alienthrowaway

how much area do you need to radiate away 40 MW, assuming you want to keep your GPUs at a toasty 90 celcius. Every space datacenter fan/promoter enthuses about the free solar power, but forget to mention how the heat will be dissipated.

> He realises the current woe of things but doesn't realise he's been arguing with bot farms and teams of people hired just for this reason - to sow doom, arguments and engagement.

I've had the same kind of argument you'd swear was a bot with real people I know offline. The best explanation I could come up with was that they got radicalized online, was shameless about arguing in bad faith, and was willing to say heinous things in a group text, but refused to continue the discussion when I challenged them to do so IRL when I next met them - their electronic words towards me were particularly foul. Polarization, online echo-chambers, lack of consequences, and shamelessness have conspired to crater the quality of discourse and provide plenty of fuel for bots and psy-ops operators to fan the flames.

It's facetious when people question why BlackSky need to exist 40+ years after the "14 words" and in the age where White Christian Nationalism is completely mask-off.

HN often tolerates dog whistles about how school kids bussed from "the had part of town" are a net-negative, but BlackSky is suddenly the bad type of segregation? GTFOH.

> I'm going to guess that you're used to codebases that use an autoformatter.

I'm used to Python code being "Pythonic" - which is one of those "I know it when I see it" terms.

Hard-core tunnel engineering

You missed my point entirely. There was real value created during the dotcom boom too: Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Google, etc did not 'create fake problems'. Amidst the pearls of real value, were dozens/hundreds of overvalued, dogshit companies which never get a ROI for their investors, and the even marginally useful companies went under when the market correction hit.

There will be the WebVans of the AI boom era, we just don't know their names yet. There also will be Ciscos and Suns that will never reach their high-water mark ever again, or become obsolete in a few years, and sold for less that what people expect.

Back in the dotcom boom years, Internet adoption growth was real - with a lot of people and businesses paying real money to get online. And yet, the dotcom bust happened. The existence of paying customers adopting a technology does not assure the sustainability of the industry at any point in time.

> And a shitload of countries in the hold of some warlord or other despot, or like Libya

Ironic for you to being up Libya as its collapse was instigated by the same former colonisers that couldn't stand Qaddafi - France nad friends. The results were deplorable, unimaginable levels slavery and waves of immigration to Europe via Libya due to it's now-porous borders have in turn destabilised Europe. Combined with other "interventions" by western counties in the middle east - Afghanistan, Syria. The argument that imperialism results in stability is false on it's face given recent history starting from the moment the first missiles were fired to kick off the war on terror.

> It has been shown many times before, with this shitshow being the latest example, that most "third world" countries simply do not have a legal system in place that can cope with rich Western or new-rich Asian exploiteers

It's almost as if the colonisers designed it that way. Sowing division, encouraging corruption and infighting while the actual administration was done from abroad, and just enough of it to keep the resources flowing out without regard for any long-term societal improvement for the natives. The same old colonial resource-extraction companies are still exploiting the countries that are allegedly "independent", but whose leaders are thoroughly bribed and have bank accounts and "investments" in Luxembourg, France, Dubai, the UK and the US that the former-colonisers are aware off. You want them to return and do achieve which goals, exactly? Cock-block China? No one is naive enough to think recolonisation can have benevolent intentions or executed benevolently.

If the west has an appetite for another round of sustained guerilla warfare and terror-tactics, then direct political control is the way to go, if not, then they should consider maintaining the status quo of monetary and service imperialism enabled by corruption, the WTO, the World Bank, the petro-dollar and the USD as the global reserve currency.

> Trump won the popular vote.

He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.

> Developing them is expensive

So are the electric and cooling costs at Google's scale. Improving perf-per-watt efficiency can pay for itself. The fact that they keep iterating on it suggests it's not a negative-return exercise.

> And if he Chatbot is serving the ads when I’m using it for creative writing, reformatting text, having a python function, written, etc, I’m going to be annoyed and switch to a different product.

You may not even notice it when AI does a product placement when it's done opportunistically in creative writing (see Hollywood). There also are plenty of high-intent assistant-type AI tasks.

What are the pros of using CUDA-enabled devices for inference?

> You still have to be careful with supervision trees and parts of the tree restarting [...] Erlang gives you a good model to work with these problems but it doesn't allow you to completely turn off your brain.

Erlang gives architects the tools to restart as little, or as much of the tree as they like, so I hope they have their brains fully engaged when working on the infrastructure that underlies their projects. For complex projects, it's vital think long and hard about state-interactions and sub-system dependencies, but the upside for Erlang is that this infrastructure is separated from sequential code via behaviors, and if the organization is big enough, the behaviors will be owned by a dedicated infrastructure team (or person) and consumed by product teams, with clear demarcations of responsibilities.