Dont fuck with electricity. I think the intuitions people have are based on home installations with RCDs, fuses and earthing and proper cabling before it gets to that socket. You then plug in a distribution to draw 100w for your devices and maybe the occasional 2kw for the vacuum cleaner for 5 minutes if too lazy to use another socket. Yoy not running full house load through it all day.
Good but temporary. Big tech has your browser fingerprint against that plus LLMs will probably be able to match it again by text using cosine similarly.
Maybe you use tails everywhere and run what you say through LLMs to rephrase. Might be OK then.
With that use case you either dont have enough anonymity, or will forget the number of identities and leave a lot of traces, like admitting you are in the euro zone.
Not what this is about. It is more like everyone needs to earn stars on their star chart to survive and big techs algorithm decides who gets the stars.
Well, yes, and the argument is that it's bad, because people become less connected, can't freely speak their minds etc. My point is there are other, maybe more powerful reasons why people become less connected and might hesitate speaking their minds. Social media that exposes everything and saves everything forever sure helps though.
No, I don't feel qualified. But it looks to me that there were times when challenging authorities and questioning general opinion was cool, and these times ended before social media kicked in. Maybe urbanization and generally people not staying in one place long enough are to blame, not sure.
That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tech manuals (as opposed to the hardware reference book I had for everything else), and I got lucky and the lab had requisitioned a Model 2, so the screen was nice and they'd gotten the full 640Kb RAM.
I had one. Great little system. Built like a tank, and just as heavy.
Incredibly forward-thinking modular architecture. Keyboard, memory, drives, serial port, parallel port, even the screen could be replaced just by the turn of a lever or a push of a button.
Fantastic keyboard, even by today's laptops standards.
Ate batteries like M&Ms. I almost always kept it plugged in.
At the time, running it off the pair of 720k floppies was fine. I believe there was a hard drive option, but I never saw it.
Its biggest weakness was the screen. There were backlit and CRT options, which were better and you could just pop off and in.
The screen was grayscale CGA, but there was a TSR called SimCGA which would translate, so you could run EGA programs.
Yeah, when I say "nice" about the screen, it is all relative. Mine was nice compared to the original screen on the Model 1.
There are very few pieces of laptop/notebook hardware that I really enjoyed. The 5140 was one of them. I doubt I'd enjoy it now, but 40 years ago I found it just lovely.
Too big to fail is the goal. If the world is powered by openai but it aint making a profit in 2028 they can just put their "were a utility like water" facemask on and get bailed out.
At least in the USA, I think if consumers realized their power bills going up every year are tied to these new data centers, there would be more opposition to data centers going up politically.
https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-a...
I don't know if the electricity markets work differently in other countries.
The US needs sufficient energy surplus to power industry. US energy production has been essentially flat for the past 25 years and the country has forgot how to bring new capacity online. Chinese energy production is up over 6x over the same period. China has more clean energy generation capacity today than their entire capacity a little over a decade ago.
Instead of panicking about data center electricity usage we need to be worrying about getting back to a state where we regularly bring new (clean) generation capacity online.
Taxpayers subsidize data centers in many other ways. These are prestige projects for politicians, so they often get long-term tax breaks and other preferential treatment.
I think it's part vanity, part a misunderstanding about the economic benefits of a datacenter (which are nearly nil, as they employ very few people and produce nothing for the local market), and part just a desire to score brownie points with wealthy corporations, which might mean donations, campaign support, or other perks for the politician who makes it happen.
That's not the main problem. That's the convenient scapegoat so we don't get mad about the real problem. Power bills have been going up for years. We're just not good at generating and serving sufficient energy. Our grid sucks, our utilities suck and can do whatever they want, and we can't build anything. And the grid problems get worse as we add renewables as they have to manage more complex generation profiles. (I'm all for renewables, love solar.)
The power bill going up is because the US, and the West in general, bet on renewables and a low energy future.
Neither of those things turn out to be a good fit for the new economy. The only thing left for people who derided nuclear for the last 40 years is to hope this is a bubble that sends us back to the 17th century when it pops. Anything else means we have to invest trillions in nuclear right now.
Moore's law is dead. The only way to increase compute is to increase the power we feed to computers. AI is just the shiniest example. Everything else will follow suit until electricity costs increase enough that it doesn't make sense to throw any more computation at it.
Any country that doesn't have energy to spare will be in the position of countries which didn't have food to support armies before the industrial revolution.
Interesting point. I can see this could turn out to be true.
If we needed, for example, 1000 TWH to power AI for a huge drone swarm but could not do it while China could, this would be problematic.
It requires a future where MAD with nuclear weapons is obsolete though, with some futuristic new missile defense tech. I don't see that happening until some currently unknown physics makes it possible.
Both parties like it better because it turns the electricity market into another casino that lets you take billions from the parts of the economy that do things.
I worked as a quant in the electric market. There wasn't a single dataset I saw where more renewables resulted in lower total costs for consumers.
The amount of money being invested in AI should've been invested into nuclear, both fusion and fission. The AI bubble will burst, but the energy bubble never bursts.
