Hilariously my 1200 sq foot 125 year old home is much less energy efficient than my in-laws 3000 sq foot 3 year old home due to the greatly improved insulation and sealing practices in modern structures. On the other hand my house is so drafty I don’t have to worry about things like mold growth due to improper vapor barriers nor the air becoming too stale due to insufficient circulation

There were recently a couple of bad gas leaks locally and it was an interesting reminder that there’s these natural gas lines laid crisscrossing the northern US that are just explosions waiting to happen. There’s been some nasty ones too

The unavoidable conclusion in today’s world is that we need to be phasing out natural gas. It can’t be cleanly turned off and back on, it’s wildly dangerous if it leaks out due to poor install/maintaince or natural disasters, it can explode if someone happens to drill into a gas line (I know a guy who did internet installs and at the time he joked about how “yeah you just drill holes into folks homes to poke the cables through and hope you don’t hear hissing after drilling”) during a house fire it just feeds more extremely potent fuel into the fire until turned off. About the only benefit is when it’s extremely cold out, such as when the destabilizing polar vortex whips through, natural gas is probably the most energy efficient option to keep homes and businesses inhabitable

As someone who just lost one grandparent to dementia and has another entering treatment (and in the process of being moved into a care facility) he definitely has dementia or a similar cognitive decline. If you watch him now when he’s publicly speaking and compare it to his 2016 campaign he’s just not the same person anymore. He’s now seeming to not remember what he was to be speaking about, going on random unexpected tangents, needs to be led around by someone else when anywhere other than the White House (and may also need to be led around within the White House, but that’s not as visible) occasionally walks completely a different direction from where he should be going, and he’s lost his talent for remembering names, mixing people’s names with associations when he speaks (“Tim Apple” of Apple CEO Tim Cook, or “Tim Minnesota” of Tim Walz) or occasionally naming someone who hasn’t held the position in a very long time, looking directly at the solar eclipse while the eclipse glasses were in his hand (or pocket? I can’t remember now) its all really clear dementia behavior. Also the tests he’s described taking, he describes them exactly as coherently and in an extremely similar manner to my grandmother’s descriptions of probably the same tests. She also knew she had an MRI (and named the wrong thing it was for) and kept saying it was tomorrow for a week, which is pretty comparable to how Trump has been talking about his MRIs.

Like, for a normal person in an assisted living facility, I’d say with his mix of ailments he might not even make it until the end of the year, but he has quite frankly the best access to healthcare of anyone in the entire world. We’re going to watch this poor man regress until there’s no sign of him left because his team refuses to publicly admit that their guy is dying. Honestly it feels like elder abuse, letting him act like a toddler on the world stage (which is what dementia does, its like the person regresses in age) instead of publicly announcing his decline and how his team will be reviewing his work and slowly taking over his duties as he becomes less capable, letting him decline not in the spotlight but in privacy. It’ll be an interesting next few years for sure, because I’ll be shocked if he survives to the end of his presidency

Ah so Chessboxing basically!

Hey it’s never too late to get things better under control! My parents only just started that journey and they’re old enough to be grandparents

Honestly the questions you’re posing require a level of market analysis that could fill an entire white paper and be sold for way more money than I want to think about. Its a level of market analysis I don’t want to dive into. My gut instinct from having worked in the tech industry, working with datacenters and datacenter hardware at large companies is that the AI industry will contract significantly when the bubble pops. I’m sure I could find real data to support this prediction but the level of analysis that would require and the hours of work are simply more than it’s worth for an internet comment.

You have factors including what hardware is being deployed to meet AI bubble demand, how the networking might be setup differently for AI compared to general GPU compute, who is deploying what hardware, what the baseline demand for GPU compute is if you simulate no present AI bubble, etc. etc. it’s super neat data analysis but I ain’t got the time nor appetite for that right now

That’s super interesting! I didn’t know other languages handled side thoughts better!

Whether or not specifically going out of your way to allow an aggressive driver past is definitely a matter of risk tolerance. Personally, when I’m on a 2 lane road (that’s one lane per direction of travel) I’ll typically simply set my cruise and not change my behavior other than slowing/moving right when it is a passing zone so that they can more easily and safely pass.

Where I live, the country roads are very lightly policed so some folks really test how fast they can go and maintain control of their vehicle on the curves and hills, many going 80+ on narrow 55mph roads with limited visibility and frequent deer, Amish buggies and farm equipment around blind curves. This practice works well for me here because it might prevent a fatal accident where some poor family was just trying to get to church and the speeder couldn’t see them in time, but more importantly I’m not disrupting my drive for other people’s insanity. I’ll continue to drive with my tolerance for breaking the law (which is extremely low), and other drivers can choose to drive at their tolerance level, and maybe the minor inconvenience of encountering vehicles that aren’t speeding excessively will help make the choice to speed excessively make less sense

So if someone wants to run a red light but isn’t first in line everyone should start running the red too so that they can run it? That’s basically what you’re demanding with your gospel of Keeping Pace

Or if we want to make this even more extreme (and less good of an analogy), if I see someone pouring drugs into a girl’s drink I should do absolutely nothing because I’m not a cop?

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Oh yeah machine learning as a technology will survive, and eventually it will be implemented where it can do what it’s really good at, but right now it’s being shoved into everything to do things it isn’t good at, so you end up with a super expensive to run, energy inefficient tool that runs worse than with traditional algorithms that can be run client side or on a single much cheaper server (I’m oversimplifying the server architecture for brevity)

Think customer service chatbots on ever car dealership’s website. Traditionally these were extremely simplistic and usually just had canned responses based on keywords in the customer’s written message and would quickly cascade the customer to a real customer service rep as soon as things got out of scope. Now with LLMs companies are running those as the customer service chatbots and the LLM can do anything from agreeing to sell a new car for a dollar to providing scam or invalid contact info to referring the customer to a competitor. There’s no knowing what the AI will do because it’s non-deterministic and you don’t want that in customer service!

Right now we’re in the bubble phase where every single company is finding some way to shoehorn AI into its business model so they can brag about it. Fucking Logitech added a remappable AI button that brings up a ChatGPT interface and just spends Logitech’s money on tokens with ChatGPT. That’s pure bubble behavior. Once the bubble pops we won’t have literally every single time you open a car dealership page spending an LLM token or 5, you won’t have Amazon running AI chatbots on every product page just for asking about that product, you won’t have every website just giving away free unrestricted access to LLMs. That’s what I’m talking about.

AI demand will drop when the bubble pops, and while it will be higher than it was 8 years ago, everyone is going to be very skeptical of anything AI, just like folks are still skeptical of mortgage backed securities over 15 years later, or just like people are skeptical of commerical websites without a clear method of financing 25 years after the dotcom bubble. People remember these things and will take a while to warm up to the idea again

Is there enough demand for thousands of servers with purpose built ARM processors (which may or may not have any publicly available kernel support) driving 4-8 600w a pop Nvidia datacenter chips though? Yes some will be repurposed but there simply won’t be the demand to fill immediately. Realistically what will happen is companies operating these datacenters will liquidate the racks, probably liquidate some of the datacenters entirely and thousands of servers will hit the secondhand market for next to nothing. While some datacenter structure city empty and unmaintained until they’re either bought up to be repurposed, bought up to be refurbished and brought back into datacenter use of torn down, just like an empty Super Walmart location

Some of the datacenters will be reworked for general compute, maybe a couple will maintain some AI capacity, but given the sheer quantity of compute being stood up for the AI bubble and the sheer scale of the bubble, basically every major tech company is likely to shrink significantly when the bubble pops, since we’re talking companies that currently have market caps measured in trillions, and literally a make up full quarter of the entire value of the New York Stock Exchange, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Remember how small the AI field was 6 years ago? It was purely the domain of academic research, fighting for scraps outside of a handful of companies big enough to invest in am AI engineer or two on the off chance they could make something useful for them. We’re probably looking at a correction back down to nearly that scale. People who have drank the coolaid will wake up one day and realize how shit the output of generative AI is compared to the average professional’s human work

they weren’t keeping pace

driving 75 mph in a 65 mph area

Why are you being intentionally obtuse?

Nobody should be peer pressured into breaking the law, especially when the risk can be literally life or death on top of risk of law enforcement interaction (which can be extremely bad for many people. Some jobs literally require zero traffic infractions and check regularly in order to maintain the job. Folks on parole or probation can be sent back to prison for a minor traffic infraction, at risk folks can experience racial profiling during traffic stops which can be deadly)

When it comes to breaking the law, everyone has a risk tolerance. Some folks that’s zero and they will follow every law they can, some will accept some risk of a minor fine but not more, and some will risk everything regularly. Just because you want to speed excessively doesn’t mean anyone else is obligated to enable you

Machine learning models have much different needs that crypto. Both run well on gaming GPUs and both run even better on much higher end GPUs, but ultimately machine learning models really really need fast memory because it loads the entire weights into graphics memory for processing. There’s some tools which will push it to system memory but these models are latency sensitive so crossing the CPU bus to pass 10s of gigabytes of data between the GPU and system memory is too much latency.

Machine learning also has the aspect of training vs inference, where the training portion will take a long time, will take less time with more/faster compute and you simply can’t do anything with the model while it’s training, meanwhile inference is still compute heavy it doesn’t require anywhere near as much as the training phase. So organizations will typically rent as much hardware as possible for the training phase to try to get the model running as quickly as possible so they can move on to making money as quickly as possible.

In terms of GPU availability this means they’re going to target high end GPUs, such as packing AI developer stations full of 4090s and whatever the heck Nvidia replaced the Tesla series with. Some of the new SOCs which have shared system/vram such as AMD’s and Apple’s new SOCs also fill a niche for AI developer and AI enthusiasts too since that enables large amounts of high speed video memory for relatively low cost. Realistically the biggest impact that AI is having on the Gaming GPU space is it’s changing the calculation that AMD, Nvidia and Intel are making when planning out their SKUs, so they’re likely being stingy on GPU memory specs for lower end GPUs to try to push anyone with specific AI models they’re looking to run to much more expensive GPUs

Huh I’d never looked into that! Thank you!

I mostly used zram because there’s an easy-peasy script in the Debian repos making it dead simple to setup and never looked deeper into it

Side thoughts in the middle of sentences are definitely weird in written form. Heck they get messy in spoken form too! Some punctuation to help the reader understand what’s being communicated can go a long way, and in the format of a forum discussion where folks will quickly tap out a brain fart from a 5" slab of plastic and glass, when I see what appear to be multiple sentences mashed together into one incoherent one, I’ll generally assume it’s a writing error, because folks don’t proof read, they aren’t writing literature with multiple drafts. They’re just quickly jotting down a thought or two and somethimes errors compound with that level of quick communication

If I am going the posted limit and others feel like speeding, why is it my job to get out of the way? Whether it’s a country road with intermittent passing lanes or a multi lane highway with plenty of lanes to the left, that’s their choice to speed but I ain’t risking my license because some chucklefucks choose to be hostile to anyone they share the road with

Whether they feel like speeding or running red lights, they’re going to have to contend with other drivers who don’t feel like breaking the law, and they’ll have to choose to either abide by best driving practices or to continue to be careless

Yikes you’re literally financing your hobby! Better financial move is to get a used system to start with (usually a used gaming PC can be had for like $500ish, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people online you can ask for help speccing something out), squirrel away money for a couple of years (I like to keep a dedicated savings account just for big purchases like tech upgrades. $40 biweekly dissearing into another account you don’t touch is $2k every 2 years, so a 4 year complete refresh cycle for 2 people) and buy when you feel like it. Good news is it’s a small enough amount of cash to easily right the financial ship but still yikes!

Are people throwing 128GB in for shits and giggles these days? I’m kinda out of the loop and still used to people arguing about if 32GB is excessive or not. Used to be only needed for media production and honestly it’s still debatable for pure gaming systems if more than 16GB is overkill

Its not just electricity but also water consumption, and noise pollution if not particulate pollution too.

They provide little benefit to the surrounding communities with very few jobs by design and just consume local resources at usually discounted bulk rates to sell a service that possibly nobody locally would be in the market for

Also the scariest part of this datacenter inflation is how much of these new data centers are going to be abandoned within the next 5 years when the AI bubble pops and suddenly the companies spending like crazy on datacenter growth need to cut back. There’ll be lots of big empty buildings outside of small towns costing taxpayers a ton of money, much like when any big box store closes up shop. You can either spend a ton of money tearing it down, a ton of money rebuilding it into something useful, a ton of money attracting another business which may or may not front the cost for remodeling the space or a ton of money maintaining the empty property so it doesn’t fall over and become even more of a blight. There’s no winning for these small municipalities that just get used and abused by large businesses