If they had better judgement they'd agree to a compromise or split instead of have a pettiness contest in public.

I noticed that it was white men who drank beer that attracted the most mosquitos.

Obviously there were not many - and it might have been rarity value.

Or perhaps no one had told them about mosquito coils.

You're describing the situation in places where demand doesn't exceed capacity. I'm describing how any sane person running an electrical utility would bill things in a place where a company wants to put in a data center that exceeds available capacity. They'll hit them with capacity charges based on their usage during peak demand periods, or they'll make them pay for capacity improvements as part of the connection charge, or both.

And the "or they will go somewhere that will" part shouldn't really be a concern. They want to build there. The generating capacity isn't adequate. They either pay whatever fees are necessary to ensure the stability of the grid or they don't build. If that cause them to build somewhere else where adequate capacity exists, that's also fine.

— Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Dane-geld, Stanzas 5-6

There is a good reason that law "law enforcement agencies around the world" advise again paying cyber criminals. And it isn't because law enforcement is dumb, or that they like seeing you getting your data stolen.

Given that big companies have already made it clear that they think AI will let them do the same work with fewer people, and given that using AI costs the company a lot in terms of compute resources, it seems intuitively obvious that the only reason execs would want to encourage more AI use is to find out what jobs can easily have their headcount reduced by more use of AI.

The people using the most tokens are the ones for whom more of their jobs can be most easily automated. This is not, IMO, a positive sign for the long-term survival of that particular job role. The only rational response is to use AI just enough to show a speed-up, assuming the speed-up actually happens at all, but not enough to be high up on the chart of AI users. Using it way more than that seems self-defeating.

I remember perhaps 20 years ago, some futurists were predicting that most of the time we'd interact with agents. That we'd each have our own personal assistant to curate and present us the information we need. This particular interview (sorry, I don't remember who it was) used the example that an agent would put together your daily newspaper specifically for you from multiple sources. I thought it seemed like kind of a stupid idea...

Yeah, that was confusing. But Kenya's president is almost certainly wrong. Here's why:

1. It is not numerically correct, assuming the numbers in the summary are accurate. The country has a surplus adequate to power the data center at somewhere around half to three-quarters capacity even at peak power use, and probably at full capacity for 99 days out of 100. So even if they built it at full capacity right off the bat and did nothing else, you'd still only lose power to a small fraction of Kenya occasionally.

2. They're not building it at full capacity. They're building a small data center at first, then building it up over time as more generating capacity comes online.

3. They're a reliable customer of power. That means that they will alway pay the bill, even if it is high. The grid operators and generation plant operators can charge them a huge premium for bulk power, then use that extra revenue to build more power plants. By the time the data center is running at full capacity, they could have more than enough power to power it.

4. Even if that extra investment in production doesn't happen, they can just refuse to provide the additional power from the grid. I'm sure Microsoft knows how to do solar + storage by now, and if not, they can pay someone to do it for them who does. Or they can build their own geothermal plant right next to the existing one. Or they can do any number of other things to produce power, like installing an SMR.

5. Nothing inherently prevents them from reducing power usage during peak load periods. Service will get slower, but should gracefully degrade, assuming they're doing it right. Nobody will lose power, realistically speaking.

It is unfortunate that so many people look at these data centers and the current worst-case state of resource availability and conclude wrongly that they are infeasible, but this is a common mistake made by planners, legislators, and members of the general public. They fail to account for how the existence of the data center with its need for resources will trigger the production of facilities to exploit previously unusable resources and make them available, and they fail to recognize that in a true power emergency, they can just turn 90% of it off and shift the load to other data centers.

But the reality of the matter is that nobody is going to build a gigawatt of additional power capacity in Kenya unless the government or some private company that needs power pays them to do it. They already have a 23 to 30% surplus compared with their worst-case power consumption. That means that adding more production will just drive power prices down, so they'll get less money for the power they produce.

But as soon as someone like Microsoft starts needing enough power to pull those margins down, suddenly additional capacity becomes economically feasible, and you'll see either existing power companies expanding or new power companies entering the market. And the existence of an all-but-guaranteed higher future demand is the key to making that happen. Without the data center being approved, that motive to expand does not exist, and the grid will likely stay at or near its currently levels unless the government forces the hand of the market by paying someone to build more generating capacity.

RealID is so important to security, it can't be used to prove you are a U.S. citizen. So says DHS, the people administering the RealID program.

Basically the same point I raised in an earlier discussion of this... What to call this? A leveraged buyout of the imagination?

However it makes about as much sense as most merger shenanigans and I would approve if at least one of the side effects was that eBay disappeared.

But I want to find a recursive joke somewhere around here... Something about eBay auctions/sales of merger/acquisitions/divestitures?

MS could be far more evil than they are, given their power and market-share. At least Satya is the devil we know.

Lying to the Board and lying to the public are different things.

What Digg and others don't realize is that websites will be dead in 10 years. At least sites that people regularly visit for content. Nobody will visit them directly. Everything will be curated behind app stores and AI will present summaries. Even YouTube isn't safe.

Why dig a ditch at all if there are no humans around to receive the benefits of it? I REALLY don't think anyone fully thought this through. Let's say that I and a few others receive the full benefits of AI. I don't even like those others, I prefer different types of people... and yet they no longer exist. They had no money for food and shelter and just died off. So I go down to the dance club to meet new people, but there is nobody there. They all died from exposure and starvation.

So I go home and turn on the TV... but all I see is static. There is nobody to make new shows or provide the news. There are no more sports teams to watch. It is just me, 20 thousand other people like me, and none of us like each other and none of want to or are capable of creating music, fine art, etc.

I have spent my entire life thinking other people are Hell... but I found out, too late, that other people make heaven possible.

Yeah, right.