Submitted 1 week ago by FoxtrotDeltaTango@sh.itjust.works to programmer_humor@programming.dev
https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/6c32a828-a75c-447a-a362-31abfb3b1573.jpeg
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/65410582
Fun Fact: the Panic of 1837 was caused by Andrew Jackson’s idiotic idea to pay off the national debt by stealing land and selling it, which crashed the real estate market. Jackson had also refused to continue the American central banking charter so there were basically no tools to fight it.
He is literally Trump’s favorite president. You know, the real estate guy fighting with the Fed.
Over 3,000 data centers are planned in the U.S., and I am not imagining they’re being built so everyone can generate slop to their heart’s content. Recent events like OpenAI becoming an official member of the military industrial complex and the F.B.I.’s deal with Flock make me think they’re largely being built as infrastructure for the digital cage.
Digital cage. I’m gonna make art using this prompt. Thank you.
Railroads replaced canals in the Midwest because the canals weren’t large enough to handle a lot of cargo, unlike the Suez or Panama canals. The canals here are maybe 20ft wide, and locks were maybe 50ft long. Trying to modify them to handle more cargo would have cost tremendous amounts of money and also disable the canals while they were being worked on.
Trains were simply able to carry significantly more cargo to their destination in less time
Pretty terrible metaphor as realistically even without AI we will never need less compute. Compute is awesome, it’s a good thing to have more. The problem is the environmental damage not anything else.
Ideally, we wouldn’t build infinite compute, just as much as we are actually using, and using it efficiently allows you to build less. We would still need datacenters even without LLMs, but they wouldn’t need to be so gargantuan, because even the worst, inefficient, nodejs-based, intern-written server you could ever encounter, would be heaps more efficient (or at least less demanding) than any LLM. This is true even from an economical point of view, or any practical point of view, not just environmental.
To quote Tannenbaum: “You know you have the right computer when you are always using 99% of it. If you are using 100%, you are being limited by the machine. If you are using 98% you have bought more than you need”. If datacenters were always running at 40%, we would build bigger ones.
That makes the metaphor imperfect, but the data centers are being paid with circular money that isn’t there, based on the assumption that AI will make obscene amounts of money to actually pay their bills when currently they’re losing lots of investor money to subsidize the price, and they’re already talking about transitioning to a usage based system, which might push some enterprises to use a FOSS alternative from China.
We’re in a bubble, when it pops it’s likely many data center projects will be abandoned before they’re done.
isn’t that a good thing though? let billionaires lose money then just don’t bail them out. Either way the datacenters will remain useful and might actually benefit real work. This is btw how we got a lot of open technologies where corporate overinvests and then community takes over.
It’d be like if the railroad went through the canal
The US profits a lot from having so many waterways. When they are usable, they literally are the cheapest and most efficient mode of transportation.
Just think, after the systems-manufactured destitute addicts clean out the rare metals from those industrial pustules, the whole country’s houseless will have homes, right?
Right?
The choice to compare data centers to canals rather than to railroads seems rather arbitrary.
It’s not arbitrary at all. In fact it’s the entire point.
Canals were at least solving a problem that actually existed and needed solving at the time when they were started. AI data centres are being built in anticipation of future demand, for use cases that haven’t been developed yet.
We will never need less processing though even if AI goes away.
A few years ago with ARM arriving at the data centers I envisioned there would be a day that density would go up and new data centers would be less in demand. I’m either too early or wrong.
ARM for big compute isn’t much more efficient than x86.
In economics, the Jevons paradox, or Jevons effect, is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource’s use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.
Unfortunately using less of a good thing isn’t how we do things.
I’m thinking you might have been wrong. Even without AI, I don’t foresee demand for compute going down. Even if everything went over to ARM, I think that would have just slowed the rate of new builds.
At least canals are still useful to have around for recreational watersports.
And transportation
Not really. Most of these old canals were only a couple yards/meters wide and dried up 100 years ago.
Ahh that sucks, we have quite a few of ours still
If they’re only a couple meters wide, how the heck are they supposed to fit watercraft?
The Internet has ruined me because I can’t read the word “watersports” without thinking of the fetish anymore.
Well I am sure some canals are next to dogging sites
Right, that’s what the canals are useful for, what did you think they meant?
Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Differencr that railway is still the absolute best and most efficient way
twopi@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Canals are more vastly more fuel efficient per kg of cargo. But rail is much faster.