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Comment Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Score 2) 68

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is (or at least use to be) well known in teaching circles. That is, if you call out a child for being a certain way they will often change their behaviour to make that come true, whether positive or negative. It's interesting that the same thing seems true for AI models.

Comment Re:liquid-immersion cooling with radiators (Score 4, Insightful) 110

Evaporative chillers are not necessary to cool a data center, certainly not in Michigan. We chill data centers in Arizona with no water usage at all. The data center designers / owners are just being cheap. Sure, if you can get the local municipality to give you water you can use that to lower your costs and increase your efficiency. But it's not necessary. All our data centers use 100% renewable power (if not available then we purchase credits), and we cool with air chillers, and despite these additional costs we're certainly not going bankrupt or being left with unsold capacity.

It's (as always) about the money. The fact that they are going ahead with the project anyway tells me that they will just switch to air chillers.

To directly respond to your comment (which is spot-on), a new facility being stood up for LANL is likely to be direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Generally we don't do full immersion because of the costs and complexity (a modern AI 52U rack is pushing 5000lbs now and fully immersing it will put additional structural strain on the slab floor), but the technology to distribute chilled water from the facility through CDUs (coolant distribution units) to manifolds in the racks and then directly to the chips needing to be cooled is finally getting mature.

Comment Re:Seems like a waste of time and money (Score 2) 66

About 40 years ago a friend of mine stated that this problem had been solved and that slow motion photography proved that the cat used its tail to right itself. I actually had a tailless cat nearby (lost it in an accident with a car) which I retrieved, held out in front of him about two feet off the ground, and let go. It landed on its feet.

What's curious is how long this has been "studied" and how many different theories there have been!

Comment "bright as a full moon" (Score 3, Insightful) 80

You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.

(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.

(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.

Comment Backlog (Score 4, Informative) 17

I can't speak to all of the areas that contribute to AI backlog (like capital allocation, systems integration, networking availability, etc). But from a data centre standpoint it is a real struggle. The general timeline to get from requirements to signature on a data centre lease is about three months if all goes well (assuming you are not self-performing). Once that is signed a DC project takes about two years from conception to RFS (ready-for-service) where you can start rolling in racks. A LOT goes into that timeframe: Ordering LLE (Long-Lead Equipment (generators have a 24+ month lead time right now)), securing permits, securing power, securing a EOR (Engineer of Record) and getting the design done, land preparation, construction crews and materials, etc.

And that is all just to get a "powered shell": what we call a building with at least two diverse sources of utility power, gens, transformers, power switch gear, static UPSs (if they are being used), chillers, pumps and piping, etc. You still can't roll in racks until you have a fit-out design (PDUs, RPPs, whips, busway, FWUs (Fan Wall Units) or CRAHs (Computer Room Air Handlers), temp and humidity sensors, etc. It takes about a YEAR from the time you get the fit-out design to the time when you can roll in racks (but it is possible to line up fit-out works with RFS if you get the design early enough).

Everybody is looking for some creative solutions to speed things up, but data centre deployments are complex (I deal with well over 1000 individual requirements per project) and there are a lot of supply chain constraints. Most of the hyperscalers are juggling 20+ simultaneous projects, it's burning people out and there is a lot of churn in the business (making it worse).

Comment This Just In (Score 2) 83

The Trump administration just pushed out the official who's unit banned Chinese vehicles.

"Jan 23 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has pushed out a Commerce Department official whose office effectively barred nearly all Chinese cars from the U.S. market for national security reasons, according to people familiar with the matter."

"The sources said that, had she not resigned, Cannon would have been reassigned, and that the new administration plans to put a political appointee in the post. Her last day is expected to be February 20, two people said."

Why this is happening is anyone's guess.

Comment Wrong Name (Score 5, Insightful) 289

It's almost as if we shouldn't have included "intelligence" in the actual fucking name. But once again our language has been co-opted by marketing BS and now here we are trying to set the record straight so people aren't confused or deceived.

Comment Grand Cultural Errors (Score 1) 259

As early as the 1950s, critics of the establishment's public education system said its main purpose was to produce a contented and functional workforce. And they were right. They were so right that even they themselves did not understand the full implications: they were so right that it ultimately made them wrong. And then they won, and we are facing the consequences. Not just since 2013: Arne Duncan was indeed an unmitigated disaster for American education, but much of the problem is older than him. And no one is willing to admit that what came before worked better.

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