I believe it takes two to make this kind of failure crop up. It’s not as if all the devices talking to/through that router were using so much data?

Our 2015 Maytag had multiple issues, starting with the finish easily scratching off from laundry baskets placed on top (other appliances with the very same laundry baskets placed on top of them didn’t get all bare metal shiny the way those Maytags did.) Self-balancing suspension died young, water valves would stick occasionally… all very young for these failures. Of course it doesn’t matter which brand you choose since they’re all globally sourced now - five different brands could be coming from the same line in the same factory, and the brands shuffle factories occasionally just to keep it impossible to effectively hold them accountable for past failures.

New washer: $500

Old washer suspension replacement: $395

You’re lucky, our Maytag from 10 years ago was a piece of junk, dead after 7.

They really should have options with transparent pricing:

Mechanical washing machine $500: 350 + 150 for the warranty to cover mechanical control system breakage

Electronic washing machine $400: 300 + 100 for the warranty to cover electronic control system problems

Smart washing machine $275: $300 + 75 for warranty (less due to remote update option) - 100 for our anticipated profit on your data

all dumb TVs, with small PCs connected.

This is the way. (DACO: Disney also chickens out.)

This article is 19 months old.

And just as relevant today as it was then. Also reddit: I haven’t seen this (particular) article before, so it’s worth reposting so I and people like me get the message.

Everything about private jet travel is shock value inefficient if you compare it to “normal people” CO2 emissions.

A friend won a $14M lottery payout, he didn’t go for planes but he liked boats, so it’s to be expected that he buys a couple of boats. The boats themselves weren’t so impressive maybe twice the size of my Uncle’s boat, what was impressive was going out for a day-trip fishing with him… and burning 800 gallons of fuel. Sure, we went a little farther than my Uncle’s boat could go in a day just because the lotto win boat is faster, but a day fishing pretty similar fish with my uncle? 10-20 gallons of gas if we’re trolling (which we weren’t in lotto win boat), 3-5 gallons if we just run around and anchor and chum like we normally do.

Also, be careful what you believe when you ask AI a question - what’s wrong with this answer? "A Boeing 747 burns roughly 18,000 to 24,000 gallons of fuel for the Miami to Frankfurt flight, which is about 36,000 to 50,000 liters. "

Yes they do. A big part of it is their size / capacity. Per passenger or per kg cargo they’re pretty efficient, but that doesn’t change the fact that they burn ~280,000 liters on a typical (Washington D.C. to Frankfurt) Atlantic crossing round trip.

Yes, overstated - it’s a two way Atlantic crossing. And if you consider Newfoundland to Ireland to be “an Atlantic crossing” that certainly uses less, and it’s rounded up a bit - though with unfavorable wind conditions it can exceed 300,000 liters.

As of July 2025, approximately 424 Boeing 747 aircraft are in active airline service

I hope your recycling is net carbon neutral as well. Example: how much CO2 is released by a recycling program which sends big diesel trucks all over the city to collect recyclables including cardboard, sorting that cardboard at a facility, shipping a small fraction of that to a pulp recycling facility and making recycled cardboard from the post-consumer captured pulp? Consider the alternative to be: torching the cardboard at the endpoint of use - direct conversion to CO2 without the additional steps.

Don’t forget: new from pulpwood cardboard also is contributing to (temporary) carbon capture by growing the pulpwood trees which also provides groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat on the pulpwood tree farms - instead of the pavement, concrete, steel, electricity and fuel consumption of the recycling process.

maybe the resulting future is that the tools can only work with really popular libraries that have lots of people talking about them on stack overflow in the year 2024 or whatever, and new smaller potentially interesting libraries will have a harder time seeing adoption

Yeah, that’s the future I’ve been living since about 2005. The alternative to letting the world be your support desk via stack overflow and similar is to develop killer examples and API documentation for your own libraries so the AI (and everyone else) can learn from that. Qt was a great example of this starting in the early 2000s.

The dark future is where you have competitors “poisoning the well” spreading false information about your tech in the normally reliable channels, then having AI amplify that for them. This, too, is already happening to some extent - more in the political sphere than the technical space, but it’s everywhere to some extent.

Another way of looking at this: A “Daily AI Habit” on your table is about the same as driving a Tesla 10 miles, or a standard gas car about 3 miles.

Edit 4 AI videos, or detour and take the scenic route home from work… about the same impact.

I was “there” with Claude as you describe about 3 months ago. Since then, Claude has stepped up to being able to create fully functional microservices. It helps if you completely specify what you want, it helps if you don’t specify funky libraries or other tech that has poor support on the internet, it helps if your total ask amounts to 1000 lines of code or less - but I have gotten up around 3000 lines before Sonnet 4 choked a few times.

Before this, my AI queries were mostly limited to specific API function call syntax, and they would only be right about 2/3 of the time, which beats randomly trying things myself until I eventually guess the right variation… Yes, it’s better to consult the documentation - when it’s available - it’s not always available.

“AI” and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.

I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper,

The baby turtles thank you.

300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.

The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.

I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I’ll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.

By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So… my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway…

In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.

Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit… that’s a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.

9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.

This notion that healthy adults need mental herding is very pervasive

Need is a strong word, but it is very true that the environment you put people in will influence their behavior. Grocery stores filled with attractively packaged highly processed foods will drive more highly processed food consumption than if you had to show proof of age ID and sign a disclosure before being allowed into the back room to buy those same foods in plain brown wrapper containers blazoned with all the health warnings that apply to them.

Handheld screen tech delivers dopamine release as powerful as most recreational drugs / experiences. People are definitely “herded” by how that tech is delivered, default settings that most of them never take the time to learn how to change, other settings that annoyingly constantly reset themselves to undesired PAY ATTENTION TO ME configurations, etc.

So, yeah, mindfulness of how your devices are shaping your behavior is a “higher level of awareness” that we as a society should be collectively trying to attain.