A lax regulatory environment and a technology that is outclassed by wind and solar in virtually every single metric except space usage in a country with nothing but space?

Hey what could possibly go wrong?

Really looking forward to having nuclear powered data centers dropped in the middle of my community by finance Bros pretending to be tech Bros...

You ever run a GPU at full bore like that? This isn't like the mining gpus which were intentionally underclocked these are going to be running at full steam.

What I'm saying is they're not going to last. Depreciation is a major problem for these AI data centers.

But that assumes any money ever changes hands. Over and over and over again Elon makes deals that have a long list of requirements he can't meet and gets headlines by pretending he can meet all those requirements and that he will get paid the entire amount being headlined when in practice is shit in the headline is the absolute maximum amount of money he might get paid if absolutely everything works out for him better than any reasonable projections.

What I'm saying is this is most likely bullshit. Something to bump the stock because the guys running Google are going to get in on the SpaceX scam with everyone else who's a billionaire. Meanwhile good luck keeping SpaceX out of your 401k. The way the NASDAQ launch is done it's basically impossible

Keep in mind a lot of these deals turn out to be bullshit. They are contingent on a laundry list of requirements that never seem to all line up and put money in muskrat's pocket. The only thing that seems to put money in his pocket is the US government and our 401k and pension programs. That shits made him a trillionaire.

Meanwhile SpaceX's entire business model is based on creating a super duper ultra AI that dominates everyone's AIs.

I am guessing the point you are getting at is that being a cloud provider isn't going to cover the valuation spacex's facing. I mean it's all well and good to get paid a billion dollars a month and that sounds great until you have to put electricity and water into all those gpus. And that's before we talk about little things like depreciation.

Thanks for the insightful post. Yeah, if this was a practice test for our society on how to handle AGI, I agree we failed it.

As shown by the several of the AI company efforts (including OpenAI transforming into a for-profit), our current socio-economic system with its incentives to race ahead competitively regardless of the risks to society (so, privatizing gains, while socializing costs and risks) may ultimately just be incompatible with ever-more-high technology.

As Bucky Fuller wrote: "Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe."

I think we only have a chance of passing such a test -- whether it is about AGI, nuclear energy, nanotech, biotech, or even just plain old networked computing used by sprawling bureaucracies -- if we appreciate the humorous irony mentioned in my sig: :-)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Even that might not be enough -- but it is the main hope I have to offer.

I have a government for that. I can just have my government do whatever the fuck Google was going to do and then I have more water without greenwashing bullshit.

One of the major reasons you can't afford beef, or at least a good beef, is because we have been in a drought for decades now and it has finally caught up with us on cattle prices. There just isn't enough water especially in Texas to keep all those cattle going so they can be turned into hamburgers.

Water is not an infinite resource. If we had a more functional civilization we could solve a lot of the water problems we have but we don't. So Google lobbying for deregulation and tax cuts so that my government doesn't have the resources to provide water on a consistent basis doesn't help me at all when they offset a little bit of the damage they did from that lobbying.

It is a nice reminder of just how fucking stupid they think we all are though.

At least for that price. The video card in it is roughly equivalent to a 4060 which is okay but for a thousand bucks that's really pushing it.

I really wish we would just shut down all this AI bullshit it's making everyone's lives worse but the people in charge want it and what they say goes. It's funny watching these little communities try to push back against the data centers and then getting their asses handed to them unless it's one of the wealthier communities than somebody just fucked up and didn't realize that.

Somebody ran the numbers and found that most of them are getting put in places with severe water shortages and therefore taking all of what's left of the water. That is of course because of you got a water shortage because of long-standing drought the property values are going to be lower so you're less likely to be able to fight off a data center.

Meanwhile small government conservatives are busy using state governments to force local governments to accept the data centers whether they want it or not. Several States especially Texas have overridden local zoning laws and rulings to force the community to allow the data center and to provide it with the water and electricity.

I guess next to that mess overpriced video game consoles seems a little quaint but it's still infuriating. The handful of things to keep us nerds happy or becoming gradually unobtainable. And of course those small government conservatives are happy to give us somebody to blame that on besides AI slopped devouring all of our opportunities...

That's interesting about the chargers. In the UK we usually don't need a service upgrade, and if changes are needed they are usually free and the responsibility of the supplier. Because the UK is supposed to reach net zero, some work is expected to be done by the electricity supplier, such as "unlooping" (it's a UK thing, was done to save money when copper was scarce after WW2), and fuse/cable upgrades.

Typically an install is in the region of â1,200 here, but you can get it for less with various schemes, sometimes "free" with the car. I had my first one installed on a government scheme that I don't think is running now, but it was free back then, and when I replaced it last year I did the work myself. A bit naughty but if it ever becomes an issue I can get it signed off by an electrician.

I still use pop3 with gmail (TLS) because It makes me feel like no remote server suddenly decides to delete my local mails via imap.
I don't know if that's possible. but imap is a bit obscure to me. So I like the simplicity of POP3.

if it is repairable it is also expandable. So there will for sure be a 3rd party market to add on GPS auto drive and other fancy automatic things and computers.
Which can be added by the farmers if they wish.
And if the addons break (as they always do) the remaining tractor is not affected and can still do its basic task.

Culture wars are absolutely global phenomenon. I have issues with golf courses too especially the private ones. But more importantly the public golf course is at least a public good.

And yeah data center is do guzzle water there are multiple articles about it including ones where forget taking all the water they have caused structural problems with the local ground, not just the groundwater but the ground itself because they pumped so much water out of the ground to use their damn data centers.

Data centers don't have to use all that water but it's marginally more profitable to do so so they do. We could pass laws but well people are busy freaking out over culture War bullshit.

The reason you don't think it's a global problem is because you don't understand the different cultures have different culture or bullshit so you don't see it happening. But it's the same trick everywhere

Hmm, I was under the impression that the US regulator wasn't entirely useless, and in fact did force car companies to do recalls at great expense. Has that changed or was it never the case?

Surely if they had such a serious flaw they would have been replaced already. As I recall, there was a recall programme in place for affected packs.

15 minutes?!? I'm going to miss the flight to my dying aunt if I have to stand around waiting 15 minutes for my oil to be changed! And what if there is a queue and I have to wait longer???

Also, come on, just oil changes? Do you think most of us haven't owned a fossil and know that isn't true?

You are getting shafted if someone is charging you $3k to have a charger installed.

It's an older chemistry that the market has already moved away from. I think the Koreans only keep producing it to ensure continuity of supply for existing buyers.

I think there was a recall on them, yes. I don't remember the details but some people got new packs. Like a lot of manufacturers, they had some early issues that needed to be resolved.