dragonfly4933

Honest question, what are you using that is only available from snap?

Snap is almost universally despised with host, flatpack and appimage usually being preferred.

You seem reasonable and don't deserve the downvotes.

Evaporative cooling is mostly used in hyperscale facilities, so most places you would ever visit would usually be cooled the typical way.

It's cheaper because running a compressor costs quite a lot of power, even modern efficient systems still cost more to operate than pumping water out of the ground at near zero cost.

It is also difficult to find information on this topic since these large companies want to keep this information on the down low, that they are consuming a disproportionate amount of ground water.

In a lot of the US, individuals depend on ground water for their needs with their own pumps. It has started occurring that large facilities are built and it starts affecting nearby residents. Sometimes it causes a significant drop in water quality. Over time, they might not be able to get water from their existing well because millions of gallons were extracted for cooling a data center.

The public would be probably be extra pissed if they found out about this.

Water isn't a renewable resource, especially not if the source of water is underground aquifers.

This is a long post, but these matters could be of grave importance.

The reason water isn't always renewable is that statistically, most of the water on earth ends up in the oceans where it gets "trapped". Sure, some of it evaporates and rains, but most of the rain is over the ocean. Some rain obviously makes it back to land, but most of it still stays in the ocean.

It's extra bad if you pump water out of the ground from what are called aquifers. The water in the ground has taken thousands of years to build up, so pumping it out for dumb reasons is not a good idea. We could argue about growing food with ground water, but most people might consider squandering ground water where it is optional to do so, to be short sighted.

At least some data centers pump water out of aquifers for the purposes of evaporative cooling. This is a method of cooling that is the same as "swap" coolers. It works by taking advantage of the fact that when a liquid undergoes a phase transition, there is a large exchange of energy.

This is a similar effect to how people can be cooled off by sweating. The sweat evaporates and it leaves the skin cooler, because when the liquid evaporates, heat is taken out of the skin.

Back to data centers, some pump water out of aquifers, and intentionally evaporate the water to remove heat out of whatever media is used for cooling chips/servers.

Why do they use this method of cooling? Because it's cheaper. Typical hvac systems involving compressors consume power and power costs money. So in effect, they are consuming water, an essential and non-renewable resource, in order to avoid having to pay for electricity to cool their servers in a more sustainable way. Evaporative cooling is not necessary to cool a data center. Data centers have been and still are cooled by typical hvac systems which do not consume water in this manner.

A common retort is "can't the vapor be condensed back into water?" Yes, but they don't because that would cost money. As mentioned earlier, creating the vapor consumed heat. To create water, energy would need to be spent to take the heat back out of the water. This is an unavoidable fact of thermodynamics.

Also, do not confuse evaporative cooling with what some people call a "water" loop. In such a loop, water is being used to move heat from one location to another, in a loop, similar to how water cooled PCs work. This is often done because air has a poor heat capacity, so the size ducts needed to move an adequate amount of air could be too big to be practical, so in these systems, the heat is transferred into water, usually to be sent to a heat exchanger (radiator/heat sink). The water does not undergo a phase transition in a typical water loop. The water merely is hotter when it leaves the so called "air conditioner" and cooler when it leaves the heat exchanger, heading back to the AC. The compressors in the AC units are what is doing the heavy lifting in these style systems.

I don't think calling hallucinations a bug is strictly wrong, but it's also not working as intended. The intent is defined by the developers or the company, and they don't want hallucinations because that reduces the usefulness of the models.

I also don't think we know that it is a fact that this is a problem that can't be solved in current technology, we simply have not found any useful solution.

Ghostty has scrollback, I have no idea what that person is talking about. I think it is missing scroll bars, but you can scroll using the mouse wheel or shift+pgup/dn. The buffer is also not very big by default but I think it can be changed via config file.

It is generally considered a bad idea to use envs for passing secrets in general since envs for process n are available to other processes which have access and permission.

Comparing python to rust, rust has far fewer breaking updates than python, and thats a fact. Feature updates can and do break older code in python, whereas in rust this is simply not allowed with few exceptions.

The language is allowed to change in compatible ways with editions. Every few years a new edition is released which allows otherwise breaking changes to be implemented, but the old and new code can still work together. Developers can rev the edition version when they want. I also think cargo might be able to help upgrade to a new edition as well.

Rust isn’t perfect, but python fails to learn the lessons that even perl implemented decades ago.

To be honest, I never heard of it, and it is interesting, but the language isn't the only factor, it's the ecosystem as well. It says it's an alternative to C, so I will just assume it can consume C libraries. But that still leaves you with using C libraries, which is not a great position to be in if you are looking to not use C.

If you are looking for something that is actually in use, but not rust, look into Zig. Still would need to use a lot of C libraries, but it at least looks like it has momentum. Not to mention they seek to completely replace libc, which would actually be useful and an achievement, since that is the biggest problem C actually has.

I am a rust fan myself, but if you are new to programming it's not a great place to start due to its' learning cliff.

Maybe, but i never mentioned years into the future. Of course technology will improve. The hardware will get better and more effcient, and the algorithms and techniques will improve.

But as it stands now, i still think what i said is true. We obviously don’t have exact numbers, so i can only speculate.

Having lots of memory is a big part of inference, so I was going to reply to you that prices of memory stopped going down at a similar historical rate, but i found this, which is interesting

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=2020..latest

The cost when down by about 0.1x from 2000 to 2010. 2010-2020 it was only about 0.23x. 2020-2023 shows roughly another halving of the price, which is still a pretty good rate.

The available memory is still only one part. The speed of the memory and the compute connected to it also plays a big part in how these current systems work.

Of the things people complain about that systemd brings in, this is among the least offensive. It makes sense for an init system to provide such functionality, the function of spawning new system processes.

Additionally, in modern systems it doesn’t make sense to use such features. Spawning a new process per request or on demand doesn’t gain you much and does reduce performance.

Spawning new processes on most OS is pretty slow compared to other operations. Additionally, there would also be an increase in latency as the new process needs to be loaded, whereas most software these days can handle the new request in more efficient ways.

I think you can also try to reuse the same process for multiple requests, stopping it only once it has been quiet for a while. But this still doesn’t really help much.

Historically, i think it was used to try to save memory. But today its a bigger nusance than it is worth. I just checked how much memory sshd is using, and i think it is less than 10mb.

total kB 8508 6432 1160

And to be clear, you theoretically can’t save much if any memory doing this because you must have enough memory available to be able to run the process, otherwise bad things will happen or some other process gets oomed.

Additionally, spawning a new process per request can represent an availability violation. An attacker could launch a series of very slow connections to a server spawning a new process per request, causing a depletion of resources.

With all that said, I wouldn’t say there are no uses at all for this, it can be useful to make very minimal network connected software that does some very basic stuff in a secure network.

If the product costs that much to run, and most users aren’t abusing their access, it’s possible the product isn’t profitable at any price that enough users are willing to pay.

You would still need to pass the GPU through to the VM, but this can eliminate the need to plug the GPU output into another device or use a dedicated monitor.

I have never used it, but I know it is pretty common.