You could even pitch it as a ground-based satellite You could make a box that has compute, batteries, starlink and a few acres of solar panels. Pack the whole thing onto a semi truck and you could plonk it down anywhere there's available land. There are loads of places in the US where you could do that, and I think most the anti-datacenter crowd would be placated if the facility didn't need water and generated its own clean energy.

That seems like the obvious compromise. You can drop POTS when you have FTTH provisioned to an address

GPT-OSS-20B gives me 34 tokens/sec on a 4 yr old gaming laptop with a 3080 RTX - smaller models come in faster still.

But that's an externalized cost - the business isn't paying it and the homeowner isn't directly paying it either. So it's really a win-win.

It would be interesting if you could bring it into your basement in the winter and heat your house for free - that does start to make a little more sense.

tbf that's kind of the definition of a good salesman!

I suspect it forces them to consider that you could apply that same logic to the US if gas prices were to rise. The country has cheap ubiquitous gasoline and electricity, but one of them is a lot more prone to market shocks

But a lot of the time these companies do already run some systems.

My employer runs mostly it's own in-house coded system that's been built over 25 years. I'm effectively one of two developers maintaining it and for a long time that was patching critical bugs and adding a few key features each year. I had the question raised a year ago if we could added asset tracking capabilities - since we already had records for employees and a location based inventory system it seemed like a really natural fit but we didn't have the resources to develop it so operations picked some random saas project and i think it works fine.

However if someone brought me that question today, i could spend 30 minutes and outline a really solid project definition for claude and have it back the next morning. It's still a lot more challenging to get claude to work on the highly specialized tasks that are deeply tied to our data but for cloning a $10/user/month saas app, it really hits the ball out of the park.

They are going to have a hard time expanding into scotland https://www.urbandictionary.co...

Also this is pretty rational government behavior. You've got a country that produces copious green energy (and has the potential for much more) and where oil is expensive. It's exactly the right thing to do.

There are lots of them in Colorado. Here's a report from Kremmling, CO which is one of the coldest places in the state which has been running electric buses for years.

From the story "A lot of the winter days will start off 20 or 30 below zero and bus drivers say at those temperatures, it's hard to get diesel buses running, but their electric buses are ready to roll right out the door." also they note that they have a significantly lower operating cost than diesel.

Certainly you have to design EVs to work well in the cold, and they definitely have reduced range which you have to plan for. But this sounds more like a case of in-ept government choosing the wrong vehicles and not any particular issue with EVs.

> Now would I want to do this for salary and long term, no....but often that old saying "make hay while the sun is shining " is apt advice!!

Yeah I'd have jumped at that when i was younger. If there was a chance to pull in several times my then-salary (+stock options i presume) by working double the hours then I'd totally do it. Honestly at 45 I'd probably still do it for a year for triple my current salary - that'd be enough to pay off my mortgage.

I have my doubts about the efficiency of it all - in the rare instances where I've put in a 70 hour week I notice the precipitous drop in my productivity much about 50, but as the employee that wouldn't be my problem.

It also means that government bureaucrats are effectively only ever negotiating with giant corporations like Oracle and PwC. While I don't buy into the notion that everyone that works in government is inept, you effectively have someone who has little experience negotiating a technical deliverable up against a corporate who has decades of experience of protecting themselves and profiting from scope creep.

Mathematical work is a outlier in that virtually all of it can be tested and rigorously proved using other mechanisms. There really isn't much need to "trust" the LLM

I suppose it's challenged by defining a dishwasher cycle (maybe an average power draw over 100W for 30 minutes on that circuit) and then figuring out when i last bought them and the size of that pack. Then it's one thing it work on Amazon, but it should really scrape everywhere that can deliver. It's totally something I could build since i'm tech savvy, but it's not worth me investing a day of my time to save on dishwasher tabs. But being able to describe an agent in plaintext and have it figure out all the pieces - that could be really useful. Though yeah, why would visa have to be involved - that part makes no sense. I think they recognize how putting this in the hands of end users will be massively lucrative for OpenAI and don't want their own shareholders to feel left out.

If i can control it, then i think it'd be great. Like I'll sometimes buy dishwasher tablets on Amazon - the price has to be less per tablet than costco, and we need to be most of the way through the current box. An AI could in theory be on top of that - and I'd be totally happy to offload that labor. In theory that was kind of the dream of "subscribe and save" but it's so unpredictable and I miss so many of the "your subscription went up by $19 but you're still getting the best price!" emails that I pretty much gave up on it.