Capacity = capability. It allows them to build better models and run inference.

Other than openai and anthropic, all of the other top models right now are Chinese. That’s just the ones we know about too.

The US datacenters aren’t going to be selling capacity to the Chinese government and military.

I do not understand people who think everything that is happening in international politics is all at the surface level.

This type of action is one of the modern evolutions of war. China absolutely wants dominance in AI, they know how powerful a tool/weapon it can be. They will happily fund propaganda in other countries to improve their odds of winning the race.

Their infrastructure investments into other countries that give them leverage over resources, propping up Russia against Ukraine, hosting North Korean cyber espionage groups, threatening Taiwan, buying up companies, international real estate. The list goes on and on.

China has it’s fingers in everything. They want to become THE world superpower. They know they can’t fight their way to the top with military might anytime in the near future, so they’re investing in damaging the capabilities of western countries and propping up their own influence.

They’re actually doing a pretty good job of it too.

I’m sure the western countries are trying to do the same to China, but it’s hard to influence the Chinese population directly when China locked down most of the communications channels internally. They aren’t stupid.

Your example is bad.

I never said AI was good, though it is, I’m saying your argument against it is weak because you’re ignoring far worse problems to protest something that’s pretty minor in the scheme of things.

I’m calling you out for being a hypocrite and illogical.

If you were protesting all of the things that use too much water AND datacenters, I’d be okay with your argument. That’s just not what any of these protests are, because otherwise we’d see water use protests at beef farms and almond farms… and I don’t remember that happening anytime recently.

Almonds and Beef are just two examples of massive water uses that make the datacenters look like they’re trying to drink the ocean with a straw.

This is exactly my point, people aren’t using their brains with their anti-AI arguments. They’re very emotional responses rather than actual problems.

I love that you’re saying they’re worthless, and at the same time the ruling class is using them effectively to do something.

It’s a great argument.

Global beef production used approximately 264 trillion gallons. Quite literally 1000x more water.

For a single type of food.

Water for irrigation of peoples lawns is just under 3 trillion liters a year in the US, about 10x as much.

Where are the protests against that?

Nowhere, because people are sheep and can’t use their critical thinking skills.

This is like watching people yell at their kids to turn off the light in their room(which is an led) while leaving the AC running at home while they run out to the grocery store 10 miles away in a 7 seat SUV.

Missing the forest for the trees. The lot of you.

Different people like different things. Even despite my super busy life I still read a lot. It allows me to slow down a bit.

Try different types of books. I’m currently reading a lot of litrpg which is a fun genre related to fantasy.

So we’re okay with massive pollution as long as it employs people and tastes good?

The water use from global Beef production is on the order of 10 million times more than global datacenters, and yet people screaming bloody murder about the water usage for the data centers.

The noise from traffic down the road you live on is far worse for you than any sort of datacenter, and yet we’re okay with that. Infrasound weapons? That’s the same bullshit people said about Wind Turbines and there’s no scientific proof that any of that is valid at all.

Let’s be realistic about why people hate data centers, those are just excuses, people are afraid they’re going to get fired/laid off if it gets better established. That’s a realistic worry, and totally valid. Preventing a few data centers won’t stop that though.

I own some laser tag equipment that’s amazing hardware and has absolutely shitty software. I rebuilt the entire server side of the software stack using a local LLM (Qwen3.6 35B A3B) running on my laptop. I’m very happy with the outcome, I never could have done that myself.

“had asked ChatGPT what would happen if a human body was put in a garbage bag and thrown in a dumpster, days before they went missing.”

Answering that question isn’t a crime, nor is it actively helping them commit a crime.

There are legitimate reasons to ask that question that have nothing to do with committing a crime.

I have asked Google, and AI agents, many questions which if taken in the worst way would constitute a crime but I was doing so just to debate a topic, or look up a law. I know other people do it for writing. Some might do it to look up =criminal cases that they have seen reported in the news.

Has anyone ever taught you about the dysphemism treadmill and euphemism treadmill?

Banning words, or trying to reframe them as bad has never worked. It just pushes people to use different words that end up with the same meaning.

Sexism, Racism, Ageism, all the isms… they will always exist as long as more than a handful of humans exist. Humans in large groups are pretty terrible. We didn’t evolve to be particularly nice.

That applies equally to everything I said.

If they’re suing OpenAI, they should have already sued and won against the internet service provider, the computer manufacturer, Microsoft/Apple for the software, etc.

Or the gun companies.

Yet all of these companies have a free pass to facilitate crimes. Why should OpenAI be held to a higher standard than the rest of them? This is pure political theater.

You know what also allowed the Gunman to find information, ask questions about shootings, and shoot people?

The internet. Computers/Cellphones. Other Human Beings.

I get that people are looking for reasons to bash AI, because it’s scary as fuck. However people step back and realize how bad some of the other technologies that we have are. There were mass shootings started long before ChatGPT became a thing.

Oh, and guns. We invented guns. That was a bad idea.

The answer to that is yes… Everyone should be able to do a little bit of plumbing.

However you don’t need to a plumber every time you use the toilet so that’s a bad example.

The concern is scale, Someone cooks your food every time you eat. One person can only cook for a limited number of humans. It only takes a dozen people to actively provide water to every house in a city.

The problem with your argument is that humans need to eat somewhere between 2 and 5 times a day. Nothing else on your list comes anywhere close to that level of frequency or importance. Just because you learn how to cook doesn’t mean you have to cook every meal either. You should still just know how to do it.

That being said, there is an economic line where this matters. If you make $100 an hour, and have the opportunity to work overtime, cooking is a waste of your time unless you’re batch cooking or just doing it for enjoyment. However, If you’re making $12 an hour, the time cooking likely saves you more money than you would make working and then using that to pay for meals out. The actual tipping point will change depending on your wage and the cost of food.

I’m a bit of a wierdo in this, I have not once in my almost 40 years of life ever ordered food delivered to me. I’ve gone out to eat, I’ve picked up takeout myself, but I have never had food delivered to my home. I make enough for that to make sense, but I just don’t.

So many exceptions to that one that it’s useless. You absolutely can overpower bad technique in a lot of situations.

Go watch idiots break car windows in rescues. If you smash it hard enough, it will eventually break. Whereas a small tap with a sharp object in a corner can crack it with almost no force at all.

Except this one is actually false, you can in fact polish a turd. Here’s the Mythbusters clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

You’re right, chemistry was not your strong point. The sugars produced by photosynthesis are the ones that get turned into coal and oil. Plant respiration actually is the reverse of photosynthesis (it’s essentially human respiration) and is done for exactly the same reason that humans use it for, to produce energy for use by the plant. A plant just does more photosynthesis than respiration, which causes it to grow over time as it accumulates carbon based molecules and stores them.

If you take the holistic view, servers are already powered by photosynthesis. It just happens that most of them are powered by photo synthesis that occurred millions and millions of years ago.