I use Gemini in my rotation of AI clients...that work pays for. It is good at most things, better than copilot for imgage searching and making images, worse at writing vs Claude and way worse at hadling technical issues when it comes to Azure stuff. I also use YT premium and maps. Anything else Google is a pass for me. I have now seen multiple people locked out of their Google accounts for reasons that are just very vauge.

Microsoft is building an AI datacenter that "uses less water than a fast food restaurant" by Ivan Jenic Image: Microsoft Microsoft has announced plans to build a new datacenter campus in Pecos, Texas, as the company continues to invest billions in AI infrastructure. The new facility, called project Kilby, will reportedly have a capacity of 2 gigawatts and will be one of the largest single capacity additions in the company’s history. To power the campus, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal with Chevron to supply natural gas from the Permian Basin, America's largest oil field. This deal is set to become the largest collaboration to date between a U.S. oil and gas giant and Big Tech. It’s no secret that Big Tech has often been criticized for exploiting natural resources for its AI developments. Microsoft is trying to mitigate some of that negative consensus by promising to build its own power supply for the new datacenter, independent of the public grid. The Pecos datacenter will be powered by a power plant hub, built by Chevron, with up to 2.5 gigawatts of gas-fired capacity, with potential to scale to up to 5 gigawatts. The facility will include at least seven GE Vernova turbines, with first power potentially coming online as early as late 2027 or early 2028. The power plant hub is part of an approximately $7 billion investment by Chevron, making it one of the largest dedicated energy projects tied to a single datacenter campus in the U.S. Microsoft hasn’t publicly disclosed the amount it’s investing in the new datacenter. Microsoft has also committed to implementing a closed-loop cooling system that will only require an initial water charge to operate. The company said that “the total lifecycle water use of this datacenter is only a fraction of that consumed annually by a typical fast-food restaurant.” What the press release doesn’t mention, however, is how much water the natural gas plant itself will consume, or how a 20-year fossil fuel commitment squares with the company's pledge to be carbon negative by 2030. The construction of the new datacenter should provide over 6,000 construction jobs at peak build-out, and create hundreds of operational job roles once the facility is built. Via: Reuters

A lot of uncertainty in this story. Might. Could. Maybe. The truth is we don't know what will happen to the universe in the end, or if it will end. Our own Milky Way galaxy will merge with the Andromeda galaxy in about 2.5 billion years, with our solar system as part of a new, larger cluster. I guess we'll have to and see how it goes down.

While people can rely on text expansion, it'd be nice to be able to save prompts as aliases. Since AI chatbots need so much provided context to lessen the chance of them going off rails in their response, it'd be nice to be able to start your prompt with a command word that provides all the necessary context that you find yourself often providing. I know there are 'memory' features, including in Gemini, but I still find myself needing to tell it things in each specific conversation for it to give appropriate responses in many contexts. For example, I have it in the memory that I'm running Fedora 44 KDE Plasma 6.7 yet Gemini constantly gives me instructions for older versions. Once I remind it what I'm running, it corrects itself. This isn't something I should need to do every time I prompt it about my setup.