Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal” - Pablo Picasso

I believe the classic line between copying and synthesis is taking from three artists or more.

The author is allowed to not give a flying fig about that. Or anything else.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Right. Which makes Kisai's dismissal of the problem a waste of breath.

It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.

>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal

Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.

Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.

Again, you were either eleven or you were living under a rock if you hadn't heard of the Transformers. Cuz if you had heard of it, you'd have known it was for kids and adolescents, and the female actress was there to keep the dads interested.

And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.

OK, so explain how you had supposedly never heard of the Transformers? They've been around since 1984.

I don't understand the nature of your comment. Are you confirming that you were 11 or 12 at the time?

Hint: Have you checked my /. ID?

Never sounded so good.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. They fit more of them in the same 2 dimensional area by using layers. The layers are the Z dimension. The thermals are an interesting question.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. It's standard in the field to market the next chip generation as a smaller size when they mean equivalent to the new size. In this case the transistors are stacked vertically so looking down you get layers X areal density of the 2 dimensional surface. We don't do this with flash stacks, which now have up to 321 layers and are mapped to 1000+.

The angstrom scale business is marketing fluff to make the density increase understandable to consumers. But this is one of the developments leveraging the Z dimension that are legitimate progress. The Z dimension gives more than just the same chip folded like origami. The net distance traveled by a signal in a cycle can be reduced, which yields massive improvement in performance without additional cost of power/heat.