I’ve never heard anyone say “we need less data centers” until ai came along. What, all the other data centers are totally fine but the ones being used for ai are evil? If you have an issue with the drastically increased power consumption for ai you should be able to argue a stance that is inclusive of all data centers - assuming it’s something you give a fuck about. Which you don’t.

AI data centers take up substantially more power than regular ones. Nobody was talking about spinning up nuclear reactors or buying out the next several years of turbine manufacturing for non-AI datacenters. Hell, Microsoft gave money to a fusion startup to build a reactor, they’ve already broken ground, but it’s far from proven that they can actually make net power with fusion. They actually think they can supply power by 2028. This is delusion driven by an impossible goal of reaching AGI with current models.

Your whole post is missing out on the difference in scale involved. GPU power consumption isn’t comparable to standard web servers at all.

. . . the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.

People understand the idea of instantaneous speed intuitively. The trouble is giving it a rigorous mathematical foundation, and that’s what calculus does. Take away the rigor, and you can teach the basic ideas to anyone with some exposure to algebra. 6th grade, maybe earlier. It’s not particularly remarkable or even that useful for most people.

When you go into a college major that requires calculus, they tend to make you take it all over again no matter if you took it in high school or not.

Probability and statistics are far more important. We run into them constantly in daily life, and most people do not have a firm grounding in them.

Just had a conversation about this. I’ll copypasta what I said there.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

tl;dr: they’re all in on AI (their own model, FastGPT, which is terrible), they make some very questionable business decisions with limited funds, and have a poor understanding of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) actually is.

I could compromise on some of these things, but if I’m going to pay for their service as a Google alternative, I need to compromise less than I do with Google already.

No, that’s exactly what this is about. They came right out and said as much. It won’t work, but they’ll cause a lot of damage in the process of failing.

Correct; nothing you can’t solve with a cheap iFixIt-knockoff toolset from Aliexpress.

This is why SD card mods are important for optical disc consoles. The OG hardware just isn’t going to last.

The problem this time around is that companies think junior developers can be replaced with AI. This is delusion. Some think they can replace senior developers with AI. This is LSD heroic dose delusion.

These delusions will work themselves out in a few years, after a very painful burst bubble, but right now it means junior developers aren’t getting hired. In 10 years, there will be a shortage of senior developers because all the missing juniors now will translate into missing seniors then.

Tucker, you need to learn to move on when your love interest won’t go out with you.

Maybe they have him confused with Chris Tucker. I can see the resemblance.

Rollercoaster Tycoon was the last of an era, not a sudden burst of genius.

Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly. Doom was a shock to the industry. You could now write a high performance, multiplatform, sophisticated game in a compiled language ©. When I say multiplatform, I don’t just mean how it was ported to everything later. It was developed on NextStations first. DOS was the first port. So it proved all of the above immediately on release.

We take for granted that C is performant now, but that wasn’t obvious until optimizing compilers got good and someone tried.

Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) is the last notable title that used ASM. It’s impressive in many ways, but it wasn’t as much of a standout as it seems now. Six years earlier to its release, that was just how games were done.

It’s notable that the only port of Rollercoaster Tycoon was the original Xbox, which was also x86. Nobody wants to rewrite it for anything else.

I know it’s a joke, but the idea that NAT has any business existing makes me angry. It’s a hack that causes real headaches for network admins and protocol design. The effects are mostly hidden from end users because those two groups have twisted things in knots to make sure end users don’t notice too much. The Internet is more centralized and controlled because of it.

No, it is not a security feature. That’s a laughable claim that shows you shouldn’t be allowed near a firewall.

Fortunately, Google reports that IPv6 adoption is close to cracking 50%.

You know you’re in the right communities when Hulk Hogan dies and everyone says “fuck that guy”.

Why are all my variables suddenly named after SS officers?