ethbr1

Or revisit an idea from the 60s, updated with modern technology, and start series-producing large reactors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems

The current industry has a voracious appetite for power. There are a variety of solutions capable of cleanly supplying it (solar, wind, nuclear).

What's missing is the shared infrastructure investment and guaranteed revenue stream contracts to link the two. This is where government industrial policy has historically and successfully stepped in (e.g. shipyards, railroads, electrification, interstate system, heavy press, etc).

Hell, guarantee waived species environmental inspections as part of the government's contribution.

This is a perfect argument getting in the way of a good solution.

There's nothing to stop hyperclouds from finishing it with temporary nat gas behind the meter now and striking long-term power purchase agreements that fund extra utility build-out.

They're not doing that because (a) it costs more and (b) nobody has made them.

Hopefully that'll change with a bluer Texas, new Congress, and more assertive municipalities.

There's a trivial path to win/win here, if the companies were universally required to enter into sustainable deals (both financially and environmentally). Even playing field nationally = no particular cloud wins by finding the rube locality that will accept a bad datacenter deal.

> The truth of things tends to come out over time, because it's the only 'narrative' that can hold up under scrutiny from any angle.

This is exactly why professional journalists, with employers who can restrict strong pressure, are important.

The truth about things which are widely observable tends to come out over time.

There are many, many things which are not widely observable.

You know the easiest way to do something secretly in government today?

Have an in-person meeting, gloss over it in online-posted minutes, then bury the evidence of it being done in the most detailed, voluminous reports.

Because finding that requires a butt in a seat through boring meetings and tracing / reconciling line items through reports.

And generally speaking, most people who aren't being paid aren't willing to do that for fun.

This. Say what you want about the tenets of journalism, but at least it's an ethos.

The 'citizen journalist' is at best a part time volunteer and at worst an astroturf'd contractor of a PR department.

And as the quip goes about volunteers -- willing to work for free, altruistic, and competent: pick two.

Occasionally you get delightful humans that combine all three, but they're needles in haystacks.

If you're in support across multiple customers, especially in regulated industries, you learn to rely on the minimum common denominator, which usually means OS utils.

And at the end of the day $2 and $2000 screwdrivers are both still screwdrivers.

PEX is plasticizer-free. It's cross-linked to provide the necessary properties.

Likewise, no plasticizers in standard sched 40.

I used to be into vinyl, but then I read that plastic is bad for you, so moved to wheels of steel.

I think people who see AI search ads as a worse business than web search ads aren't thinking avariciously enough.

AI results are their own citation- and context-free reality.

If Pepsi pays Google $100M for every statistical +10% they give recommendations of Pepsi over Coke in Gemini... how would anyone ever know?

Google hasn't done that obviously yet, because they have the cash to weather the choppy PR waters around public AI perception, but once AI is normalized it's going to be trivial to turn the knob on managed models.

Especially free ones, served cost efficiently by Google's infra backend, pushed via the most widely used phone OS and browser in the world.

The monetization (and user profiling) opportunities make web tracking and ads look like kids' toys.

Regulated monopolies can be more efficient than state ownership... if the regulatory framework has the correct incentives. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do.

The benefit with regulated monopolies are that you have a separation of control between regulation (from PSC/voters) and monopoly (running its business).

If the current regulatory regime isn't producing the desired results, it can be changed.

With straight state ownership, things are much more entangled.

It's amazing thinking about Teddy Roosevelt following the New Year's Day tradition of shaking every single person's hand who showed up at the White House.

Which in the 1907 case meant 8,513 people's hands.

Google?

It's interesting having a quantifiable number of how much AMD was underinvesting in decent software for their hardware.

> if over the next X years consumers will free up ALOT of disk space by just using agents and not needing to download and install desktop software

Trading bits you own for rented redundant compute to recreate same seems... suboptimal?

How much power should we burn on everyone's agent recreating curl?*

* yes, agents have tools, but what is and isn't an agent tool is a gray area. "Desktop software" could be an agent tool with a human UI.

Pretend like Nixon was on the ballot.

Reposting from stopwatchstring's comment:

> On the other hand, why aren’t we just building all this shit in the vast emptiness in the middle of the country anyway? Hmm.

Exactly. You have a power-hungry asset that needs few humans to operate, causes severe noise pollution, and can effectively be located anywhere in CONUS with minimal latency impact.

Imho, what federal and state governments should be doing is fast-tracking power and network infra to agreed locations in the mid and southwest, ideally in areas suited to solar and wind.

Pre-zone the land around for the desired mix of power + datacenter, then let private industry build what they want.

There's entirely too much empty land to make building in {small town} make any goddamn sense.

Nothing like trolling a troll.

Hope Elon has a great day.

Feels like there's going to be a lot of investigation into DoD contracts et al.

And I expect at least some of the greater Trump orbit fucked up severely in leaving an illegal paper trail, because people new to corruption aren't very good at it. Especially at the cabinet hangers-on level.

Also, the Senate can and should fucking sit on any Trump Supreme Court pick until the next election.

Because fuck McConnell and his party for stalling Garland's nomination for 293 days. Thomas or Alito can be filled by the next president.

"The definition of democracy is that the party in power can lose an election."

Fair, there is the Uber model of 'When a founder does it, it's not illegal.'

There's a relevant point that Valve dogfooded Steam for 2 years (2005-7?) before adding third party titles. Two years is a lot of polish.

> Why involve the rockets and satellites and all. What's the point. That's what everyone is puzzled with.

Corporate sovereignty.

How dare those elected governments have demands and the means to enforce them?

The (search query) -> (targeted ad) isn't the part of Google's ad business most people have a problem with.

They take issue with Google grabbing and compiling every piece of data it can get on you into a profile, keeping that forever, and selling that targeting to advertisers.

Yes and... parent was making the aggregate conglomerate profitability growth case instead of the single-product one.

Wall Street generally cares about the former more, unless the single-product is only-product.

In this case, that's the fundamental question about Google: is it only an ad company (in which case those numbers are the only ones that matter) or more (in which case total corporate revenue is more important)?

Might be useful to scale yearly revenue percentage points relative to graph start year, so f.ex. 2023 percentages sum to (total revenue 2023) / (starting total revenue).

Would give a better sense of left-to-right momentum over time when the entire pie is growing.

I'd assume Google leadership weren't unintelligent, looked at the trends, and decided maximizing search revenue per user was more advantageous than search quality.

E.g. how Amazon knows they have a problem with counterfeits and low-quality copies that damages their brand, but chose volume over quality

Neither company will ever explicitly put it in those terms, but it seems obvious Google isn't looking at search as a growth engine anymore.

Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers sure thought so.

That's not a loophole: that's literally the way fractional deposit traditional banking works.

The only difference is regulations -- banks have them; things labelled crypto don't (in the US).

The former is inflation of the money supply, which causes price inflation when it exceeds economic growth.

The latter is volatility.

Apples and oranges.

Why would they? In addition to moral hazard (next time), this is binance's fuck-up.

Have bad security, get hacked.

If binance wanted to hedge against that risk, they could have bought a cyberinsurance policy (if they could get one for the amounts they'd need).

Counter counter point - we've constructed a society that provides excess rewards to people with cooked brains and antisocial behavior