Our institutions aren't even able to control what dirt-poor pirates do on hardware they own. How in the heck are they going to be able to control what incomprehensibly-rich people do? They can purchase political favors from whichever nations are selling them.

1. Local governments can require that if the data center peak load is 1.0GW, they must provision transmission and generation capacity for the local region of 1.2GW; the extra power can be given to the neighbors at substantial discount.

2. Construct a public swimming complex nearby, heated with waste data center heat.

3. Local governments can enforce strict limits on environmental noise at the property boundary. I've personally stood right next to a 150MW-class datacenter and experienced sound levels less than traffic from a typical suburban 4-lane street; making the datacenter quieter than any other industrial use is a choice the builder can make if they have the right incentives.

Setup directional microphones around the perimeter, and fine them $25,000 per minute per dB above the agreed threshold. Distribute the fines to the neighbors. Failure to pay promptly means the sheriff shuts down the power.

All of these options are far cheaper than launching the data center into space...

Known unsound code should not be merged, let alone released to production. If you have good enough tests and run them under MIRI or ASAN, maybe you can get away with it for a time, but most Rust experts would not sign-off on such a project.

If somebody put a gun to my head and told me to make the best of such a codebase, I would try to figure out how to turn off the LLVM optimizations that assume the Rust references don't alias. With these optimizations this codebase is scarier than most C or C++ code.

Just because it appears to be working fine doesn't mean you are in control of it. Without hardware attestation, how do you know the machines are running the software you think they are?

In a constrained market, supply and demand favors folks who can most efficiently extract rent. Local models only make sense in a world with abundant compute and energy.

Demand will only go down if people reduce their use of these AI tools. Given how much folks here complain about quotas, I'm very skeptical that will happen willingly.

Surely it is a more efficient use of DRAM to run inference on shared hardware with large batch sizes and more utilization.

I want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.