It's funny how when you cut off someone's revenue, they get all sorts of cranky, even if it's for a social good.

The same thing should be for water as well. It should produce potable water pumped back through a sewage treatment plant owned by the local water utility, and the cost of fresh water for data centers should be high enough that the cost of all this new infrastructure is fully borne by the data center.

I'm sure some people complained that it will make data centers uneconomical, to which I reply: I should not make up your revenue shortfall. Either your revenue supports all your costs, or you go out of business.

The national security nightmare is the dependency on fossil fuel sources. If we were to lose our crude oil supplies because of a war in the Middle East, blocking a strait for tankers, we would be well and truly fucked. We don't produce enough domestic natural gas to replace it.

The only options we have today are solar, wind, and, given enough time, nuclear. These three sources remove external dependencies for generating energy. I'm not sure how much uranium we have in the States, but once the blades are spinning or the sun is shining, we keep getting energy, and no war overseas can stop that.

Electric prices are climbing because we're doing externalities wrong. For example, utility charges for data centers should be significantly higher than what we charge residential and non-DC businesses. The goal is for data centers to absorb the cost of the impact they have on the grid and water.

They could have on-prem power plants, but those plants should belong to the local utility and charge the data centers the data center rate. It also should be a surcharge for the air pollution those fossil fuel monstrosities create. Again, paying for the externalities.

They could get a break if they deployed gigawatts of solar and batteries or used their waste heat for district heating, but yeah, I'm tired of letting them get away with dumping externalities on us. We now have a nicely delineated scenario where we can focus it on them and make them pay.

It occurred to me much later that local machines could become a shared resource of a small co-op. Or it only runs off solar or energy harvested at times of excess generation (too much daytime solar, lots of wind, or overnight when demand naturally drops).

Exploring how to partition inference across many machines and shed load for idle sections of hardware would be a problem that could be solved by a community of smart people like us here

And hand problems was an aggregate thing. first chronic pain then fine motor control and tremors. The pain flares up again if I try to use my hands too much.

I don't see the llms have me trapped like a tethered elephant anymore than the other layers of entrapment that we live with. I would argue entrapment started when we learned the secret was banging rocks together.

Or did you mean some other kind of entrapment?

It is well recognized that meritocracy is an illusion. A much better determinant of success is the birth lottery. If you're born into a rich family versus a blue-collar one, you have unequal starting points, access to education, better-than-average medical care, and more reliable, higher-quality food. Once you win the birth lottery, you have access to a network full of connections that will hire you based on who you know or who your parents are, rather than your ability (e.g., a Nepo baby). When you are a nepo baby, you are insulated from many of the inequalities built into our financial and education systems.

You'll frequently hear from successful people that they got where they are because they have sufficient morals or good standing in the world, and that if you didn't make it, you're clearly not a good person. This rationalization is mostly bullshit because there are many in the 1% class who are lousy human beings and, by their own justification, should be on the street.

When you buy into meritocracy, you are contributing to keeping the billionaires in place and supporting their destructive behavior, tearing at society.

see: https://www.linkedin.com/videos/the-institute-of-art-and-ide...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2025.2...

https://therowlandfoundation.org/the-myth-of-meritocracy-ref...

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-m...

My solution is to see what four or five-year-old equipment I can buy that will let me run local LLMs. I may only get six or seven tokens per second out of an i7, but it's a start. And best of all, I can turn the machine off when I'm not using it.

IMO, Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers.

I believe the next stage is big ass batteries to soak up excess energy production for later use and to let us work with what we have today, both in generation and grid wiring. Residential and maybe commercial big-ass batteries could reduce the need to rewire buildings for higher energy devices.

This would reduce the overall use of fossil fuels and make it available for all the things necessary to preserve human life, while making a serious dent in slowing down climate change.

At the same time, we need to tout the environmental benefits of solar farms, such as increasing biodiversity, preserving soil moisture for agrivoltaics, and reducing the stress of climate change on livestock. These will also require big ass batteries for soaking up the excess production of these solar farms.

Although yes, AI as a technology is still in its early stages, and I believe it's a sound technology for us to work with.

I also think we're solving the wrong problem (removing office work) versus solving problems in the sciences, like running and monitoring biotech labs.

When I was in Scandinavia a few years ago, I discovered their sausages served in, I think, what is called a French roll (a tube of bread). I briefly considered setting up a food truck called "Scandi Dogs," selling these sausages in the same rolls as they serve in Europe with a side of vanilla ice cream dipped in salted licorice. And yes, that licorice ice cream combination is great once you get past the salt lick impact of the first bite.

I think increasing the viability of travel between smaller airports is a good thing for those times when you don't want to spend a lot of time traveling or waiting for a transit vehicle. If the equivalent of micromobility air travel comes to fruition, you'll see two- or three-person vehicles that get up and go when someone wants a ride. Another benefit could be the airport-to-airport delivery of packages with different-sized drone craft and autonomous navigation.

#IFoundMyFlyingCar