Cryptocurrency does have some valuable uses, outside brokerages anyway. You can transfer money into or out of countries bypassing their banks and laws, and even international agreements. It enables money laundering, and allows for payments to and from criminal organizations. Those right there are very sound business cases that won’t be going away and provide strong underpinning of its value, though which token is self reinforcing and needs critical mass so it’s only something like bitcoin and maybe a few others. It’s also more convenient than tulip bulbs for speculation.

Batteries that are cost effective largely solve the intermittent renewable problem. Lithium batteries aren’t even suited to anything more than very short term storage of minutes to a few hours, lithium was developed for energy and power density, able to sustain vibration and impacts without damage (such as being dropped without dents), and the cost can be relatively high as these are mobile device requirements like for laptops, power tools, and EV.

Grid storage is almost diametrically opposed. Energy and power density almost don’t matter at all, if a lithium battery needs to be a ten foot cube, something 100 times less dense mass or power wise is only 46 feet. They can be extremely fragile, and not work under vibration or movement. Low cycle cost lifetime is extremely important. It’s also much more important to have a high efficiency of discharge energy to charge energy. So really lithiums only make sense in niche cases and it’s why pumped hydro is still the vast majority of stored kWh.

The data is from actual use in 2025.

An average text response takes 0.0003 KwH of energy, and 0.1s of server time. That much energy used per 0.1 second is about 10kW. My wording and your complaint was about a single hosting of an image, not thousands or millions. A single hosting of a screenshot uses about 0.0000004 Watt-hours (Wh) per year.

Despite being 15% of all data center usage, AI data centers accounted for 50% of all new electrical demand and are expected to be 70% of all data center growth through 2030. You don’t need kW of energy to store or host an image, but you do to host AI. To put it in a car analogy, it’s like saying republicans hate cars instead of saying EV. You lose a lot when you drop the qualifier like you did.

Republicans, as in the constituents, are largely against data centers as well. All AI and data centers do for them is threaten their jobs, devalue their property, and increase the cost of utilities. Maybe if there was a bit of socialism in giving back there would be a silver lining. But at this rate we are looking at more of a silver ammunition situation.

No, in America the extremely wealthy and well connected have never ever been held responsible for their behavior even once. Well, I guess if you steal from too many other ultra wealthy you might be, but outside of that no.

Was it even updating the information into its training or implementation layers beyond the instance of the agent? I’d say it was burning more natural gas than learning.

Sam Altman belongs in prison for his actions, whether purposeful or negligent.

It took life 3+ billion years, and we might replicate it in 3000 or 5000 years of technological development, but science is barely 2000 years old at the moment. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you can make a computer for the foreseeable future, it will be dependent on humans for everyone’s lifetime reading this, and far beyond. Sure, they could destroy the world, but it’s about a million times more likely by causing resource wars over climate change aggravated by their bottomless consumption before all these nonsense bedtime stories.

Let them spew crap all day, it’s far preferable to encouraging their agents to go on cyber crime sprees to try and drum up investors.

“AI” models like LLM are barely functional in narrow bands of capability mentally, and are hopelessly complex machines that need constant tending to, while taking 10,000x the power and resources a human does. Computers break down frequently, need constant human attention, need something physical to do everything from mine the resources to fabricate base materials, to fabricate base materials into components, then to design and assemble the components and finally the data centers. Factories have some automation, no factory is 100% automated including diagnostic and repair needs.

Humans are self healing, self replicating, insanely efficient (probably pushing the limits of efficiency baked into physics), machines able to adapt, evolve, and are broadly intelligent. The natural technology they are based on is so many thousands of years more advanced at the current exponential rate that they are indistinguishable from magic.

Wake me up when I can pull a chunk off my server, drop it in some hydrocarbons, irradiate it with UV, and have a brand new complete server (with ram and storage), all in a few months.

In the video they explain that many people have open WiFi hotspots by opting in and using the company agreement to get access such as Xfinity. In an apartment building this would be a problem if you want to air gap anything.

Because in business school it’s taught that the price of a product has nothing to do with the cost of a product. It the highest price you can get people to pay for it. Since people pay for gasoline, then that’s the price per mile despite commercial electricity being 3-5x cheaper. Even at home it’s 2.5-3x cheaper on average.

No, this is an amazing advantage for everyone, just maybe not so good for a few people who take the work of millions as their own. The simple fix is to properly subsidize American products, not necessarily even tariffs as they make everything more expensive. Right now cars and vehicles are in an affordability crisis and vastly dropping the price would be amazing for sales. We can easily afford to subsidize companies in a responsible way, it’s money better spent on strategic defense than hundreds of billions into overinflated missile and drone costs that make the military no longer viable in modern warfare.

While it’s true that only 15% - 50% of components or base materials are sourced from foreign sources, only 10-15% of products in general rely solely on American manufacturing. No cars or vehicles are 100% American made. No laptops or computers either. In the case of another world war, we wouldn’t fare anything like the last time where we were far more self sufficient.