The potency and purity are typically pretty good but from time to time vendors will be outed for either outright fraud or a bad batch that is underfilled or low purity. Most of the direct vendors (out of China) will guarantee fill and purity, and also give credit on your next order for lab test costs if you share the tests with them for future marketing purposes.

All sorts of risks involved of course, but you can mitigate them fairly effectively. Your risk tolerance may vary. Some folks will buy single vials from US resellers and trust those seller's lab test reports. Others (smartly, imo) don't trust that and do their own testing directly on the product they receive.

This grey market supply chain is remarkably robust these days. Plenty of suburban Facebook soccer moms organizing group buys.

One of the worst outcomes from GLP-1 drugs are people getting on them and then saying ridiculous things like this. Just totally confident that they can discount other folks lived experiences.

I know quite a few skinny people who have struggled every single day with food noise, overeating, and self control. They simply got through it with a lot of struggle, habits, and discipline.

Some of these people had to maintain their weight and fitness because their careers required looking conventionally attractive for their jobs. It consumed most of their life doing so. Some of these folks are now on GLP-1s and their lives are immensely better as they don't need to constantly be in a battle of willpower with themselves.

There are a huge number of "skinny" people out there who feel hunger in very likely the same way many obese people do.

Sawstop is the exact opposite. It was used by giant firms to try to regulatory capture the industry.

The locality tax is in addition to everything else paid on the electric bill.

And yes, datacenters have always been about converting electrons to photons, density of photonic output and electron input steadily increasing over time.

I dunno if it's for the most part or not, but it holds true in my experience.

In my home state, there has been a transmission line project planned for over a decade now to take wind power generated in the windy southern end of the state to bring it to the central metropolitan load center.

It's been basically tied up this entire time due to NIMBY. It just recently in the past year or so started to enter the next phase, just in time for the anti-datacenter folks to be added to the NIMBY allied cause to get it blocked again.

It might still happen, but overall green energy from where I stand is something everyone wants in someone else's backyard. In the state I currently live in rural folks protest the solar farms, and pretty much everyone everywhere protests the transmission upgrades required.

My whole life has been consumed with basically no one allowing anything to be built for any reason. It's getting tiring, so taking anti-datacenter concerns at face value is proving difficult to me. Even if I do logically understand many or maybe even most are being brought in good faith.

Polls won't really provide much value on the subject. Plenty of people will say they are in favor of green energy projects - until they are proposed near them.

This is for a standard "warehouse sized" 100MW facility no one would know exists unless you told them it does which has been there for 20 or so years now. It generates far more taxes for the municipality than buildings of similar footprint next to it, as it's in a light industrial park like most of these things are. Scaled up to 1GW that's $60m/yr in simple "sales tax" on electricity consumption. Property tax is harder to dig through, but ignoring initial 10-20 year abatements typical for such projects it's roughly double that - but that's from memory.

I agree the tax abatements are bullshit. But those are bullshit for any sort of development and imo should be outright illegal at a federal level regardless of the project.

This doesn't account for any local income tax/etc. generated by jobs - where a datacenter of course will not be significant compared to most industrial land uses of similar acreage.

These datacenter facilities have typically been very tax revenue dense land uses for quite some time now without cities needing to invest very much in infrastructure to service them. It's why they generally have sailed through approvals until recently.

But it's way more than just chillers. It's everything from structural steel, to electrical transformers, copper cabling, optical transceivers, electric generation, skilled workforce in the trades, etc.

Overall this boom has been relatively tiny as far as US industrial booms historically have been, and we cannot ramp up production even if there was the political will to do so.

It's not just datacenters. Look at the military industrial supply chain these days. We can't even scale up WWII era artillery shell production in any reasonable timeframe. Much less modern weapons systems.

Everything has been cut to the bone so any blip in demand cannot - at any price - be effectively responded to. Even if you were exceptionally good at being able to double internal capacity, the supply chain all the way from raw materials to skilled labor pool your vendors may need just isn’t there.

This latest datacenter bubble is just the last and most acute symptom of this problem I’ve noted in my lifetime. Hyper-financialization does that to an economy.

The best anyone can do is outbid peter to rob paul.

The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.

Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.

If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.

It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.

AI makes these projects significantly more feasible, at least in my domain. We have some critical-path software I wouldn't touch with such an approach, but the vast majority of our code is internal and/or supporting tooling.

For those cases, burning it down and rewriting via AI tooling has proven far more productive than anything we have attempted in the past. This is for old technical debt laden stuff everyone has been afraid to touch for well over a decade.

It's not perfect, but it moves the needle where before a lot of such projects were stuck on the backburner for years.

It certainly introduces new bugs and such, but at least this way forward momentum is happening vs. just being stuck in decision/analysis paralysis forever.

This also assumes some very senior SME folks are driving the process. I would not expect similar results with junior or even mid-level folks in these specific domains.

Fixing exactly this has been the constant drumbeat of IT since the early 00's at least. It started with virtualization, to get capacity factor of hardware up in the enterprise. The average server back before VMWare (and HyperV/etc.) became a major thing was probably sitting at 10% utilization or less 95% of the time. Hypervisors were invented to fix this as their primary use case. You'd take a 5-10% performance hit on the raw server performance to gain 90% efficiency back.

Next came the cloud. Which was virtualization at scale. The larger the scale, the better the efficiency.

It's basically almost all anyone has actually accomplished in IT over the past decade or two. Everything else has been largely stagnant compared to the 80's and 90's.

AI inference is in it's infancy, but I imagine we will see more or less the exact same thing play out yet again. Lots of initial on-prem stuff due to cost and freedom, and eventually it becomes virtualized, commoditized, customer segregated, etc. Just like average cloud workloads are today and all the various "small" megawatt-scale builds moved back into the hyperscaler type providers within the next 5-10 years.

> How many companies are building datacenter commons and sharing with other companies to optimize resource usage?

Quite a few that I've seen. Rented inference/token factories are the current new hotness. Plenty of speculative builds being done by hundreds of smalltime providers. These will consolidate per usual and everyone but the last few top percent will remain as the winners. Just like the first hosting providers. Virtualization and fancy schedulers to maximize hardware utilization across a number of end-user customers are a huge topic in this space at the moment. Heck, a lot of these small time players are providing raw compute for the giant AI labs and even hyperscalers.

I don't like that Altman is right on this btw. I much preferred the highly inefficient days of every midsize corporate office having a 200-500kw datacenter in the basement. AWS and their ilk are quite obviously orders of magnitude more hardware efficient though.

Defense in depth is the idea. Swiss cheese model of failure.

The number of people who never seem to have understood what software and IT is in most companies is eye opening to me. Your job was never really to "write code" - you were always automating things.

That the field got somewhat stuck for a couple decades seems to have made many people forget this.

The vast majority of programmers who started in the 80's and 90's are basically directly responsible for massive waves of job losses in certain categories. Lots of cases of entire departments of secretarial level paper-pushing work being replaced with a small team of programmers. Same will happen with AI tooling. The difference is programmers are no longer the "winning" party here.

Computers and software in the end are the most configurable and complex automation system society has ever created. They are simply a continuation of industrial automation, and AI is a continuation upon that.

I’ve been one of a handful of passengers more than a few times. Where the flight attendants just move everyone to first class after boarding and the rest of the flight is super relaxed and barely professional.

This was not common, but not a rare thing after the 2008 crash for a few years.

During IRROPs you can still luck into one of these. Definitely a fun experience!

Only this is just a thing that really doesn't happen much at all. Very few developers are putting up 20 story apartment buildings in the middle of an existing SFH community in the suburbs somewhere. Most of those such fights are people fighting the 5 over 1 development built greenfield just outside the current SFH neighborhood in question. And for those such people? They should have zero say.

If they are doing so, it's typically in very dense city cores that support the density and thus investment. If someone wants to put up a 20 story building next to me in my Chicago neighborhood, sounds good to me! I am upset there are not more of them and that zoning has effectively made them illegal to build here, as I'm roughly 500 feet away from a rapid transit station and two arterial roads with high frequency bus routes. It's a crime that they are illegal to build.

I'd be an asshole if I bought a house in such an area and wanted my little conclave to be protected at the expense of everyone else in the city. I should rightly be overruled and told to pound sand and move the hell out if I don't like it.

Instead, laws have enabled such people to effectively veto such buildings. Or even simply stuff like 12 unit 4 floor apartment buildings that already exist due to predating zoning on my block.

Many areas of the US are effectively retirement communities by zoning. People who moved in 20-30 years ago who demand zero change and have captured nearly all political power.

Not sure what a private developer would have to do with public transit though. That's the city's job to provide and figure out the routes for. Developers bring projects accordingly, and the local residents veto 12 story apartment buildings built on current strip-malls 2 blocks away from train stations. Residents using transparently bullshit environmental and walking/biking infrastructure "concerns" as just another way to block things.

I'll take building stuff - even if flawed - over the current state of never building anything ever any day of the week.

I enjoy the effort - most of the time. I don't enjoy the time burned on what amounts to a very small portion of the entire chain of creation.

Autonomous driving is something entirely different in my mind. That would be a car good enough to work without driver controls or a remote operator. Nothing on the market meets this definition today.

Pilots still are required to be able to take over immediately for an autopilot system and are responsible and accountable for all those items you list and more.

Calling it autopilot is precisely what it is, calling it self driving would be false marketing.

But to be honest the reaction from the ivory tower here is seemingly quite telling to a layman watching from afar.

It looks far more like this was some extremely gatekept community where you were only allowed to work on sanctioned things if so deemed worthy. Better not step one someone’s toes lest you get exiled! How much progress was lost due to newcomers never working on a problem due to told not to?

It’s starting to make those old timey Usenet kooks look a whole lot less crazy to me. They seemingly were right about this part.

Mathematics was funded and supported by a whole bunch of janitors and blue collar workers busting their asses to let entire departments of thinking men and women work on hard problems for the betterment of society. If it was just a super special friends club the whole time that was gatekeeping what amounts to a hobby, it’s going to me much harder to justify such a social contract.

Honestly not even sure what to think at this point. Extremely disappointing to me the more I read from these people.