I don’t really view it as a humiliation. I’m slightly more surprised UK joined than I am surprised UK left, given their stature on the world stage throughout the past handful of centuries. A country doesn’t give up much culture or autonomy or individuality by joining but it’s enough that I’d figure UK wouldn’t wanna move in that direction in the first place

Energy is zero sum. If you’re throwing away carbon neutral energy you could instead use that energy to displace consumption of energy that would otherwise be produced by coal or whatnot.

Furthermore, many of these data centers use evaporative cooling as opposed to a sealed system and water indeed goes right out and into the atmosphere. There are limitless articles discussing this and the footprint

Edit: I should add that the whole zero sum aspect of energy is why things that ‘scrub carbon’ are a pipe dream. That stuff often requires so much energy to produce that, even if it were made from solar or whatever, there’s always a more positive impact simply by taking that energy and using it to reduce energy production that emits all the carbon in the first place. Consumption is still the crux of the problem at this point and to look at anything that requires gobs of energy and uses clean energy as some insular thing that is separate from things that use dirty energy is not a good way to look at things

Sure, when looking at statistics behind fatal crashes, but when looking at other metrics such as ‘deciding to park in a lane next to a concrete support under an overpass in order to look for damage after a fender bender in rush hour traffic’ California is probably right up there. Oddly specific because I’ve only ever seen California drivers do that (multiple even)

Yeah and the problem I’m pointing to has nothing to with electrical infrastructure and instead the sheer amount of energy wasted on bullshit.

You could have fantastic electrical infrastructure but if people are consuming literal gigawatt hours and boiling municipal water dry making Garfield and Shrek comics, that’s the problem. Where does this energy come from? How is the copious amount of heat dealth with? Those are the corollaries

It’s seriously the biggest waste of energy in human existence and it’s staring at you right in the face. Gotta be blind to miss it

Infrastructure in this case refers to the data centers and LLMs. It takes hundreds of megawatt hours to train a single current-gen LLM and who knows how many gigawatts of energy are being consumed by the sum of LLMs at any given point but it likely dwarfs the sum of all energy spent training LLMs.

But then there’s the energy involved in producing those cards, shipping those cards, the data centers themselves.

It wouldn’t be preposterous to suggest that the sum of energy spent at any given time on generative AI is enough to power New York City. Might even be well more than

The whole planet is threatened by AI. If you look at the amount of energy needed not only to power the infrastructure, but the energy needed to create the infrastructure, and compare it to the work produced, and the energy needed for humans to produce equivalent work, it’s totally fucked and dumb as hell

Edit: to elaborate, there was this commercial for a Google Pixel I saw, people in group chat talking about a football game, person says “create an image of football gloves made out of butter”. .08kWh later that image gets posted in chat for a chuckle. Dude, just say “gloves made of butter? smdh” Lady laying in bed talking to a glorified chatbot, just hop on Lemmy or reconnect with an old friend and save .16kWh. These are the most common use cases for AI, basically finessing a prompt a dozen times to make a Shrek and Garlfield comic that winds up in some Facebook group with 9 likes. Multiply those figures a couple million times tho and it’s like holy shit. We somehow went from extremely low-bandwidth words to high bandwidth Youtube and Tiktok to the messiest bullshit humans have ever invented, to do things we could easily do with characters on a keyboard

I’d argue that monopolization and subscription models have led to mega caps actively stifling innovation. Why get into a frantic rat race of better and better, only improve when the revenue starts drying up

I think the sad thing is that if Trump has any hard skills, it’s probably reading fine print in contracts to find gaps or flimsy ambiguous wording, so he’ll probably just get worked up over the fact that Biden won this battle and go be dumb elsewhere.

It would be funny if he was mega dumb and just cancelled it all but he basically carved out a name for himself by being a weasel so that’s unlikely.

Props on Biden for the one finger salute tho lol

Trump actually can’t do that in this scenario (well he can but it’ll royally fuck him over) which is kind of funny.

If it was in the budget and money was handed out at intervals via appropriation he could just turn the faucet off, but since it’s a loan and the principal disbursed to the debtor, it falls into contract law, which is very pro-contract with probably a couple centuries of precedent.

Boiled down, only way a creditor can force a debtor to pay the remaining principal in full outside the terms of the contract is if they put an Acceleration Clause in the contract. Usually those are thrown into loans in order to recover any collateral in the event the debtor does not fulfill the terms of the contract. IE: someone quits making car payments for enough time, repo guy shows up, they auction car and apply it to the balance and demand the rest due immediately.

But acceleration clauses in practically every contract ever drafted, they’re contingent on the debtor’s performance in upholding the terms of the contract, so they almost always come into play if and only if the debtor quits performing their duties.

So without that, or if the acceleration clause isn’t applicable, debtor almost always has the right but not the obligation to pay early, creditor has no right to do the same, and creditor’s only real way to get out of the loan is to sell the rights to the debt (the servicing) to someone else, or to issue a COD (cancellation of debt). Cancellation is as it sounds, they just tear up the contract and let the debtor walk away (edit: I should note that the unfulfilled obligation is treated as taxable income for the debtor, like a gift of sorts, so they gotta pay tax on it and then walk away, but slightly pedantic). Debtor keeps whatever you gave them, debtor no longer has a contractual obligation to pay you back. It’s almost always used alongside negotiation, for example bankruptcy, they might say “if you give us this much money we’ll eat the rest of the loss”, kinda compel someone to pay that creditor first and give the creditor some way to try to wring out a couple bucks that would otherwise be a pain in the ass to collect.

So basically Trump’s only real option is to sell the debt or just do some big loan forgiveness thing lol