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After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

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Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#71

Post by Waterluvian »

est31 wrote: post #61
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it. I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!

Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom. However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still. It's…

Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking that HTML was antiquated. "Obviously they had 20th century ideas on what websites would be. As if we're all just publishing documents." But the beauty of HTML eventually clicked for me: it's describing the semantics of a structured piece of data, which means you can render a perfectly valid view of it however you want if you've got the right renderer!

I imagine language choice to be the same idea: they're just different views of the same data. Yes, there's a canonical language which, in many cases, contains information that gets lost when translated (see: opinions on certain books really needing to be read in their original language).

I think Chrome got it right at one point where it would say "This looks like it's in French. Want to translate it? Want me to always do this?" (Though I expect Chrome to eventually get it wrong as they keep over-fitting their ad engagement KPIs)

This is all a coffee morning way of saying: I believe that the browser must own the rendering choices. Don't reimplement pieces of the browser in your website!

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#74

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MadDemon wrote: post #15
mrbluecoat wrote: post #7

Next up: Las Vegas

Las Vegas is actually very efficient with their water use.

Maybe, but the southwest of the US uses more water than it has and can import. With droughts and overconsumption, the water supply is at risk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_me...

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#75

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

a2tech wrote: post #25
KeplerBoy wrote: post #21

So the sanctions will eventually work and topple the regime?

In 10 years there won’t be a regime in Iran because Iran won’t exist as it does today. With the collapsing water table people are going to be forced into either death or migration. I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.

> the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes

I think the impacts of climate change vs growing populations became real to me around 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town_water_crisis

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#76

Post by csomar »

a2tech wrote: post #29
csomar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. My country have been through this (at a whole country level, not just a single city) for two years. It sped up desalination projects. People re-adjusted to the lack of water. Prices adjusted. Lots of water is wasted and very little water is actually being used for drinking. At the end, the rain came and it coincided with many desalination plants starting operations. The prime minister suggesting evacuations…

They’re already straining to truck in enough water for survival now WITH some of the wells still working. If the ability to source water locally stops the people of Tehran will either need to move or die. With aquifers running dry from iran to Afghanistan they’ll have to migrate even further. I think we could see the entire region plunge further into chaos as the water crisis worsens.

That's just a Western pipe dream. The water crisis could trigger a revolt but the fundamentals for such revolt have to be there rather than the water crisis being the sole reason.

> people of Tehran will either need to move or die

No. I've lived (along a million other people) without water for many months during a hot summer episode. It was a major lifestyle degradation (and major doesn't even begin to describe it) but death was not a threat (though there was fear of disease spread due to possible degradation of sanitary conditions but that didn't happen either).

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#77

Post by pbmonster »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60
nerdsniper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They share the same gas field with Qatar, who does all their desalination with all the excess gas production they can’t sell. Qatar has no surface freshwater or groundwater. So all of their water is desalinated. It’s often still quite salty to the taste though - the last few ppms would be an exorbitant cost to remove. However, Qatar has 3 million people. Iran has 92 million people - 9 million in Tehran alone. So thei…

I have read about experimental desalination techniques that do a better job, and use less energy, but I haven't heard much about that, lately. I'd think that this kind of research would be a priority. It won't be long, before we start having water wars (like olden times, but with nastier weapons).

The low hanging fruit have been long picked. Reverse osmosis is within 50% of the thermodynamic limit.

If you have gigawatts of low grade waste heat (Iran does, in theory), you can run multistage flash distillers of the waste heat, and those have more than an order of magnitude separation to the thermodynamic limit (they also have lower CAPEX, lower maintenance and lower water pre-treatment requirements than reverse osmosis).

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#79

Post by jfoster »

est31 wrote: post #61
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it. I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!

Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom. However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still. It's…

What do you mean "every browser advertises English"?

In my experience, users who genuinely don't want English will most definitely have their browser language set to the language they do want.

I think what you might be seeing is that many users are OK with English even if it's not their native language.

Re: After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

#80

Post by black6 »

dkga wrote: post #5

I grew up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a region full of natural resources and, thankfully, aquifers and natural water reservoirs. However, centuries of extraction mismanagement and, more recently, over exploration of mineral resources puts these water resources into jeopardy. (Other problems include mining in open pits and with sludge dams that led to two of the worse environmental disasters in the world i…

So that's the kind of hill Jack and Jill went up.
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