For a real world comparison, the Perth desalination plant claims ~4kWh/m3.

> could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually

To put it into perspective, 63 billion gallons is 193340 acre-feet, which is 0.5% of california's water use (a bit under 40 millions acre-feet). That's a tenth the water consumption of lawns, which is 1/15th the water consumption of agriculture.

Gaping holes seems unlikely, more loss of detail or shifted colors.

You can experience something like that by using plugins which simulate CVD / color blindnesses.

Even proving your identity to a government entity is non-trivial, as can be seen by the administration trying to use that as a new poll tax.

When I needed to get my newborn daughter's social security card I went to the local SS office, only to be turned away because I did not have an appointment. So I went home, finally got an appointment after an hour on the phone, trying to explain why I didn't have her SS card (apparently "it never arrived" did not compute), went back the next day with my passport card to provide as proof of identity. Only for them to say "we don't accept passport cards as ID. We can use your license though!"

Baffling.

> the US government is too corrupt and intentionally ossified to react

The trump administration is not too ossified to react, it's in full support of. It dropped two investigations into polymarket mid-2025, and polymarket is crypto-adjacent, a field which the trump family takes full advantage of.

> Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors.

polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran https://www.npr.org/2026/03/01/nx-s1-5731568/polymarket-trad...

> and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran

Oh, trump made some money?

nit: The article you linked says half a billion, not a billion.

Death markets are banned in the US. Personally, I tend to think of this as a crypto problem, not a prediction market problem.

It's also fundamentally something you can't really do properly in crypto. You need a central authority to decide if "thing has happened". There's no way to properly incentivize accuracy in cases where the majority of stake benefits from an inaccuracy.

The team probably sync'd the two after unarchiving the original.

Jason Evans (the creator of jemalloc) recounted the entire thing last year: https://jasone.github.io/2025/06/12/jemalloc-postmortem/

"Were I to reengage, the first step would be at least hundreds of hours of refactoring to pay off accrued technical debt."

Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these.

Refactor doesn't mean just artificial puff-up jobs, it's very likely internal changes and reorganization (hence 100s of hours).

There are not many engineers capable of working on memory allocators, so adding more burden by agentic stuff is unlikely to produce anything of value.

> Facebook's coding AIs to the rescue, maybe? I wonder how good all these "agentic" AIs are at dreaded refactoring jobs like these.

No.

This is something you shouldn't allow coding agents anywhere near, unless you have expert-level understanding required to maintain the project like the previous authors have done without an AI for years.

Hm, I wonder.

I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

> ...but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.

I don't think so.

Even on LLM generated code, it is still not enough and you cannot trust it. They can pass the tests and still cause a regression and the code will look seemingly correct, for example in this case study [0].

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

AI is more than happy to declare the test wrong and “fix it” if you’re not careful. And the cherry on top is that sometimes the test could be wrong or need updating due to changed behavior. So…

And tomatoes.

Years ago I made harissa out of peppers for sauce for baked chicken wings. To my surprise it tasted tomato-ey.

After doing some Google searches I realized the plants were related and eventually it sort of made sense. Peppers are almost like a very dry, very firm tomato.

In hindsight it's obvious but at the time it was very surprising.

you are both right of course

but for some reason my fealty to potato does not extend to tomatoes and eggplant quite the same way. i feel toward potatoes sort of how gary Larson feels about cows

Considering the most powerful nation on earth elevated a known grifter to the highest office, twice, we’ve been sailing those waters a while.

Grifting is about as American as apple pie honestly. Melville is of course know for Moby Dick where he delves into the psyche of the Great American Man but he also wrote The Confidence Man. Mark Twain’s work is full of con men and grifters. Ponzi laid the groundwork for more complex schemes in the 20s. Pyramid schemes were all the rage in the 40/50s, Tupperware parties as an example, and of course still are huge today.

It seems like whenever American society is changing very rapidly or has changed very rapidly con men become the powerful ones of the time. Maybe this is true everywhere but as an American I don’t know the history of cons in other countries.