I think of myself as having average intelligence. When I worked hard I could get As when I slack off I can sneak by, when I do average work I get average results.
This makes me perfect to answer because nothing comes easy to me but nothing is out of reach if I apply myself. I do alright because I’ve put in the effort and here’s how.
Evidence based thinking: (what is the evidence backing this conclusion and how trustworthy is it?) without this everything you believe is no better than fantasy.
Room to be wrong: what if my prior assumption is incorrect? Can I admit that and get better? Without this you can never improve. (Also if you can’t ever admit you’re wrong that’s essentially the definition of being an asshole)
Avoiding perspective /assumption lock: there are classic thinking problems like the one that spawned the term thinking outside the box (look it up and answer for your self how this might be assumption lock). The apocryphal Charley Munger effort to armor planes better in World War Two (it was actually someone else’s work and far less cut and dried but interesting), the actual Charley Munger effort to save the lives of pilots by inverting and solving (how do I save the most pilots? Invert that and it’s obvious, now invert again and you have a solution)
Then practice. Seek out thinking problems, read about solutions to thinking problems and see if you can find similarities in solutions, thinking traps to avoid.
Try out chess and see if it gets you thinking ahead or about what other people might do. (Most people in prison can’t draw a causal relationship between their actions and their situation, chess taught me to not be like that)
Read the classic book on systems thinking and see if it resonates with you
Talk to people who challenge you intellectually (people who can successfully convince you of something you didn’t think before). Socrates says the loser of the argument is the one who benefits most. Because he leaves with new ideas. The winner only gains satisfaction and that is worth far less than knowledge.
Immediately after this step, return to step one and check evidence closely, because making a convincing argument is not always correlated with correctness. A convincing argument on faulty evidence is worse than useless. (Look up what Socrates says about sophistry)
Keep in mind that there are many types of intelligence. Emotional intelligence, financial savvy, street smarts.
If you’re not trying at all in any of those areas you’re leaving money on the table.
My buddy has low school smarts, high financial intelligence. His financial management is 100x better than his rich friends. He’s not “smart” he just tries harder, follows best practices, vets advice carefully and does the work.
Go do the work
Lay out some areas you want to get better. Look up best practices, vet them, practice them.
You’re already on the right track. (Excuse me I gotta go do something that guy told me to do but I never got around to)
Thanks a lot for your input. I feel like this really resonates with me and tbh I'm kind of the same as you when it comes to being "average" but not really average. I just feel like if I applied myself and my thinking properly to problems and situations I could do far greater things. I'll definitely take everything you said into account.
I despise snap.
Primarily because it mounts a new volume for every package.
I tore it out a couple times. I’m switching to another distro entirely. In part because the last time I tried to remove it I either didn’t remember how or the old way doesn’t work anymore.
I would recommend choosing a distro that doesn’t use it.
Ai does us a crap-ton of water.
Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling. (At least all the big ones like Google and Amazon do)
I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.
The Dalles data centers use a large fraction of the water supply of The Dalles because the data centers are extremely large and the town of The Dalles is of negligible size. It is also true that the paper mill of Valliant, Oklahoma uses 50 million gallons of water per day and that the town of Valliant, Oklahoma, population 819, uses less than 1% of that amount, so the paper mill can be said to be using > 99% of the local water supply but this is also a meaningless comparison.
So we'll move the datacenters from the tiny town to just outside of a giant city which will probably move that percentage down to only a few percent if even that. Problem solved!
You're looking at the wrong metrics to compare here if we're trying to just gauge how efficient a datacenter is or is not. This metric could be useful if the datacenters are attached to the municipal water system and thus begin to be a massive load compared to what was originally planned/built, but in terms of understanding the total water use compared to other industrial users its kind of a meaningless statistic.
I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?
It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
As is always the case when discussing systems, the answer changes depending on where you draw the system boundary. In some cases you would expect water to fall as rain in the same watershed where it was drawn. This is the case for example of water "used by" California rice fields that are irrigated by flood. In other cases, you can expect the water to disappear into a distant system. This would be the case for water drawn from fossil aquifers.
Active noise cancellation of a known sound pattern is actually pretty easy (technologically). The inverse of the sound wave collides with the sound waves and cancels them out.
I’d do it with an arduino, use a microphone to listen for the specific sound and trigger the opposite sound (which you’ll have prepared ahead of time and saved). Arduino programming is pretty straightforward. And now with AI you could probably just prompt one of the top five ai products for the code.
Then it’s a question of getting the sound projected in the right direction. You’ll probably want a speaker array pointed towards the source of the sound.
I think a soundbar might be a good start.
In the short term headphones with active noise cancellation work great. I use earbuds under comfortable hearing protection.
I also like the wire cutters idea. I hate those alarms.
I continually fantasize about doing something that doesn’t require a computer to design, manufacture, distribute, or sell.
Let me know if you think of anything.
Much as I hate them I do actually have a good time when things work out. Unfortunately when things work out you’ve solved some problem and the reward for solving a problem is more problems to solve.
