But does a border search of a US Citizen have such standing as a court order or warrant? What was the basis of the request to inspect the device-- was there information that he could be a child pornographer, or was he just on a watch list because of his occupation?

Can a prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was wiped with a duress password with the intent of hiding criminal activity, or maybe it was wiped in advance? Can the prosecution get a court warrant to search the individual's home based solely on the wiped device?

I think there are a few improtant subtleties to it. Namely that Nvidia is providing a [loan] guarantee and not an actual loan. It is also unclear if this guarantee is on the data center, or for the power purchase agreement. So, when OpenAI can't pay for whatever it is, Nvidia is responsible for payments. Depending on the terms of the deal, the risk could actually be quite low for Nvidia. Something similar goes for financing chips with a >300% margin-- payments after the a year or so are pure profit.

It sounds like the guarantee is on a PPA and not data center build based on the summary. That is a pretty important distinction as a PPA is a very different kind of risk than a compute facility (especially given grid shortfalls for projected growth).

So as I understand it, current AI models need about two orders of magnitude efficiency improvement to be sustainable as a business. You burst the bubble if usage growth doesn't exceed roughly infrastructure growth divided by efficiency improvement-- flat usage means a 10x growth in infrastructure requires a 10x efficiency improvement. There is some fudge factor to cover sunk costs, but I'm not sure how meaningful that is as you talk about orders of magnitude.

Most of what AI is useful for today could be done more efficiently with small models, and the idea of AGI is a long long time away despite what true believers hold as gospel. That, from my limited understanding is where most of the token spend is today-- the money could easily be starved in that context.

Personally I would not want to live within 3 miles of the perimeter of a data center, but the summary really mixes up issues. On-site generation, presumably around a >300MW scale, should be regulated as a power plant from an environmental perspective. Diesel generators are hopefully just a backup, and at 80 hours of operation per year I would not stress about them myself. It really sounds like they shopped regulators in this case.

Baggage automation isn't too hard with random sized/shaped objects; you will have a breakage rate higher than humans though. Really though, containerized bag holds are an easier solution that doesn't require (but permits) automation.

The modern carry-on problem is that you can't check things with batteries in them.

A friend was a flight attendant on the recent suicide-by-aircraft-engine-injestion incident. People don't listen; they take videos, they grab their rollerboards and everything else, they do stupid things (and apparently some flight attendants freeze up and forget to open their door). Just to throw it out there, the real reason you should not take a bag with you is it will greatly increase the risk of injury as you evacuate. Someone at the bottom of the slide is supposed to help you stop-- if you take them out with your baggage that is much less likely to happen. If it is important, have it on your body at least for taxi, takeoff, and landing.

Safety briefings really need to change. They need to be compact, concise, and focused on the high risk events. They don't need to be comedy, they can't be advertisements, and they need to have a system to make it permanent memory for people that do fly a lot, kind of like education.

Yeah, I knew what he meant, but has Sodium really passed the gauntlet yet? I thought it worked well at grid scale but was still likely 5+ years out for residential/small commercial scale. There have been a number of false starts with Sodium over the years-- molten salt, SoNic, and others, but I thought the challenge with current generation was density and cycle life.

Dude... any thoughts where the L-F-P comes from? LiFe are the first two letters, and Phosphate is PO4.

Doesn't work like that. Once a 48_hour outage is considered "normal" you are not far from Cuba's situation. The grid should be designed at about 4-5 9's-- 5-45 minutes of average customer downtime per year over its service life. You still end up with a bathtub curve though where you might see 3 9's at the beginning and end, and 6 9's for the rest.

You can hit the problem from a MTBF or MTTR perspective; the problem in the US is we have let both suffer.

The Thailand number is suspect to me; while provincial outages were common, I do remember outages in the capital as well. Maybe it has gotten better over the years.

The US I can speak much better about. We have significantly worse reliability than we should. Both overhead and underground infrastructure is significantly less robust than it should be, and urban vs rural doesn't seem to make a huge difference. An excavator took out about 8 blocks of power for 48 hours at my old office, which was a capstone to years of unreliable service. That was the result of consolidating and overloading systems partly due to roadwork and partly due to growth in the area. "Excusable", but very poor planning. My current home has significant outages frequently. The primary driver here is an undersized right-of-way for the utility leading to excessive spacing between poles, and tree encroachment, and ultimately underinvestment over the past 30 years.

In Sweden they are doing a wholesale grid replacement in places; infrastructure installed in the 60's is obsolete so they now are putting in a whole new medium voltage network, and even replacing low voltage service laterals in many cases. I can't imagine projects like that ever being undertaken in the US, beyond small isolated areas.

If they were using a scoring sheet that would be obvious, but it is much harder to prove with machine learning.

The employees have to prove that their protected status was targeted to win, and that is a pretty tough sell IMO. It seems like the protected status was more of a side effect of "performance."

Most modern data centers look and behave more like a power plant or large industrial facility. When they are installed at appropriate locations with reasonable setbacks from neighbors, and basic sound attenuation strategies they can be fine. When they use outside air cooling with no silencers then it can be quite miserable at scale. Older data centers simply didn't have the density to be as big of a nuisance.

I compare it to an industrial feedlot. It shapes the city for miles outside its perimeter. Most of the benefits don't go to the people that are affected. There really is no way for it to be a good neighbor no matter how hard they try to distract people.

Pure accounting and auditing are, as is tax preparation. But most business/cost accounting is much more complex which makes it more difficult.