable in others: no matter how many times I ask “What is 1+1?”, I usually want the same answer.
Swords are off-limits:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/1-2/14/section/1
Prevention of Crime Act 1953
Any person who without lawful authority or reasonable excuse, the proof whereof shall lie on him, has with him in any public place any offensive weapon shall be guilty of an offence
That being said:
Shields also
I’m not aware of anything restricting armor use in public in the UK.
kagis
https://www.uk.safeguardclothing.com/blogs/articles/body-armour-uk-law
UNITED KINGDOM
In the United Kingdom, there are currently no legal restrictions on the purchase and ownership of body armour.
There is a law against wearing it in Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_forbidding_Bearing_of_Armour
The Statute forbidding Bearing of Armour (7 Edw. 2. St. 1) or Coming Armed to Parliament Act 1313 (originally titled Statuto sup’ Arportam’to Armor or Statutum de Defensione portandi Arma) was enacted in 1313 during the reign of Edward II of England. It decrees “that in all Parliaments, Treatises and other Assemblies, which should be made in the Realm of England for ever, that every Man shall come without all Force and Armour”. The statute, which was written in the Anglo-Norman language, goes on to assert the royal power to “defend Force of Armour, and all other Force against our Peace, at all Times when it shall please Us, and to punish them which shall do contrary.” It declares that “Prelates, Earls, Barons, and the Commonalty of our Realm… are bound to aid Us as their Sovereign Lord at all Seasons, when need shall be.”[1]
The law is still in force today, though the Crown Prosecution Service has said that it is unaware of anyone being prosecuted under this or other archaic statutes in recent times.[4] According to a CPS spokeswoman, “If anyone was caught in the Houses of Parliament wearing armour it would first be a matter for the police.”[4]
Mulvad apparently uses Wireguard. Is there an Android Wireguard client that supports multiple VPNs and toggling each independently?