Comment Re:The "data center" hot topic... (Score 1) 33
What are these things you call books?
They're things you find in a place called a liiiiiii-brary.
What are these things you call books?
They're things you find in a place called a liiiiiii-brary.
The need for more data centers is questionable. If all this AI growth turns the corner and companies decide much of it was just overblown hype? Then those data centers will quickly wind back down again.
In the worst case, they'll add interior walls (and maybe add some windows to the exterior walls), and resell it as office space, residential space, factory space, retail distribution space, or even a community library. After all, floors built to support racks of equipment should handle the weight and distribution of stacks of books without breaking a sweat.
So the construction might be overkill for what they eventually get used for, but it's not like a newly built, solid building isn't going to find a use. Maybe a quarter of the effort is wasted? Just guessing.
Hawaiian eruption last a long time and the lava flows persist for years.
Your effusive eruptions last on average no longer than our effusive eruptions. The fact that Iceland also has phreatic eruptions doesn't change the fact that most of ours are effusive basalt, just like yours, with corresponding eruptive dynamics. Also, FYI, for a given total effusion volume, slow eruptions are easier to divert. Diversion is much more challenging when an equivalent volume of lava is effused in a short period of time. And it's not like you have vastly larger average lava flows than we do. The largest lava flow on Earth in the Holocene (modern era) is in Iceland (the THjórsárhraun - 900km2, 25km3, 70km underground travel followed by 130-140km on the surface). For comparison, Hawaii's largest holocene flow is the Ailaau Flow at 430km2, 4-5km3, and 40km.
If we want to limit to more recent flows (since Ailaau was fairly recent, in case you think Iceland stopped having big eruptions), Iceland's biggest *after* Alia'au was Laki (1783–1784 AD), at 600km2, 15km3, and 80km. It lasted for 8 months to 2 years, depending on whether you count the concurrent Grímsvötn eruption as part of it. So much gas was released from that huge volume of lava that despite us being nearly arctic (polar volcanoes have much lower near-term climate impacts than equatorial volcanoes), it caused a winter so severe that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and ice was seen floating in the Gulf of Mexico.
We simply get bigger effusive eruptions than you, full stop. Not all eruptions, of course, both of us have a huge variance in eruption scales and dynamics. But trying to claim ours are somehow "easier" is just not in line with the facts. Also, Hawaiian eruptions tend to occur on terrain that slopes significantly more consistently toward the sea, aka where you want to divert lava toward; on flatter or less-consistently-angled terrain, lava "piles up" more and makes it easier to overtop berms.
There is a practical side that it is easier to move people and build coffee shacks
I'm not talking about "coffee shacks", I'm talking about whole communities and beloved places. In particular, I'm thinking about the 2018 Lower Puna eruption. Of course the homes near the vents in Leilani Estates were doomed, but there is absolutely NO reason why you should have lost anywhere close to as much as you did so far from the vents. Losing Kapoho Bay for example was simply cultural fatalism. I watched a person crying on the news saying she didn't understand why Pele chose to take such a beautiful place. It's not Pele who took it, it's your insane resistance against doing anything to protect yourselves. That was one of the easiest possible flows to divert. Most of the lava fronts moved at a crawl, you had warning long in advance of the eruption and a very slow eruptive rampup (didn't really take off until June), and you had a steep slope to the south into unpopulated areas you could have easily diverted it down. Losing all that was a choice.
"Oh, we can't!" is just an excuse for your fatalism that gives you an excuse to not put forth the effort to actually do it. It's not the 1940s anymore, we're not chucking surplus WWII bombs at lava tubes anymore. Lava diversion is a science and is routinely effectively done. There are limits, but you were nowhere near said limits for sites far from the vents. There are costs, but they are nowhere near the costs that you paid by refusing to act.
Easy to read "Prop 13 (1978)" between the lines, which is California specific. IIRC[citation needed], Prop 19 (2020) while eliminating inheriting the assessed value (Prop 58 (1986)) make it possible to transfer the assessed value to another property statewide (previously available only where individual counties had made agreements). Why Modoc isn't being bought up in order to transfer the assessments to Beverley Hills is a mystery.
The main impact of prop 19 is making it possible for the elderly to not be forced to move to another state if they decide to downgrade to a smaller home. It likely has minimal impact on people's ability to move closer to their jobs, because it is limited to people 55 and older, so less than a quarter of California's workforce qualifies for transferring the cost basis to a new property.
More to the point, the people most likely to change jobs are younger workers, and none of them qualify.
As for Modoc to Beverly Hills, the difference in market value is added to your assessment. So if you bought a $50,000 home in the middle of nowhere that has appreciated to $300,000, and you trade up to a $3 million home, your new tax basis value is $2.75 million ($3 million minus $300k plus $50k). So it really doesn't make much difference in that case, practically speaking.
Which doesn't really work as users routine confuse their accounts and upload files to the wrong account, and then confusion ensues when files are stored partially on a work account and on a personal account.
And that's when the corporate systems are configured to warn if you try to share something with or from the wrong account, and you shame the user into doing it right. Besides, this is usually only a problem for brand new users. Once you have a bunch of files uploaded to both accounts, you're not going to suddenly see the files from your personal account, and think, "Oh, this is where my work stuff goes".
It's only confusing if you have access to the same files from both accounts. And then, yeah, you'll get confused about which account is editing the file, but it's not as if it really matters in that situation.
If Apple wasn't able to keep their critical employees from jumping ship, then that's really on Apple for not recognizing or being willing to retain their employees at market price.
And now, by suing a bunch of former employees, they're giving employees who might be thinking about jumping ship a reason to pause. Whether Apple wins or loses the lawsuit, Apple wins.
So the UK is doing a great disservice to citizens of all countries, not just their own, by pushing on this.
They know what they are doing. The UK government has never believed in privacy rights. They know they're doing a disservice to everyone. They don't care.
And the only rational answer is to cut them off. No more iCloud storage for anyone residing in the UK. And for anyone else, immediate denial of access from the minute you set foot in that country to the minute you leave. This is the only reasonable option.
E2EE is really a dog and pony show, not real math, because the apps we install are all opaque and built by opaque build systems we inherently trust, whose vendors can insert a new backdoor any time they want.
And ultimately, this is the reason why Cloud storage shouldn't even exist. The minute you depend on someone else for storage, you can't completely 100% guarantee that your data is not in someone else's hands. If you store it on hardware you own, not built by the company that sold the backup software, then people will be able to verify that data is getting pushed to only a single destination, and if they started cheating and sending it to two different services, folks would likely notice. It's not perfect, but it makes back doors a lot harder to pull off without detection.
We need Time Machine for iOS, backing up over encrypted SMB to servers on our home network that we control. Fix that gap, and none of this matters anymore.
I take native Hawaiian religious objections seriously. These are people who take a fatalistic "Pele will take what she wants, it's pointless to try to stop her" attitude toward lava flows running over their houses that seems utterly insane here in Iceland. We'll buy up every available water pump on the international market and walk on active-flowing lava fields to save a harbour for a couple thousand people. We'll keep running tourist sites right next to a volcano that erupts every couple months by building multi-story-high berms around it with giant bulldozers and cooling anything that tries to overtop to make the berms even higher. And it totally works . But Hawaiians will sit back and watch incredibly slow-flowing flows with easy diversion paths take out everything they hold dear. At best they'll point to some primitive failed attempts in like the 1940s as a reason to not try, but then when pressed, it often comes back to: "Pele will take what she wants to take."
Another example: geothermal drilling on the Big Island. Massive protests. Massive resistance, way beyond the token NIMBY resistance here. Meanwhile Hawaii continues to generate most of its electricity from oil, at great cost. Hawaii is the only other place (outside of Iceland) to have accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. In Hawaii they treated it as a major incident and immediately shut down the well. When we did it? Our reaction was, "WOW, we can produce REALLY hot steam from THIS well!", made it into a production well, and started planning to drill more.
I guess one major difference here is that in the early Icelandic cosmology, volcanoes weren't the product of a high-ranking creator goddess, but rather, Surtr, who was practically a demon and was fated to destroy the world. It's good to resist Surtr!
At least for me and many others I spoke to.
Go and use books to train AI.
Just don't fucking destroy them afterwards! Many of these are out of print, impossible to replace! How much of a douchebag do you have to be to destroy them ?
Except his complaint is not.
Yes, it literally was. The main public complaint of the weavers was that they spent their entire life learning their art, and then their bosses come in with a machine that they teach to replicate the patterns that they developed, churn out cheap "slop" versions of them, and fire them.
And here we're talking about profits, despite their huge scaleup expenditure. Theirs and OpenAI's margins on serving inference are ~40%.
It's almost impossible for a company undergoing a massive scaleup rate to turn a profit, let alone growing 10X annualized for 3 1/2 years running, but Anthropic pulled it off.
No matter what the humidity, at 42.5 degrees you are cooked. It's only going to get worse too.
Apple will keep jacking up prices too, due to AI taking all the RAM and flash.
But isn't this a massive upheaval and cost for you? Switching from managing Chromebooks to Macbooks, switching software suites, dealing with all the different IT problems that arise from MacOS etc?
Unix soit qui mal y pense [Unix to him who evil thinks?]