dwoldrich

I value your experience! I agree with you the insane buildout does not make sense. The rapidly approaching optimizations in the inference space will eliminate 99% of the current compute requirements. So what do they really need all the general compute for??

I work with cloud everyday and am disgusted by the waste - not cracking 5% utilization on huge clusters. It feels like globocorpo money laundering to me.

Every once in awhile you get to see good utilization in cloud with distribution and amazing scaling and failover with big data and it all seems worthwhile. :)

> asinine

See? You think people who disagree with you are stupid! When you run a simulation of what what is going on in others' heads, do you envision a sucking void? You ascribe no nuance to me at all.

In fact, what if your entire belief system on climate is based on moneyed interest greed and pernicious lies? Is that possible? How many more decades will you wait for the sky to fall until you question?

The mind boggling size of the earth reminds me that we are a type 0 civilization that burns stuff for power. Smog for me was not in space, I lived on a hillside and looked straight out into the smog layer and suffered personally for it.

To be against pollution is just logical, to think we're capable of destroying the biosphere with our current pollution levels is hubristic. You are capable of hubris, I know big shock!

I love how you're working through all this! There are indeed two sides to every coin.

> Alright then. So I suppose you think that was "a backyard issue... [and] it [was] politics to hate on [smog]," and so the expensive efforts to mitigate it, like requiring catalytic converters and NOx mitigation should be repealed? Or not enacted in the first place?

The gotcha here is that I must hate politics that address the destruction of the planet so i am self-destructive. But you seem reluctant to ascribe working brain cells to people you disagree with, so your gotcha is worded to get a dummy to think. I wonder who told you people you disagree with are fools. Maybe those people aren't your friends. Maybe they secretly hate you.

Let's jump to the end of the argument where there's common ground. Of course pollution is real, I called living in smog disgusting, didn't I?

Who has the power to deal with these huge negative externalities? Usually the government with regulation that hopefully doesn't create bigger downstream problems.

Catalytic converters: good, regulation on factory outputs: good. See how we can agree?

*But* political grifters love the fear pr0n, the power of panic. And so we also got the world ending climate emergency stuff. And that was an expensive grift for taxpayers and europeans never got to enjoy air conditioners, but thankfully it seems to be petering out now at least in the US. It is safe to unclench your butthole because the sky isn't falling, and it was never falling.

> empathy skills

Emotional arguments and trusting snakes who hate you are what got you to where you are in the first place mentally. Time to be critical OF EVERYBODY. What is their angle? Are they paid?

> You also mentioned "propaganda campaigns," but think about it: investors are pouring literally trillions of dollars into AI. Who do you think is going to be running the "propaganda campaigns," the people with the trillions or their opponents?

I love this! You are thinking rightly, but you need to complete your thoughts.

This place is CRAWLING with shills for the AI businesses. How do you think Anthropic grew from nothing to trillions so quickly? They have big line items on their financial statements for influence campaigns. It is an attack on us and IT IS WORKING SO WELL.

Elon bought Twitter to run continual AI influence campaigns and for his other businesses and to get a trove of decades of exclusive training data in tweets and DM's.

I didn't get shill mogged in this particular instance because I happened to be speaking in favor of AI data centers. If anything, i got a few shills backing me up, but they were downvoted for weak shillery.

You will probably dig in your heels, and feel i've said hurtful things. Being disagreed with IS hurtful in a way, it hurts to have your ideas picked on.

I just hope you can be more discerning and be more suspicious when panic is delivered into your feed trying to spin you up again for the thousandth time. Let your dopamine receptors finally burn out completely. ;)

I try to be a fun person. But, no it wasn't satire. I find this latest satanic panic to be so cringe. If you crave religion, I suggest you find a bible and get to know Jesus because the post-modernist stuff blows.

Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.

Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge.

I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.

My thinking is most aligned with yours relative to all the other replies. Short term tulip bulb mania pricing on vidya game hardware is annoying and making me delay purchases. And my concerns for long term are about what all that heavy compute will be used for.

All the grug-brained politics and popular panic hysteria about power and water and heat for AI seems to me to be a transient thing, at least with regards to inference. The power requirements for inference will drop to practically zilch once models get etched onto dedicated hardware and the dynamic state requirments become optimized.

I want to know what the real plans are for all the general purpose compute and memory they are building everywhere. If inference is going to wind up being cheap or free, then that general purpose compute will in the best case be left unused and available for lease like dark fiber was after the over-buildout of the 2000's.

In the worst case, all that compute will be used for probably something awful like surveillance.

I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ...

*BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

Classy guy, showing how it's done

.. and I want more for myself and everyone else. And I don't feel bad about it. In fact, degrowthers can pound sand and cry about it.

There is power in controlling people through upheaval and degrowth. I delight when those self-serving revolutionaries FAIL.

Spin 'em off Microsoft, you are terrible at this.

Sounds like a threat

I don't disagree with you that freely distributed software on conveniently licensed terms is going to be the go-to stance for the majority of solo and non-commercial developers.

I just believe I could arrange the universe such that I get to have my cake (commercial licensing) and eat it too (with default open source licensing).

It is my experience that corporations do pay handsomely for software they use, even SaaS ones as the cost of doing business. Open source communities need mechanisms for funding that are consistent and low friction.

This is why the software language/repository/platform itself needs to facilitate license tracking and billing for alternative commercial licenses, to make it easy for corporations.

A successful new language effort that provides this facility need not be an enforcer except to say if an enterprise is willing and signed up to pay for any dependencies it uses, it is obligated to pay for all of them with something like AGPL 3 as the poison pill they have to swallow otherwise if they distribute or serve from any copyleft software.

Having simple, consistent rules that vendors and consumers have to follow with no rugpulls will be important for market acceptance. Having voluntary compliance with license terms will also be important to not turn people off from the ecosystem and to let them kick the tires. If software vendors want to distribute only unencumbered free and open source, then god bless 'em, they should be able to do it.

For libraries, I like the Gnu Affero Public License[1]. If you run the library in software with that license, you have to publish all the source of the entire project that incorporates it.

No corporation could tolerate this, though, so the library vendor can negotiate a commercial license of their software for appropriate fees.

That said, corporations are not going to want to negotiate fees with 100's of vendors over constantly fluctuating dependencies in their software.

This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.

Similar to Amazon's Dynamo API, whatever the next big language/ecosystem is needs to be designed around _billing_ and automatic license management for # of deployments, seats, call volumes, etc.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260712154038/https://www.gnu.o...

Element.scrollHeight first appeared in the DOM API with IE6 in 2001 as far as I can tell. That browser was the first really modern one, with javascript and CSS that could drive a dynamic layout and they innovated with things like AJAX and vector graphics. The web browser had matured from a document model with live elements to a programmable operating environment.

The API implementation was klunky though, where DOM Elements attached to the DOM became 'live' objects. Reading some of the properties would necessarily require reflowing the page in order to calculate the value. It's interesting to think about all the ways the DOM thread can stall for synchronous API's. The Paul Irish gist is always the top hit when I search:

https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a

The mouse event ones always get me.

I'm always impressed by how old sins like element.scrollHeight can get papered over with newer API's. You can use ResizeObserver or requestAnimationFrame() to time your reads of the property and hopefully get the reflows for cheap or free.

Because an LLM is the only way to express intelligence with a computer. So your conception of ram/cpu/storage/networks and learning (training on huge corpus of data) is the only way to do artificial intelligence?

LLM's are the perfect consumer-grade AI, safe to release to the public. It lacks creativity so little chance for a runaway super-intelligence, and it gives the people real tools. It's the best case. Isn't it tidy how reality is? Almost seems planned.

I should think so! I wonder what those original AI were used for.

> so unless the military ran a giant expensive program just to hide the fact that they actually had machines 10000x faster than the $50M (in 80s money) supercomputers of the day, and had trained them on a corpus they whipped up out of nowhere (the amount of information on the internet at the time could probably have fit on a few of todays phones), it probably didn't happen.

Well, did they? They do fritter away a lot of money. Maybe there's a long-running black budget somewhere that could account for it.

You are framing your argument in technologies and technological progressions that you are familiar with. Reality isn't so neat though and there are surely many technological paths to artificial intelligence they could have exploited.

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's?

NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it.

You have to be told something before you can believe it, right? You also get to choose whether you believe that something you're told is 100% god's honest truth or a load of bullshit as well. It's kindof sad to see people try to gatekeep thought here. Lot of rigid thinkers.

I recall Intel in the 90's trying to build clockless pentiums. They couldn't figure it out or maybe it had integration problems with clockful peripherals and it never came to fruition. But I wondered if that was some furtive attempt to seed some tech into industry. I just try to keep an open mind to these sorts of things.

I'm not saying the movie War Games was a limited hangout for a super-intelligent secret military computer system/network that already existed. I'm just saying it could have been.

I see those trillion dollar data centers we're building in the US are classed as military installations or at least appear to be a public-private partnerships where the data centers are being built on air force bases.

Perhaps the consumer compute tech has advanced to the point that it's good enough to host the next phase of intelligence for the military. Maybe all the water AI datacenters need is for energy, not cooling.

> Well, that didn't happen.

The military had stealth aircraft in the 70's. I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

That is to say that (practically) all software has a finite utility timeframe. So it's a lot like an organism in that way in that it 'dies' when it is no longer useful.

This is more than enshittification, it feels like purposeful brand destruction.

Are governments going to institute more lockdowns? Is this some topdown control thing?

I will root this POS android phone I have and forego any Google Play services and just use it as web browser and a phone. Fuck these guys!

AI propaganda crew hasn't rolled on yet today; not seeing the "it's different now, code is cheap/free with AI" messaging yet.

80% of the cost is maintenance, and all software dies so there will always be work to do.

I'm not a fan of state management in React apps, and it took me a long time to come to peace with it. What I landed on that works with the system rather than against is useContext at the page level containing Jotai atoms that wrapper Immer-managed objects representing the page states that get passed through the component tree as props.

I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.

React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.

Yes, I hope I didn't contradict you, the economy has been shite. Was just trying to leave a positive note on recent developments that will continue, God willing.

Some enjoy their local cultures, customs and sovereignty and do not wish to dissolve into a homogenized nowhere-land of world culture/governance. Some people do not cheer for dystopia.

Continue with the scold though, very convincing argument so far.

There are upward and downward revisions this year at least, it seems like a mixed bag with many policies juicing the economy. [1]

Job opportunities differ by state and de-growth hostility to business policies and crony investments. Where I am, layoffs and offshoring continues. I hear new grads are increasingly opting for the skilled trades, which is interesting given they aren't getting use out of their degrees.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2026

Modern invented flag peddlers only seek to have us fly flags of the division they seek to generate. I only fly the flag of the country I live in and give side eye to anyone that does otherwise.

> I'm referring to the model itself. The `.ckpt` file is clearly transformative wrt its training set. Or, at least, substantially more transformative than other things that have long received fair use protection.

Oh, I see. And the model weights are what one can make the copyright infringement claims on in the US?

Not to split hairs, but do you believe it's so transformative because you can't read plain text copies of original works in the weights or because the source material is so hopelessly discombobulated that the original work could not be reliably recreated?

I believe the 'hopelessly discombobulated' argument is probably pretty solid, but one could argue to a judge that the weights are something like JPEG compression. Sure the forged image of Mona Lisa is a bit foggy in the background and some of those details are incorrect, but the wry smile in the foreground is perfectly captured.

> On the contrary, I'm invested quite heavily in the exactly opposite hypothesis -- that the ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini UX you're referring to is not fit-for-purpose.

Oh! Excellent, carry on!

> rather than an anthropomorphic entity.

But it unfailingly passes the Turing test, at least with regards to an immature, non-discerning human mind like a child's. You may as well rub a lamp.