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Posted
2 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

I, for one, welcome the guillotines. 

 

At this point, an increasingly larger percentage of Americans -- from various spots on the political spectrum -- feels similarly.

The hubris of the billionaire class will be their undoing.  The problem is, as if often the case in such situations, their well-being is too wrapped up in the functioning of the rest of society, so the collateral damage will be significant when it happens.

Plenty of folks have been shouting these warnings for years, including some intelligent and self-aware members of the billionaire class, but human ego, narcissism, and hubris are unstoppable forces.  They will stop only when they meet their brutal destruction, by which point it is way too late.

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Posted
5 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

At this point, an increasingly larger percentage of Americans -- from various spots on the political spectrum -- feels similarly.

The hubris of the billionaire class will be their undoing.  The problem is, as if often the case in such situations, their well-being is too wrapped up in the functioning of the rest of society, so the collateral damage will be significant when it happens.

Plenty of folks have been shouting these warnings for years, including some intelligent and self-aware members of the billionaire class, but human ego, narcissism, and hubris are unstoppable forces.  They will stop only when they meet their brutal destruction, by which point it is way too late.

4th turning. I mean this shit has all happened before already and it's not even that far off from the last time it happened. 

Teddy Roosevelt and trust busting. We are living in similar times, with similar technologies coming to change everything etc etc. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

 

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Posted
21 minutes ago, immamac said:

4th turning. I mean this shit has all happened before already and it's not even that far off from the last time it happened. 

Teddy Roosevelt and trust busting. We are living in similar times, with similar technologies coming to change everything etc etc. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

 

My great hope is that all of them seem to be pouring all of their energy and wealth into AI.....so when it collapses, it will take them down with it.

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Posted
Just now, Brisketexan said:

My great hope is that all of them seem to be pouring all of their energy and wealth into AI.....so when it collapses, it will take them down with it.

Mine is that we don't have to have a global scale war. 

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Posted
Is this water really not recycled over and over? Please tell me it’s not being pumped out of our aquifer 


FWIW, this generation of data centers are mostly closed loop cooling with little water usage. Up to about 2 or 3 years ago, most were evaporative cooling, which are the water hogs. The big techs switched to closed loop due to community pushback. One big example was in Uruguay, which was developing a Google dc while citizens were drinking brackish water due to a drought. But closed loop is much less efficient, resulting in more power usage.
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Posted
31 minutes ago, immamac said:

Mine is that we don't have to have a global scale war. 

 

Oh, my friend.  Hope is for suckers.  Despair following the rules of (1) it only gets worse, and (2) there is no bottom, is where it's at these days.  You should join us out on the ledge.  I think there's even room for you to lie down.

 

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Posted

But here's the thing with recycling that water... you can only recycle it so many times and then you have to get rid of it...

https://ketos.co/closed-loop-cooling-water-saver-or-chemical-time-bomb

Operators bleed a small fraction of water each month to keep these levels in check, a practice known as blow-down. Even a 2% monthly bleed sounds proactive, yet contaminants can still rise much faster than in open towers that take on fresh water continuously. Higher cycles push minerals out of solution, feed microbial slime, and shorten equipment life.

The bigger worry sits outside the fence. When blow-down finally leaves the site, it can carry nitrite, glycol, and heavy metals at thousands of times the limits set for surface waters. In other words, the water saved today may return tomorrow as a very different kind of liability.

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Posted
4 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

At this point, an increasingly larger percentage of Americans -- from various spots on the political spectrum -- feels similarly.

The hubris of the billionaire class will be their undoing.  The problem is, as if often the case in such situations, their well-being is too wrapped up in the functioning of the rest of society, so the collateral damage will be significant when it happens.

Plenty of folks have been shouting these warnings for years, including some intelligent and self-aware members of the billionaire class, but human ego, narcissism, and hubris are unstoppable forces.  They will stop only when they meet their brutal destruction, by which point it is way too late.

I read a great quote in a history book i just read "The History of History" which is a good, light read.

something like:

"the rich either agree to redistribute wealth and take a hit, and go on still being rich, or the poor cause a revolution and redistribute poverty to everyone".

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Posted
1 hour ago, Parliament said:

Why not put these data centers in the north?  So when the servers get hot all you gotta do is literally open the windows?

Serious question.

Or you could always go south...

Antarctica Eyed by Microsoft and Amazon for Future Cloud Data Centers

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Posted
5 hours ago, Parliament said:

Why not put these data centers in the north?  So when the servers get hot all you gotta do is literally open the windows?

Serious question.

like the northern United States? Mainly because they need to be generally close to the population they are serving. There's not exactly a bunch of internet run to the low population north, there's also not a lot of energy infrastructure.

Posted
6 hours ago, Todd Gack said:

I have a dumb question.  Why are these data centers low, flat buildings spread out over large areas instead of building up in high-rises?

It's kinda difficult to modify high-rise floorplates to accomodate subfloor water cooling loops, DC switchgear and battery rooms.  Then you need a place for an entire different chilled water plant (seperate from comfort air), along with a massive bank of diesel and/or turbine generators, multiple utility feeds and multiple service entries for private fiber and diverse telecom circuits.

So much utility infrastructure is involved that it only makes sense to build everything on a low, flat plane that starts life as slab-on-grade, reinforced tilt-wall structure.

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Posted
On 12/15/2025 at 9:00 PM, TwiceHorn said:

Yeah, what I'm saying is, it's not truly creative and therefore not an extension for creators.

But yeah, your point about expectation is excellent.  AI by its very nature delivers expectation.

In patent law, we adjudge the patentable to be that which is non-obvious, which basically means beyond rote expectation.  Not very far beyond in many cases, but at least somewhat.  And most patentable inventions are not terribly creative, or even at all.

And, interestingly, some of the better inventions come from recognizing a problem, and, once the problem is recognized, the solution is pretty rote.

What Cuban misses in his post, I think, is that he and people like him are incapable of thinking like a true creative, because all he is able to think in is sellable units. How can I move more widgets, how can I sell tickets at a higher profit margin, how can I get more eyes, more clicks, more conversions? How do I get more iteration? 

And he completely fails to understand that the joy of creating, genuine creativity, comes in part through loving the process. The musician, the artist, the writer, they do the thing because they love doing the thing, and they’d do it if there was money to be made or not. The brilliance in the true creativity is born out of a love of the process. But all he can consider is “if I offload the process to AI, I can sell more creativity.”

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Posted
Why not put these data centers in the north?  So when the servers get hot all you gotta do is literally open the windows?

Serious question.

As someone else mentioned, fiber connections-large and redundant- are critical for siting. Although, it’s less critical for an AI learning facility than most data centers.

Also, this generation of chips are mostly liquid cooled because their energy density is so high. It’s literally impossible to blow enough air to cool them. Some older data centers did just have outside air for cooling in colder climates, but that’s not practical now.
Posted
31 minutes ago, Tuco said:

Also, this generation of chips are mostly liquid cooled because their energy density is so high. It’s literally impossible to blow enough air to cool them. Some older data centers did just have outside air for cooling in colder climates, but that’s not practical now.

The density and power consumption of these things is unreal. 600 kilowatts through a single server rack is mind boggling, and then when you throw in closed loop cooling and heat pumps to move all that heat away from the chips... It's insane how much power is being burned on these things that don't actually make a profit



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