I’ve lost count of the number of modal dialogs I’ve “accepted” because they popped up out of nowhere milliseconds before I pressed enter coincidentally.

Not everywhere. I go out of my way to assist teams to achieve a secure outcome with less effort.

Things like: “instead of admin access to the production servers the devs can have fully automated deployment pipelines combined with OpenTelemetry for observability so they don’t have to spend half the day scrolling through gigabytes of logs.”

That’s more secure and and more better.

Nobody had to be told “no”.

Similarly, I replace key store access with secret-less managed identity, etc.

They want to build the data centres right now, but the power companies and other energy suppliers are booked solid for 5+ years out.

Money or not, you can't just click your fingers and instantly get regulatory approval, or spin up a facility to build parts that only a handful of places have ever figured out how to mass-manufacture.

Gas turbine blades are especially difficult, but batteries and panels are not far behind. There are a surprisingly small number of shops capable of making power switching gear and transformers too.

That “elsewhere” has to be far enough away to get different weather.

This means a grid capable of transferring 100% of the needed power.

So even if you plopped a new DC in the middle of a field of panels you’d still need a ~1 GA grid connection… or a battery array many times the size as you’d otherwise need just to cover night time usage.

- Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it.

- Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc.

- Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production.

Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types.

They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.

I’ve done some experiments replacing spatial SQL queries with custom vectorised batch mode code in C# and the speed up was astonishing.

The people dubious about these claims have no idea what their computers are really capable of.

I wonder if this is a side effect of MoE models — they can write excellent prose, but not simultaneously with writing code.

It turns out that the "more CO2 = more warmer" model is hilariously simplified, and the real modelling gets into the weeds to put it mildly! There's a NASA database of the super-high-resolution absorption and emission spectra of every isotopic combination of every common molecule and ions, excited states, and more! It turns out that most of the forcing is determined by the behaviour of the upper atmosphere at high latitudes where the air is so thin that exotic excited states can persist for appreciable durations, and are made in large amounts by absorption of UV light. The "glancing angle" of the sunlight near the poles also means that even minor constituents participate in the exchange of IR radiation. Then, then, the simulation has to be run in many thin slices because air is so opaque to IR radiation that it bounces many times on the way up and down, and of course, the isotopic mixes (and excited fractions) are inconsistent between layers.

An insanely complex supercomputer model is required to come up with even a rough estimate of the actual warming.

By whom?

China would be mad to destroy the most valuable building on that island.

I doubt Taiwain would bomb themselves.

I can't see anyone in the US acting like this either.

If China decides to take over Taiwan and nationalises TMSC, redirecting their top tier silicon to 100% Chinese companies then what are the American firms worth?

"X is literally more than Y".

"You are exaggerating how much X is!"

"It's still a lot more than Y."

PS: This whole thread reminded me of several managers I've worked with who were pathologically unable to estimate... anything, be it driving time or development effort.

They always focused on the "minimal aspect", ignoring everything before and after. Walking to the car park. Standing in line at the machine. Paying at the machine. Getting out of the car park in the car, surprisingly long during busy times. Driving through traffic. Any delays that could -- and regularly do -- occur. Finding parking. Actually parking. Walking from the car park. Etc.

"It's just a 5 minute drive!"

No, it isn't, not door to door.

The extent to which they are able to do this is the more interesting question!

Local: You need to invest $thousands into GPU and/or very-high-end CPU+Memory hardware.

Vendor: You can use any existing device, even a phone or tablet. A very low-end laptop is fine.

> takes literal minutes to get started

Local: Typical scenario is hours just to download the software, the model weights, and then faffing around with CUDA and matching your GPU drivers.

Vendor: Free-tier available instantly on a web URL. Even local agents have free tiers from multiple vendors. Install is a single command and/or download and "next,next,next,finish" wizard that takes ~1 minute.

> you can just `rm -fr` it and forget the whole thing existed.

I'm still cleaning up multi-GB model weights floating around in hidden subdirectories under my user profile from months ago when I was experimenting with local models!

Meanwhile I simply... stopped using Gemini. That was the entire process: I no longer actively use it. They stopped billing me for my token usage, because it is now zero. That's... it.

You have it totally backwards.

I pay OpenAI $100/mo, twice what I pay for my mobile phone service.

It’s a useful service that I use every day.

I have never even heard of anyone in my social circle expressing even a mild interest in tulips, NFTs, or the metaverse.

This bubble has much more in common with the rail road boom and the 2000 fibre build out bubble.