If only voters would get this worked up about corruption.

People are also ignoring the benefits. Data centers don't bring a lot of jobs after construction is complete, but they can generate a lot of tax revenues for counties and cities. Huge amounts of money that can be a real game-changer for the local budgets, and could be very beneficial for the locals. By itself that's not a reason to accept them, but it should be part of the overall calculation, and the net cost/benefit of the projects should be reasonably and fairly evaluated, and negotiated.

But this isn't what's happening.

The thumb wheels on the steering wheel do that. You do have to use the touch screen to put it in "mirror adjust" mode, but really that's something you only do once. Set up your driver profile, set your mirrors, then the car just always changes them to your settings.

I find the auto wiper works pretty well... it is important to keep the windshield fairly clean, but I like to do that anyway.

Yeah, the Model 3/Y handles are weird. The S/X handles are pretty nice. In theory the fact that they're motorized could make them a maintenance problem. In practice, little electric motors are extremely reliable. There was a problem with the wiring harness getting fatigued and breaking about 10 years ago, but that's been fixed.

Those are also on the thumb wheels on the steering wheel.

Before I came up with my current system I spent a lot of time looking into actuators for windows. They exist but they're expensive, often bulky and look like a lot of work to install and maintain. Then it occurred to me that I already have a whole-house fan (HVAC system)... if I could just get it to draw from outside rather than from the air returns. That part woks great and I think it does give me a pretty good single point of control. The only problem is that the house is pretty tight so I also needed a way to create some negative pressure, hence the laundry room to attic fan. I think that's still my airflow bottleneck.

As for whether I've crunched the numbers.... no, I haven't. And since I installed solar last year it maybe doesn't even matter any more? Throughout most of the summer I'm actually giving away nearly a MWh per month of electricity even after running house, A/C, car, steam shower, etc. So it's really more of a game to me than a serious attempt to save money. That said, I do watch my energy consumption closely (game, right?) and running the fans consumes maybe 400W. Overnight that's about 3.2 kWh. Meanwhile, my AC draws 4 kW, so if my AC kicks on for 45 minutes it consumes as much as the passive system does all night. And for that, the passive system cools the house by ~10F degrees while the AC will cool it by about 2F, which would indicate 5X efficiency improvement. But even that doesn't fully capture it, because the AC will cool the *air* by 2F while the passive system will cool the house and also much of the thermal mass, so it's actually moving quite a bit more heat out than the thermostat temperatures would indicate.

So, yeah, an order of magnitude more efficient seems about right. When outside air cools down at night!

I've also been thinking about building something for my shop. It's an uninsulated pole barn (30' wide x 40' long x 25' high) which gets quite hot in the summer and quite cold in the winter. I think some automated fans to exploit day/night temperature variations could probably move the average interior temperature several degrees closer to comfortable, year round. Even better if I insulate it.

The available information isn't terribly specific; but on the surface it doesn't sound any deeper into application internals than it already does.

You can certainly go deeper into etw trace hell; but Task Manager knows how much CPU time you are eating, your memory consumption metrics, your network traffic, and has a (currently less granular) look at your consumption of GPU time. It also having a view of consumed NPU time seems totally analogous for a new flavor of coprocessor. Only one that might involve gory poking at the application(though I'd assume would be more logically pulled from the GPU driver) would be distinguishing "GPU Neural Engine" from GPU utilization generally.

This isn't about AI but about Ukraine. Aside from this being drastically off topic, it is worth articulating the many differences here. The AI companies are taking individual books and scanning so they have training data. They are making use of them. And they are doing so largely with older used books which would often be thrown out anyways. Used book stores throw out old books all the time, as do libraries. Moreover, the books being destroyed for digital scanning are often things which are not just that important, things like random sword-and-sorcery novels from 1975 and car manuals. This is in drastic contrast to the wide-scale deliberate destruction of books and book infrastructure by Russia; they are trying to destroy Ukrainian culture and the ability for children to get an education. In some cases, nearly entire print runs of a book or entire print runs have been destroyed by what Russia has done here. The situations aren't remotely comparable. So instead of making complaints about AI again, maybe show you actually care about books by making a donation as they've asked?

Yes, people are using AI to generate slop, and do things like generate kitten pictures. But there's a lot of extremely productive use. We have a lot of people using it for coding. We have mathematicians using them to prove long-standing open math problems. There are a lot of positive uses here also.

Noise is largely due to gas turbines or diesel generators running. That's again the sort of thing where reasonable regulation can help out. Some other noise claims are also just not plausible; there have been examples of noise complaints about completed data centers which hadn't been turned on yet for example. The heat claims are generally not plausible. If you take the claims seriously, they'd have to be generating far more energy than they are. Meanwhile, people don't object to large parking lots which are constantly taking in sunlight and converting to heat. I'm also not sure how they engage in "destruction of neighborhoods" any more than any other building project.

Not really. Heavy duty training involves intensive energy use. And one of the genuine problems with AI data centers is the electricity use can be very high or very low with minimal warning to the grid operators. This is part of why it pushes up electric costs. I'm not sure what evidence you have that any new data center now is being built for AI. Many of the data centers being objected to are small "Edge Data Centers" used primarily to reduce latency for video streaming, video games, and other activities which require low latency https://www.maysteel.com/why-maysteel/resources/blog/types-of-data-centers-how-do-you-choose-the-right-data-center.

So, first putting solar panels on is a step. It doesn't do everything, but it is a good step. It also has the nice advantage that if there's a serious bust in data centers, there will be already solar panels ready to be connected the other way for the grid. But you are also underestimating the effectiveness of solar panels, for a few reasons. First, almost no data center is used at 100% capacity. The solar panels keep producing even when server racks are getting little use. Second, data centers require corridors for humans to move, office spaces for humans who work there to stay, along with bathrooms and other needed things. Typically, actual server space takes up around 20-25% of the actual space. Now, that's not quite as good as it seems, since data centers are often 2 or 3 floors. But overall, the ratio is still better than you state.

But if you think that's not enough, then you can make it tighter. You can do things like require that their parking lots have solar panels too. Or you can even just require a specific percentage of their power be handled by solar, and then let them figure out the details, including attached solar arrays if needed. But these are all conversations we can have, and far more useful than just saying "No!" very loudly.

I think that's fair, although it feels like the tone has gotten harsher.

Definitely. I'm actually already seeing a little of that in late August. Nights are getting down to ~62F, which is managing to cool the house to the high 60s. I'm wondering if I could get a higher-volume fan for the laundry room to increase the air flow... I'm sure that by the end of September we'll have nights in the 50s but days will still often reach the mid-80s. That's when another benefit of having it automated kicks in. If I were just opening a bunch of windows before going to bed, there would be a period of time when the house got too cold at night. With the automated system, when the house gets to 62F it turns the fans off.

Of course, as we get into winter, I pop the laundry room fan out and fill the gap with an insulated pillow of the type they sell for filling swamp cooler vents.

Speaking of swamp coolers... those have historically been fairly effective in Utah, thanks to the dry air. My first house had just a swamp cooler and it was honestly fine. I've actually thought that it might make sense to have all three: passive cooling, swamp cooler and central air. With a smart system deciding which to use when. You don't want to use the swamp cooler a lot on days when the A/C might need to run, because it raises interior humidity, which the A/C then spends a lot of effort extracting. Maybe... have to consider the cost of buying and installing the swamp cooler.

There's obviously a massive large-scale backlash here, and it is pretty bipartisan. Part of it is concern about water use (which is largely overblown) and part is concern about increases in electricity cost (which is much more reasonable). But it is clear that two related things are happening: 1) People are reacting this way to all data centers, whether or not they have anything to do with AI. 2) People are blocking data centers rather than trying to take reasonable steps to make them manageable with their concerns, like requiring that they have solar panels. There's room for compromise here, but we're not getting it.

It's possible. My prediction is that they're not going to find any evidence of collusion, that all of the DRAM manufacturers simultaneously shifted production to AI chips in response to clear market demand, not because of any agreement.

Yes, there was collusive price fixing 25 years ago, but the companies got slapped pretty hard for it -- not just cash fines but prison sentences for executives. I think that prior experience makes it less likely that they're colluding now, not more likely. Once burned twice shy.

I'm really hoping that occurs. But right now, Starship has run into a lot of delays, and we cannot rely on this turning to work out to be as cheap as we hope for our long-term planning. The expectation for the Space Shuttle was also that it would drastically reduce launch costs. It didn't for a wide variety of reasons. Starship incorporates a lot of lessons from that, including no use of solid fuel, much more improved heat shield, and using methane for the main liquid rocket engines rather than the harder to use hydrogen. (In general, one of the major insights the last few years has been that paying a small performance penalty in engines is worth it if it makes the engines cheaper and easier to reuse. This is essentially the design philosophy behind the Falcon 9's Merlin engines also, even as they did end up being pretty high performance engines even though they used kerosene. And the Raptor is going to be pretty high performance even though it uses methane.) And Starship doesn't have the engineering restraints being insisted upon to make the US military happy with weird orbital profiles. But whether that's enough is genuinely not easy to predict.

Huh. I had no idea that the prices had gone down that far. That's very neat.

One correction: It didn't have anything to do with discovery. Discovery was complete when the judge put the trial on hold to allow the deal to close. What happened was that Musk realized that proceeding with the trial was dumb because he was going to lose and be forced to complete the transaction regardless, and possibly on worse terms than he could get by just doing it. Avoiding the public spectacle of the trial was also a consideration, I'm sure, but not discovery... 10 days before trial discovery is already done.

I don't think that's correct? Possibly I'm misreading this, but it looks like the study involved giving two things, both the Keytruda, and a separate personalized vaccine.