Seatbelts famously had the patent gifted to the public commons.
Sawstop is the exact opposite. It was used by giant firms to try to regulatory capture the industry.
7,420 karma · joined March 13, 2014
phil21@phil21.net
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.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
I’m also not entirely sure how relevant that is due to states (and provinces) not printing their own currency though. Very different situations.
If you want to solve the budget deficit you need to go after the things that matter which is mandatory social spending these days. That and the revenue side combined are all that matter. Even the military is starting to become more and more irrelevant as social spending and debt service eats up all the air in the room. You could end it entirely tomorrow and you’d still have a deficit. It’s not the 1990s anymore.
Anything else can be immediately written off as unserious action brought by unserious people. The bike shedding of budgetary politics.
I moved to Chicago and am stuck with United now. I miss Delta most times I fly, they simply had a better product.
This is already happening.
It can certainly be parted out with proper motivation but it’s going to take a whole new ecosystem to support these in your typical home lab. Even then 20-30kw slices are electric car level energy consumers.
Micron has 3 brand new fabs currently under construction, 2 Boise, 1 in New York as the first of 4 planned for a campus.
Plus expanding other existing facilities.
These things take ~3-5 years from breaking ground to full production. You'd have had to anticipate the current demand years before it happened in order to be bringing production on-line before 2030 or so.
Samsung and HK Hynix also have fabs under construction and planned.
CXMT started 11 years ago and only now is reaching any real volume. If they decided a year ago to react to the current demand cycle they'd be 6-7 years out.
Not much you can really do to wish for more fabrication to exist on any timeline not measured in fractional decades.
Could they do more and react quicker? Probably, but everything I've read on the subject seems to point to 3 years is absolute bare minimum if you happen to have a shovel ready project with the land bought, local permitting completed, infrastructure extended to the site, and a skilled workforce already in place. They could suspend buy-backs/dividends today and dump it all into building production and there would be no material impact until around 2030.
> The Micron CEO just recently said this is the exact plan
CEO simply stated the demand pressure will not go away through 2027, and supply will not increase until around 2028 when currently under construction fabs start shipping volume. The article does not support your statement.
Got flagged for attempting to have Codex write a quick script to basically dictionary attack my own infrastructure with a tiny dictionary file.
A bit silly, but it doesn’t take a whole lot.
Doubtful. Your competition started building out additional production roughly when you did. Lets say you got a 1 year head start on shovels in the ground.
Those competitors have decades of experience producing RAM. You do not. Even if you get your facility on-line to first wafer a year earlier than the incumbents, it's unlikely you will beat them to full production output as even extremely experienced operators take 6-18mo to get a fab from first production to expected nominal output.
The only way to "win" this is to have started before the supply crunch happened back in 2021 or 2022 - or more likely much earlier. Like CXMT did.
If you were able to find a bunch of investors to give you $40-50B today, already had a site ready to start construction literally tomorrow, by the time you are on-line you will be competing with new capacity currently being built by Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix - not to mention CXMT. The only way you will be profitable is if the current demand exists through 2031 and beyond.
I know I certainly wouldn't be investing in such a project, since the entire bet is that RAM prices 5 years from now will still be at roughly what they are today. Which is simply a bet that the current AI bubble and infrastructure build-out is still ongoing.
2 years is not remotely enough time to spin up a competitor. It's not even enough time for a current leading competitor to spin up another fab.
If you are a newcomer you are talking a decade or more before mass production. If you are HK Hynix perhaps 5 years or so.
The majors all have large fabs under construction, but the majority of new production from those facilities won't be coming fully on-line until 2028 at the earliest. Even from the date of first wafer shipped most of these facilities take 6-12mo to reach mass production level output.
Chinese DRAM is interesting only because they started building capacity (expertise) a decade ago. Only now are the expected to have any material impact on the total volume of the market. And if they want to gain even more market share, they will be under the same ~5 years to spin up a brand new fabrication plant. Perhaps a bit less because they are China, but still multiple years.
If someone is rolling in with a larger than usual group they typically bring enough extra food to go around.
And yep, a lot of these are pot luck style to some degree. Host makes main course, everyone else pitches in on other stuff.
Definitely some loose coordination involved and the host will typically call a roll call the day before to get an estimate of number of people dropping by.