"I'm sure if I cared enough to go looking".

So you just made a weird, false assumption in order to justify to yourself something you already wanted to do.

I used to have your viewpoint, by the way. The reality eventually became undeniable. Musk is a unique threat to western democracy.

How much energy does it take to drive to a laundromat and back?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant. It's agriculture that uses the overwhelming majority (70% of withdrawals and 80-90% of consumptive water use. Industry next (20% of withdrawals). Residential usage is way, way down the list, and washing machines are only 17% of that (well below for example lawn watering at about 30% overall, but which in some regions is over half of all consumption, and in the summer and times of water scarcity can be the vast majority). An early 1950s top-loader washing machine would use about 40-55 gal plus 0,3-0,5 kWh of electricity for the machine itself, and if your water wasn't municipally heated, heat would cost about 4,5-6,5kWh / 16-23 MJ (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a litre of gasoline / 0,13-0,19 gallons). At the then-standard 14-15 MPG in the US, that laundromat better not be more than 2-3 miles away if you're trying to save energy (just ignoring the energy they use to heat their water!)

For the record, while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides). For example, Bannon-acolyte Joe Allen on stage before a Trump rally a month ago warning the crowd:

Why wouldn’t you want a mosque in your neighborhood? Well, because the people in there aren’t like me. They don’t want the same future I do. Now, if you look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants. Already, if you look at Hugging Face, they’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.

Literally, this r/opensource mod set the policy: "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community." Does that sound very "leftist" to you? Yes, his reasoning was because translators use AI, but still, that's literally the opposite of appreciating and accommodating diversity.

I cannot find anything beyond that indicating how Wesley Wolfe (r/wolvereness, the mod) votes. What I can tell you is that there was a big backlash in the sub to his actions. Some amusing, like a person asking, "What do we use now that we've banned Linux? I can't afford Windows keys for all these damned servers." A lot of people seem to just be ignoring his rules. At the top of the sub right now is a post titled, "Linus Torvalds posts his AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap". It seems to have sparked vastly more AI discussion than it shut down.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Really, you don't see any difference between Elon Musk and, say, John Stankey? Is John Stankey actively transforming the US into an autocratic fascist-adjacent state?

Would you buy from a company called Plantations Inc which proudly advertises that all of its products are made by daily-whipped slaves? Are there no limits to how self-focused you are in your consumption?

It's one thing to say "this particular issue isn't mine, so I'm only going to think amount myself". It's an entirely different issue to have no moral bounds.

This headline sounds like something you'd hear coming from a news report on a TV in the background near the start of a horror movie.

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

And here comes Node.js....

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.