boringg

First things:

1. The AI race has been essentially been a nation cold war arms race with China - so that would be the government backing the race. 2. The previous Biden administration was going to put a lock down on all things AI (remember: The 10²⁶ FLOPs Rule) 3. The populist anger about data centers will have a strong political arm to investigate and shut down efforts (at all levels). 4. Energy buildout will be intentionally slow down through various mechanisms controlled by dems. 5. Financial regulatory bodies will have strong teeth.

FWIW this isn't meant to be political but more a state of play looking at the real factors of Dems getting power and the impact to the market place.

How many people in this thread think that when the Dems win midterms the AI boom has a hard switch to a bust? I really feel like they will rapidly expedite the process instead of having air come out. I definitely didn't think the market would run up right to the date though.

Wait this is the CEO of proton mail? Wasn't that a coveted email service for privacy and safety -- so you didn't have to be on gmail? Brutal.

Wait what is this site the dles of aukspot? How do you choose - it's overwhelming.

I didn't realize how vast the underworld of dle games was. Brought to you by AI?

The Zynga of small cute puzzle web-games.

Its headline of the NYT - not sure we have ny post version of the article here.

Fair enough! Thanks for clarifying -- I have a tough time imagining a lot of people getting into that spend without work driving it (And paying for it)!

I mean you can definitely do that - just set it up do to that.

What you are describing is that a majority of humans are inherently not interested in that. There are are a subset of people who would like to do that - and certainly can now that they have the tooling.

Its just a vastly strong tool. If you want it, build it.

What are you talking about -- almost no one goes with a mix of energy. It should be renewables + nuclear + storage and were golden. Everyone just goes solar+battery saying thats all we need, it isn't.

And gas/fuel has high functional use as a differentiated energy product - we just don't need to use so much of it -- keep it on the smaller end of the use case spectrum.

Im not a gas booster -- but turbine technology is pretty impressive. Id go with nuclear before gas for sure - especially for these larger long lived sites.

I would say you end up with battery+solar and gas turbine/gensets providing power when solar+batteries cant fill the gap. Its a bit expensive to be adding so many different sources on site to shore up power supply.

FWIW obvious maintenance work required to keep turbines going.

Yes the point of batteries is to add backup power when solar goes down - and it does. However the two of them do not get to 4 9's of uptime which is needed for these large data facilities.

Reliability issues. You cannot get 4 9s with solar and battery.

I mean neither of these companies provide an important service. If they both disappeared tomorrow I think most people wouldn't care.

Am I on the wrong side of perspective? I imagine of these companies are at big risk in a turn down with low margin - competitive space. The model is a tough one to work

Merging reduces platform inefficiencies and drivers can work both situation.

I am actually amazed both companies are alive and making a profit.

I have to ask -- is that $10k work related spend but under your own personal budget or personal life management related? Im always curious what other peoples spend is on. Hope thats not to personal a question.

The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview. I asked for facts - which HN is generally a fact based environment instead of broad hand wavy fear based statements.

As an aside - thank you for the isolated cases that you sent as evidence which I haven't clearly been following as closely. I know it is a significant problem in the UK but kind of on the other end of the political spectrum.

Those are corporate dollars making that spend, thats the only people.

"The trackpad on it is so god awful that using any sort of multi finger gesture is a non-starter. In this case the touch screen works significantly better."

probably the only reason -- and this is mitigated with a mouse.

Sources for that kind of claim please.

This was my immediate thought -- this is such a tragic unforced error. It seems impossible for this to happen.

Still have them galore up north where I am. Had at least a couple thousand last summer one night -- it was very cool.

Seems like the smartest move. Microsoft went all in and have really not got much out of their efforts.

Im on that same cycle. M1 pro max still running strong though. 3 cycles might be hard though...

It does seem quaint in retrospect. Its not dissimilar to the the cost of capital will go to zero from certain parts of the finance world during COVID era.

If you don't recall the early innings of AI - that was a big promise from a vocal group of people.

If you know the energy system it absolutely does. Theres a large portion of power that is always in demand. Industrial power needs high quality power and constant on.

I probably should have clarified -- I'm not referring to forward bases or front line operations. That location would be fantastic for solar. I'm talking utility scale solar operations deployed in large areas -- quite easy to knock out as it is a huge surface area and not particularly robust.

This isn't a reason not to go with solar+batteries everywhere. This is an observations of the product weak points and why it isn't the only solution in the chain.

Its also tricky to defend in war prone locations.

I think solar is amazing and we need more of it - but I can't stand this solar and storage go at it alone mentality. It's pretty thickheaded to discount the other forms of energy that we can use and will need.

What? Construction crews are completely different - different tranches of money. Couldn't be more wrong about this.

Nuke, storage, solar and wind. They all work together. You need redundancy, resiliency and dedicate quality power.

No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.

If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?