Last time a proposal like this made the rounds on the Internet stirring up consternation, the proposal was to use space mirrors to replace the street lighting for the Chinese city of Chengdu. It would have had no net effect on light pollution and would have reduced electricity consumption to boot.

Bear in mind, this mirror focuses its light on a specific 5km-diameter patch of land. It won't be visible elsewhere.

Ah, that's why pear-based weaponry played such a small role in World War II?

It would be completely impossible for them to all focus on the same spot, they'd be distributed around the world.

Also, that's not been approved. This approval is for a single prototype.

Have to admit, I've completely forgotten about Pear Harbor.

"Sunlight on demand" is an exaggeration. The plan is to create a 5km spot of 0.1 lux, which is a bit brighter than a full moon.

Every time I've seen this news posted (and I've seen it a lot over the past few days) everyone has leapt to some very extreme conclusions.

I have more than one trash can. She'll be back.

Should have just played along. Free wife.

Back when generative image AIs first came into general awareness with Dalle-3 and Stable Diffusion and so forth, there was a fad of changing image alt text into deliberately misleading nonsense. Which, of course, was not great for the visually impaired back then either. It was ineffective and short lived, but it's still pretty annoying seeing people proudly declaring their intent to make things deliberately difficult for people who rely on technology for this kind of stuff. So IMO worth pointing out.

Except that the environmental impact of AI data centers is actually quite small compared to tons of other things that they could be protesting.

It's quite ironic, there's an old golf course near my home town that's likely going to be replaced with a data center in the near future (it's shutting down and being rezoned, that's enough to get the protests started) but golf courses are way more water-hungry than data centers are.

By "bad faith troll and AI evangelist" XLE means "someone I disagree with about this topic, and therefore that I follow around obsessively accusing of being a troll."

He's really rather sad that way, I notice that every thread I've been in over the past few days with any relation to AI he's been adding this comment to. Guess he noticed me again. At least he's stopped calling me a literal bot or accusing me of being "from Reddit" as if that meant something nefarious.

So evidently, people either can't tell when AI is being used or don't care when AI is being used.