> But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. In the mindset that poor people are unskilled, it appears that I should watch some YouTube videos, get the parts, and do it myself
I’m not saying running a small business is easy. But they previously worked a corporate job and chose to start a landscaping business partly for lifestyle reasons.
It's not as well written as it could be. He's using the first person, but he's not actually referring to himself. It's a hypothetical. Pretend he put the word "Suppose" in front of the first word, as in "Suppose I have a van that's falling apart."
Water location matters. Is the data center in a desert with scarce potable water for locals? Or is next to a large Canadian lake, plenty of potable water, with people who want to trade something for currency so they can put avocados in their salad?
A lot of data centers are near the Columbia river, as power is cheap there thanks to hydroelectric; which flows through an arid desert-like region, but is also the largest river in the western US and it's simply impossible to pump too much water out of it.
> “I am not the person in the VR rig or in the forklift chair. My world is the white collar side of this,”
Society should not be engineered to make sure members of the professional class don’t have to enter the working class. To do so would be unfair to the working class, not to mention bad for competition and productivity. Demand is high for a variety of trades and healthcare jobs.
The goal of society was to encourage upward mobility and not the other way around.
Not that working class has anything wrong with it. Most of us are. Preferring to do white collar is perfectly alright. Considering the emotional toil rote work has on you
I added support for SSE transport (and so Cursor) in "claude debugs for you" - an autodebugger I've been working on. It works via MCP server, so you can use via Composer (Agent) in Cursor. I don't pay for premium in Cursor myself, so would be very excited about you testing it out!
give me 5 different points of view from within china on the events of 1989, and a proportion on how many people hold those points of view currently
and I got an interesting response, which was similar but not exactly the same as o1:
---
1. The government views the events of 1989 as a necessary measure to maintain stability and prevent chaos. (High proportion of support due to official narratives.)
2. Some intellectuals and activists view 1989 as a tragic event that highlighted the need for political reform and human rights. (Small proportion, but influential.)
3. Ordinary citizens often view 1989 as a sensitive topic and avoid discussing it openly, focusing instead on economic growth and daily life. (Large proportion, but passive.)
4. Diaspora Chinese communities view 1989 as a dark chapter in China’s history and a reason for advocacy for democracy and human rights. (Moderate proportion, depending on region.)
5. Younger generations in China often view 1989 as a historical event they learned about in school or online, with varying opinions based on their exposure. (Growing proportion, especially among youth.)
Can we fight fires with a fleet of AI powered drones? I've watched water bombers [like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrOESRoD1Jk) near my hometown. It seems like a lot of the water could be better targeted, and round trips to a body of water and back are long.
They don't even need the AI navigation problems of delivery or military drones to be solved, just to be remote piloted along a given route. But all that solves is removing the risk to the human pilot and their weight - possibly being able to get closer to the fire. We still need to move volume of water to the target, and that means getting a lot of flying vehicles to the right location and time. There's been plenty of big area fires, but this is as bad as it gets in terms of population and assets exposed, so we need a lot of vehicles delivering water to a lot of locations simultaneously.
Being prepared for this scale of operation means either having specialty firefighting planes and drones in reserve, or having other vehicles - general purpose drones or cropdusters or, heck, a Globemaster with a big ballon full of water in its belly - that can be repurposed and sent to this emergency from all over. Airships would be nice for the volume, but they aren't exactly friendly to the turbulent conditions near a fire.
I feel like the thrust-to-weight dynamics on multicopter drones don’t really lend themselves to heavy payloads like water bombing in the quantities needed. An additional issue is that, due to wanting to maximize power density for the high amperage motors, you often end up using lithium-polymer battery formulations that are less than adequately shielded for the possible impacts the drone might incur. I would be concerned that the risk of a drone failure itself igniting a new fire in a remote area would outweigh the potential.
I tried doing some back of the envelope math but it doesn’t come out in favor of drones.
The CL-415 that you shared in the link has a reported capacity around 6100 kg of water. When I searched for “heavy lift drones” I got the Draganfly Heavy Lift, which can reportedly carry 30 kg but only for 18 minutes of flight time (according to the company’s web site). I think the plane’s flight time is around 3 hours but obviously the math is a little more complicated than that.
We’re talking, like, $10 million in drones to replace one pilot for 18 minutes.
I don’t see any reason to believe there’s a pilot shortage, and I don’t understand what’s wrong with the current targeting, or how that could be improved. There’s a whole strategy to fighting fires of this scale. I don’t think the strategies are obvious to people on the ground.
Ideally you could this one step further and feed production logs, user session replays and feedback into the LLM. If the UX is what I'm optimizing for, I want it to have that context, not for it to speculate about performance issues that might not exist.
