My central question: Why do complex, critical systems so often get stuck in the public sector? I explore this from the inside of the drinking water sector, drawing on a background in civil service, teaching, and observation to explain what I find. My interests lie at the intersection of technical innovation, bureaucratic inertia, and practical philosophy. I blog about what it takes to actually implement change in the real world.
www.title22.org
title22
Karma: 54
what is the significance of the v in RETVRN?
Its a good point, I think its a failure of heuristically thinking. We like that easy variable.
Yes I understand. I appreciate you asking for clarification.
Yes correct. Potable water is used because it is “cleaner”. Also, it is more likely that potable water systems are what are available to connect to. There is no technical reason why we have to use potable water and evaporative cooling. It’s a financial and logistical decision.
The market would solve for this if it were a free market, but you know how that goes. As I note governments are mismatched against the resources of the tech companies. Thats not to say the companies are bad, but we need to be open eyed about the current ability to build new systems and price resources.
Yeah, I don’t recall specifics but if I have awkward transitions, a bad paragraph, etc it’s something I’ll try.
I have had a very similar experience. A short break went longer and longer. At this point I had maybe 3 beers and a few sips of wine in 2.5 years.
In the first year I had a few non-alcoholic beers and felt that “social anxiety dissolving away” as if it were real alcohol. I realized much of the benefit was psychological, if anything being drunk works against it. Also, overall I feel sharper. This can come with additional, not necessarily pleasant but useful self-reflection.
I don’t think I’ll ever drink again, although I’m not totally against some other future psychoactive alternative.
The Cloud Drinks Local
I already liked the Kimi-K2 model. It’s creative writing is very interesting and in chat it’s no BS. One never knows how much these models are a mirror and how much its baked in so seeing the data is insightful.
It seems to me there’s general pattern that new models do better, rather than a company vs company trend.
This is something we all need to hear time to time. That feeling of futility can be such a weight. I think not only should we personally acknowledge that we can accomplish more than we give ourselves credit for, but we should help others feel that way. Set people up for success, rack up wins and build momentum. The act of doing has benefits beyond the finished product and the lack of doing does harm beyond the opportunity cost.
I came across a similar “hack” on LinkedIn from Tom Styer:
“California just pulled off the nation’s largest-ever test of a virtual power plant.
This successful test proved VPPs are a fast, low-cost, zero-emissions way to make better use of the clean energy we already have — and to keep the lights on as demand surges from data centers, heat waves, and electrification.”
Basically, they are talking about allowing residential batteries supply the grid during peak demand. I tend to be skeptical about stuff like this because in my own domain, water, there’s a lot of pop science and bold claims that ignore scaling and logistics. I asked a smart fellow in that industry about it
https://substack.com/@energycrystals
and I thought he gave a good answer that aligns with my experience with water, which is it always come down to implementation:
”The challenge is lining up customer telemetry to incentive structures that matter. With standard demand response products (which some people sell as VPPs), the incentives given to customers don’t pay for the battery and the software admin and API costs to the utilities outweigh the cost savings of a VPPVPPs are vaporware until someone can make the business model pencil and the API integration and UX not suck ass”So, without knowing more, my prior is that this free capacity is there for a reason, and that utilities aren’t that dumb. On the flip side, I think it’s great that we are thinking this way. Probing our systems and looking for efficiencies are worthwhile. our legacy infrastructure is a mess of path dependent bureaucracy and I’m certain there’s gains to be made in addition to new construction.
Cool! I didn’t know about bookmarklets. I knew Gemini would host little pages and apps made in canvas, so I played around a bit to see how different AI’s handle it.
Gemini is like your Claude example. Here is a 5 min timer bookmarklet
https://g.co/gemini/share/73048c89f2f2
Perplexity lab made a bookmarklet and a nice html explainer, but sharing is a little less intuitive. There’s a tab for “app” and at the bottom of that page a button to share the url. Here is a RNG (code works but the “drag the button” isn’t (and I was just looking for proof of concept)
Random Number Generator Bookmarklet—Free Tool
Chatgpt has canvas like Gemini. It should work the same but in my 15 min of testing the shared page hangs up and the bookmarklet doesnt seem to work. But I suppose it could be my work PC is breaking it somehow. Anyway, here is an attempted “read mode” for webpages:
ChatGPT—Read Mode Static
Grok’s canvas is Grok Studio. seems like it only can be summoned in chat, like Claude. Doesnt seem like you can share the app. Grok suggested:
To share publicly, host it on a free platform like GitHub Pages, Glitch, or Replit (upload the file and get a public URL).
I can share the chat that generated the bookmarklet though. Also, it doesn’t seem to work but again, proof of concept:
Mute all tabs
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA%3D%3D_e0f91d33-7aba-4c8a-942b-db570b049536
Just to see if these bookmarklets were even possible I re-tried in Gemini
-Read mode works: https://g.co/gemini/share/dc55070e0dc4
-RNG, app works “drag to bookmarks” doesnt: https://g.co/gemini/share/024d865cbbae
-Mute all tabs works: https://g.co/gemini/share/5dba86dee603
This is excellent. It reminds me of theoretical vs experimental physics. Actual experiments to probe what is going on in the black box seem unintuitive to me and I really appreciate when someone can explain it so clearly. Interpretability is going to reveal so much about our minds and the machine minds.
Hi,
I’m a long time lurker but finally made an account since I’m writing more. I’m particularly interested in applying concepts to the public sector.
I wish I could attend, but cannot being on the West Coast. I would be extremely interested and appreciative if an attendee(s) could provide some of their experience and impressions afterward. Also, if materials distributed at the summit can be available as well that would be awesome. I might see what can find from websites of the exhibitors now, as a primer to share.
Thanks,
I’m not suggesting data center construction should proceed without any concern. It is outrunning local capacity in some areas, but not all. Also, there are other cooling technologies that can be deployed that use less, or no water.
The logical conclusion is to assess all the externalities, then weigh the true cost for the private and public sector. If a city cannot accommodate the resource needs of a data center and population into the near future, then yes it should halt or slow down the construction.
The entire point of the article is that opinions are being formed using broad area numbers when the actual decision is very local.Not fair to say its the entire point. It spurred the article.