Womble

You could even do district heating. Use the hot water output from the data centre and sell it cheap for piping into appartment blocks for heating.

Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.

You're right that there's orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that's far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.

I mean, Farage is a cunt, but he's been publicly in favor of PR for decades, likely not least because it would benefit his parties.

No I'm a meat eater who is anti-car! I'm more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.

Yeah, I too hate those hypcrites who complain about the massive environmental impact of AI, then drive a 10 mile round trip to buy a burger made from a cow raised on soy.

Just FYI, this use of republic is not recognised in political science and as far as I've seen is only used by americans justifying why their system is undemocratic. Republic just comes from "res Publica" (public affair) and means the head of state is not a monarch but a member of the public. There are very democratic republics like Finland and there are very undemocratic republics like the PRC. The way you describe a republic would apply to countries like the UK or Sweden, which are constitutional monarchies, not republics.

Representative democracy is a better term for what you are talking about, where the population elects representatives who are able to advocate for them and take the time to become subject matter experts on running the country (idealy).

I dont think AI has much to do with them dropping the greenwashing, it's kissing the ring to Trump. If Harris had won they would still be going just as hard on AI but trying harder to keep the green messaging going.

If the tax is on fuel then it wouldnt matter where they are registered, they'd be getting refueled in the EU and so would pay the tax.

wouldn't this result in airlines dumping the extra cost on customers

yes, partially. If the increase in tax results in a particular flight being £50 more expensive for example they will rise prices by an amount. But it likely wont be the full 50 as airlines are already charging what they think the optimum price is, the price going up is likely to result in less sales.

It also incentivises the airlines to be more fuel efficient (and so less damaging to the climate), and punishes worse offenders like private jets more as the use more fuel per passenger mile.

The most annoying thing is there is a trivial to implement way to close to halve these stupidly inflated sizes: make the highest resolution of textures a free DLC that you optionally install

Yes, i find it difficult to believe that they mess up a dozen line algo that is in their training set in a prominant place with no complicating factors. Despite what a lot of people here think, LLMs do have value for coding. Even if the companies selling them make ridiculous claims about what they can do.

Presumably the devs have to agree to it. I dont think gog cn just decide "were going to give away this game we dont own for free"