Really? You must be in BFE or something.

Here where I am - somewhere in South Florida - FPL has consistently jacked up our rates, for a variety of stated reasons - including feeding the new colos.

Your experience != everyone else's.

My power bill has increased by about 20% DESPITE switching to LED lighting, which reduced my light draw from about 700w to maybe 50w for the whole house minus home cine and bathroom.

My power bill has increased DESPITE setting higher aircon temps.

So yes -- datacenters are absolutely jacking up rates, and have completely made irrelevant the change to LED.

I want my tungsten lamps back. A pox on the next son of a bitch who mandates a switch to a "higher efficiency" light, only see all those gains in efficiency wiped out by a much bigger power user.

The small drop in demand from going to LED is gone. Now, we have a massive increase in demand, supposedly solely to AI.

RAM, and other related prices, through the roof.

Happy, yet, tech bros? Not only did your greed jack up the global demand for electricity, now your insatiable thirst for cash and power make it so hardware's that much more expensive.

We abandoned our beloved tungsten, for this?

Do this to me, and I'll sue. I don't care for what -- the usual bullshit of "emotional damage" and "mental anguish" and all that.

I encourage every person erroneously flagged to do so. The only thing that hurts corporations is a hit on the wallet -- so hit their wallet, hard, and often.

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

I'm not amused by it. The human on the other end is hoping the "AI" chatbot will give them results stripped of all SEO bullshit.

This alters that behavior. The chatbot will be unduly influenced by the ad, and the user will be unaware of this influence.

The answer is obvious: Online advertisement must die.

It's hard to parse sentences some of the words are.

Do not the cat.

Models and meteorologists want a *vertical* sample of the atmosphere. The ideal sensor would not bend, deflect, or drift off with the winds aloft. Balloons do a *lot* of drifting.

The soundings returned by the balloons are all skewed to some degree or another.

Every time you wash your car, hose off the underside too, then go for a long-ish drive to dry it all out.

Ziebart is still a thing.

Waxing the undercarriage is also still a thing, and now there's even better - silica coatings, ceramic coatings.

You do'nt get a car to last by being a passive customer, you get one to last by being an active steward.

And yes I've lived in rust belt. In snow country where sand and salt are used. I've worked on machinery that required the ultimate persuader - the blue wrench. (the torch.)

Today I live in sunny south florida, the car is garaged since day 1, and I still hose off the undercarriage at every wash as if I still was in snow country.

For every risk, there's an action you can take to reduce / eliminate that risk. in cars it's keeping it clean, on top and under the car, too.

I wouldn't know - my UI is toggle switches, rockers, rotary controls, levers.

The few times i've had to drive a "new" vehicle with touch-everything, they've all been uniformly terrible.

And I can't stand Tesla build quality. Have a co-worker with an S. It's mid-70's Detroit build quality. Loose trim, things that don't line up, panel gaps that aren't perfect, etc etc.

I'm keeping my current wheels until death do us part.

if the wheels fall off I put em back on again.

Light, stickshift, simple, joyful. No watchful eye. No connection to any network. It does have a black box that can be played back tho.

But today's cars? An affront to privacy, an affront to the person who enjoys driving, an affront to basic decency.

Maintain your old cars, folks - they don't make 'em like they used to now, and this time is far worse than prior shockwaves.

Stuff like this makes the federally-mandated screen seem downright tame.

...you could have a jar where you put, say, $20 a week. Or $10.

Even if you have a device now.

Let that jar fill. In 2 or 3 or 4 years, when you need a new phone, there'll be enough in that jar to buy that new phone outright without having to finance.

I understand if you can't do it the very first time. Fine. Finance that first phone. But immediately start on the saving $10-20 a week, for years.

You'll break the cycle, and it is liberating

(jar is metaphorical. You could open a savings account that you don't touch for anything except phones. And direct-deposit a tiny slice of your paycheck into it, and forget it exists until new phone time.)

Try it.

I've kept most formats, but abandoned tape in all formats.

I LP, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and stream.

And rip.

Ripping replaced my tape deck. Make my own "mixtapes" only now they're playlists. I rip vinyl to MP3 like I use dto make tapes for my car or walkman.

Streaming is for Suckers, and for Convenience.

Physical is permanent (to some definition of "permanent")

I just bought my first paper manga in a while, after reading the digital. It's so good it's no shame to double-dip this one, get the author her 100 yen per book.

I love Media OCD's tagline: You'll own nothing and be happy -- only the "nothing" is crossed out, and "everything" is gratified in.

He is literally charging for insider trading knowledge. And no one in the US feels like stopping it. It says everything about the state of what is laughably called US democracy now, because its judiciary, and its legislature are flaccid and supine.

Trump has basically pulled his pants down and curled an enormous figurative shit out on the White House lawns. After already literally bulldozing and wrecking them with his low-rent circus, of course.

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.

Brother, at least for now, doesn't do this. And that's what I use at the house.