[1/2] https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-pause-the-data-center-boom?nowrapper=true https://stallman.org/actionnetwork-letter-instructions.html US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to support a bill to for a moratorium on construction of data centers I suggest you eliminate the term "AI" from your letter. You might say "pretend intelligence" instead. See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not
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the jev release is giving react major version drop vibes. just a massive crashing wave, everyone rethinking fundamental stuff and thinking through the implications of a novel new primitive.
one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.
I do not think those running the government testing understand what is going on, and believe they are reacting basically on vibes and what various trusted people tell them.
All this combined with the survey data on Americans’ stated reasons for opposing data centers makes me think that attitudes toward AI are probably a meaningful factor for a minority of people opposed to data centers, but I don’t think the backlash overall is driven by people’s thoughts on AI.
Preventing companies from building data centers in America wouldn't slow down the rate of progress in AI. It would merely slow down the rate of progress in AI in America.
The fastest-growing political movement in America is dead-set on stopping the construction of data centers, which are critical to the growth of the fastest-growing industry in America.
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
His Lansing rally with Bernie and AOC, more than anything else, crystallized the connection between data center opposition and voters' anger about money in politics.
So, here I actually think it's even stronger. The thing with C++ is that if you make a mistake, right, in in JavaScript, maybe you take down your server, which is already bad enough, but in C++ when you make a mistake there, now it's actually a security vulnerability most of the time.
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
The fundamental drivers of this change are panic and impatience, and that is what is behind the worst impacts of data centre growth, including a material risk to decarbonisation and climate action.
So that's unfortunate, and that's why some environments like Go, for example, has has Go routines and green threads, which are really language emulated lightweight threads that kind of do what I'm talking about, but but at a much lower cost. But you avoid the function coloring. So there is a bunch of different things, but but you know, but for an environment that already exists like JavaScript or like C# and and the Windows event loop and and whatever, this this was the right solution.
And we we full well knew that there was absolutely zero chance that we would appeal to the JavaScript ecosystem with a proprietary programming language licensed from Microsoft. No. No one was going to come. It had to be open source. There was just no two ways about it, right?
So, if we're checking 99% instead of 100%, well, heck, that's better than the 0% that JavaScript checked, right? And it gives you like language features that no other languages can provide because they can't get to 100%.
This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).
As the software industry is largely driven by trends and fashion, React's "cool factor" led to a mass amnesia regarding how to make normal, well-designed web apps made of HTML with a sprinkling of scripting on top and everything became one big tangled, brittle mass of Javascript that completely keeled over when scripting wasn't available.
none of us wanted to go through that extreme but lots of time when you are under a lot of pressure and no time to react other than just to survive that scale that keep on coming at you, you have to make uh decision that increase uh speed and velocity because speed and velocity allow us to build quick enough to survive
um humanoid robots maybe start to or robotics at least start to but the main factor is going to be for reducing the number of people is modularizing things and making them in factories in Asia
Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck is compute and for that the longest lead time supply chains are not power or data centers. They're actually the semiconductor supply chain themselves, right? It switches back from being power and data center uh as a major bottleneck to chips.
oh 50 gigawatts of economic you know sort of capex in in the data center and what gets built on top of that in terms of tokens is even larger right it might be hundred billion dollars worth of AI value into the supply chain is held up by this $1.2 two billion dollars worth of tooling that simply just cannot expand its supply chain quickly.
And so I think people are figuring out how to build these things and permitting like I I just like ultimately like permitting and red tape in middle of nowhere Texas or middle of nowhere Wyoming or middle of nowhere like New Mexico is probably a hell of a lot easier than sending stuff into space
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
I think frontier AI auditing (covering both safety and security) is both urgently needed and doable, and can help avoid extreme concentration of power, since it introduces external oversight into the decision-making of people with a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" at their disposal.
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
I actually think profitability happens when you underestimated the amount of demand you were going to get and loss happens when you overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get because you're buying the data centers ahead of time.
but it's not an infinitely compelling product, and I don't think even AGI or powerful AI or country of geniuses in a data center will be an infinitely compelling product. It will be a compelling product enough maybe to get three or five or 10x a year growth even when you're in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which is extremely hard to do and has never been done in history before, but not infinitely fast.
on the basic hypothesis of you know, as you put it, within 10 years we'll get to, you know, you know, what I call kind of country of geniuses in a data center. I'm at like 90% on that. Um and it's hard to go much higher than 90% cuz the world is so unpredictable.
But then you actually sit down and do the maths, and then for most people if you just skip one burger per month, that compensates the, the CO2 output, or, like, the water use in equivalent of tokens.
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
I've realized that performance engineering as we know it may not be enough - I'm thinking of new engineering methods so that we can find bigger optimizations than we have before, and find them faster.
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs - it's about saving the planet.
To be clear, speed in itself does not mean labor markets and employment won’t eventually recover, it just implies the short-term transition will be unusually painful compared to past technologies, since humans and labor markets are slow to react and to equilibrate.
elements, JavaScript reigns supreme. SvelteKit's efficiency and reactivity make it my framework of choice, and TypeScript's type annotations bring a welcome layer of confidence to my codebase.
On the flip side, these captive solar power plants will be curtailing approximately 75% of their generated power and will be able to provide net power on all but a few days per year.
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
No, never. Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, including governments and intelligence services. If you try to access any server in any of the data center locations, it's all encrypted.
However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.
We're not going to run out of natural gas at 1 gawatt per year indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing 5 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gawatt per year? Like, you can you can just break the situation.
actually it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you if you've got like three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just like you can dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or or um or training.
But then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.
I used to think it required more churn to get progress to stay on the leading edge of new stuff. And I wrote this before I experienced the indignity of the 2010s in the JavaScript community.
But the metaverse and 3D gaming in general needs something that's rather more powerful, more safe, more scalable, and more capable than JavaScript because the metaverse is actually a more difficult technical problem than a webpage.
As a Python and JavaScript programmer my favorite models right now are Claude 3.7 Sonnet with thinking turned on, OpenAI’s o3-mini-high and GPT-4o with Code Interpreter (for Python).
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
Before this book I used to think that Javascript is "bad" or a "hacky" language. This book changed my perspective, understanding some tradeoffs and some remarkable strengths of this weakly typed language that is starting to take over the world. Note that this book is now dated
when you send someone a link to a post, they can't read it without loading the entire Mastodon frontend app into their browser, which will is a monster React codebase that will break if they have scripting disabled and also can take up to 30 seconds on older hardware.
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
My hot take is that JS has the lowest bar of entry to building and being productive (a good thing) but one of the highest bars of any language and stack to building high quality, stable, and reliable software. Very few devs have the expertise to pull off the latter
Yeah, it is interesting because, when people react against you by saying you are being arrogant about this, 99.999% of the time, all they mean is I disagree. That’s all they really mean, right?
The 100-megawatt facility might have ten 10-megawatt blocks served directly by a 1500V DC feeder line without connections to other blocks that would require extra switches and routing.
One thing that drives me crazy about the React ecosystem, and more specifically "tech influencers" and "thought leaders" in the space, is the infantilization of the developers using and working in it. I’m tired of reading takes like TypeScript generics, mapped types, etc should only be needed and used by library authors for most use cases. Or today’s discourse; Don’t use `useCallback’, ‘useMemo’, and React.memo. If you’re building anything beyond a simple CRUD app or a an incredibly focused app with few features, you _will_ need these features.
RSC is the future of React. The React team has made this very clear and we are lucky to be in touch with their amazing team members to help us along this path.
I have argued that the probability of a bad equilibrium is only marginally influenced by the level of debt, but can be much reduced by a contingent rule making the primary balance react to an increase in debt service.
Multipliers are likely to vary a lot over time and space, but the bulk of the evidence is that they are different from zero, positive for spending, negative for taxes, and that they are stronger when monetary policy does not or cannot react to fiscal policy.
Did you know, the tests you write with react-testing-library look almost identical to the tests you write with vue-testing-library. Magic things happen when you don't test implementation details. :)
Visual Studio Code is the go-to editor for some complex languages like React using JSX or TypeScript and I finally agreed with Wes Bos that VS Code is better for development of React JS.
JavaScript allows us to mask network latency altogether. Applying this as a design principle should even remove most spinners or “loading” messages from your applications.
For text editing that is not specifically related to programming the Mac and iOS, I rely heavily upon BBEdit, where I do most of my Python, HTML, JavaScript and PHP editing.
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