Frezik

The company has signed agreements to buy over 22 gigawatts of power from sources including solar, wind, geothermal, and advanced nuclear projects since 2010.

None of those advanced nuclear projects are yet actually delivering power, AFAIK. They’re mostly in planning stages.

The above isn’t all to run AI, of course. Nobody was thinking about datacenters just for AI training in 2010. But to be clear, there are 94 nuclear power plants in the US, and a rule of thumb is that they produce 1GW each. So Google is taking up the equivalent of roughly one quarter of the entire US nuclear power industry, but doing it with solar/wind/geothermal that could be used to drop our fossil fuel dependence elsewhere.

How much of that is used to run AI isn’t clear here, but we know it has to be a lot.

“Will personal headphones lead to a world of silence?” We could have wished.

Also, the OG Walkman still looks brilliant. I wish they’d bring the headphone design back.

This is another reason why I hate bubbles. There is something potentially useful in here. It needs to be considered very carefully. However, it gets to a point where everyone’s kneejerk reaction is that it’s bad.

I can’t even say that people are wrong for feeling that way. The AI bubble has affected our economy and lives in a multitude of ways that go far beyond any reasonable use. I don’t blame anyone for saying “everything under this is bad, period”. The reasonable uses of it are so buried in shit that I don’t expect people to even bother trying to reach into that muck to clean it off.

Republicans with nationalized health care and a monarchy.

The point of the article is about how IDE’s can’t validate certain things as you type them in this order. The example of a string length function could be replaced by any other API.

How long back? IEEE 754 floating point was released the same year as Excel v1, and it’d be a while before there was hardware support. Floating point numbers were often dodgey back then on just about everything.

What’s the difference between interpreted and compiled?

I need a big truck in case I need to haul wood from Home Depot once or twice a year, because that’s worst case scenario. It needs to be an EV with 1000 mile range, because that’s worst case scenario. And I need to make enough to live in Silicon Valley, because that’s worst case scenario.

Starlink still requires ground stations, and those ground stations can and are a limiting factor. I was up at a cabin that had Starlink, and service is still in the “better than nothing” phase.

There is concern for fucking up things like radio telescopes. Also, creating a Kessler syndrome event. “But LEO wouldn’t have an issue with that because it would burn up”. Two things:

• Everything in LEO being destroyed is still really bad. Astronauts would likely die.
• Objects in lower orbits can get ejected into higher orbits and hit things there. Kessler sydrome in LEO could potentially start a chain reaction in higher orbits.

Plus, the EU and China are understandably worried about Musk being the only game up there and want to deploy their own equivalent systems. So now there’s not just one system of satellites threatening Kessler syndrome, but possibly three.

Just roll out fiber everywhere like we have with electricity.

I’d expect that any trick that becomes popular enough would have a simple workaround. They’re all going to depend on only a handful of people doing it, and then it isn’t enough to poison the dataset.

FWIW, it doesn’t work. The preprocessing for LLM training isn’t going to be fooled by that. It’s just making things harder for everyone to read.

Jira almost seems like overkill if all it’s for is bug tracking. Though I’m guessing all your clients are just used to it, so let them have their comfort zone?

I hate Jira so much. It’s designed to do everything for everyone, and that makes it a big, wet, hairy dog.

They won’t. Nuclear has long been thrown in as a “maybe we’ll do this”. The economics have long run against it.

It was always expensive and niche. Only a few commercial releases even at its peek. Most of the machines were used for mastering, not personal listening.

They’re not that complicated. They just look that way when you’re threading the reel through the mechanisms. There’s a logic to it, and it’s pretty easy once you understand that. Does have a little more maintenance than a record player or cassette deck. Stuff needs to be lubed right.

Edit: also, note that people aren’t necessarily buying cassettes or vinyl to listen to them. Lots of vinyl is purchased by people who don’t even own a turntable. It’s for the art and physicality.

How about reel-to-reel? Unlike cassettes, it actually sounds good. Probably the best you’ll ever hear from an analog format.

Oh, look, all those “climate pledges” over the past decade or so are in the bin as soon as they think it’s socially acceptable to do so.

Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can’t pick people’s locks.

I think we’re fairly close to agreement.

The things I do to encourage anarchism are things like makerspaces, community gardens, and bike fixup workshops. Anything that helps people rely less on capitalism and more on each other.

I’m quite aware of the history of the field, thanks. It’s had a lot of cycles of fast movement followed by a brick wall. You can’t assume it’ll have a nice, smooth upward trajectory.

Buy any bubble memory lately?

I have a book from the early 90s which goes over some emerging technologies at the time. One of them was bubble memory. It was supposed to have the cost per MB of a hard drive and the speed of RAM.

Of course, that didn’t materialize. Flash memory outpaced its development, and it’s still not quite as cheap as hard drives or as fast as RAM. Bubble memory had a few niche uses, but it never hit the point of being a mass market product.

Point is that you can’t assume any singular technology will advance. Things do hit dead ends. There’s a kind of survivorship bias in thinking otherwise.