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Tomasz Tunguz x.com
Does the token supply chain also experience the bullwhip effect? Here's my explanation of this classic phenomenon and what it means for AI data centers.
data centersphenomenonexplanation
The subject this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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20 September
19 September
18 September
17 September
16 September
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korrents.com
Nervous credit-market sentiment around the AI datacenter buildout could suddenly reverse and collapse the boom.Their words
And when market opinion is nervous, it might turn and collapse the boom at any moment.
15 September
From one piece The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formation 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
it was a chance to stand up to the oligarchs and this technology they've staked their future on.
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com
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Their words
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.
The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com
14 September
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Their words
AI data centers resulting in lower electricity prices for consumers
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Their words
If you consistently get the same particular negative reaction from people, it's best to model your own affect/behavior as the cause.
12 September
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Their words
the best way to think about AI is as another social, political, cultural and economic shock in the series of shocks that have been underway over the long industrial revolution.
How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com
10 September
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korrents.com
The simplest explanation for rising long-term interest rates is a surge in demand for funds from the AI boom.Their words
The simplest story consistent with the facts is that we’re seeing a surge in demand for funds as a result of the AI boom.
9 September
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Their words
the math community needs to adopt a version of the ethical standards of experimental science. If you are using AI agents, you can't just give a proof (formalized or not), but need to also provide a detailed explanation of how these agents were used to get the result.
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Their words
data centers are nowhere near the biggest climate problem with artificial intelligence.
7 September
6 September
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korrents.com
Rising concentration in the stock market is a feature of bull markets rather than a warning sign.Their words
Stock market concentration is a bull market phenomenon.
4 September
3 September
2 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Stoke's reusable launch vehicles will be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit within a few yearsTheir words
In a few years, Stoke's reusable launch vehicles are going to be shipping Starcloud's data centers into orbit.
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Their words
And yet, life expectancy about two years more than the national average is rather common in rich regions with selective migration, even in European countries with even access to health care, like France and Spain.
31 August
30 August
28 August
26 August
25 August
From one piece I think the data center backlash is mostly about data centers 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I have a long separate post here looking at the evidence we have, and I come away thinking the data center backlash is basically entirely homegrown.
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korrents.com
The data-centre backlash is about the buildings themselves, not about what people think of AI.Their words
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.
22 August
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Their words
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.
21 August
From one piece A year in, the data center/AI battle starts to clarify 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The buildout of AI data centers is part of a broader extension of oligarchic control over people's lives.Their words
It's clear by now that this is all part of the extension of oligarchic control over our lives.
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korrents.com
AI and the data-center buildout underlying it pose real and significant dangers to society.Their words
Its's clear by now that AI, and the data center development underlying it, pose real and significant dangers.
20 August
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Their words
He ruled out all the actual, measurable variables because they were an imperfect explanation, and instead offers a vague, diffuse variable, for which he has no measure, and which is not actually included in his model.
We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com
19 August
18 August
16 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal ExperienceTheir words
It’s one of those things that make perfect sense once you think about it. Great book, very important premise and a short and concise explanation. Can’t recommend enough.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
CodeTheir words
Woah, what a ride! An excellent explanation of how computers work, starting from scratch. Really, from scratch.
14 August
13 August
12 August
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Their words
they found that Big Oil's use of AI to produce more oil and gas could create 3.3 to 13.3 times more climate pollution than powering AI's data centers.
11 August
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Their words
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.
10 August
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korrents.com
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least.Their words
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.
9 August
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korrents.com
Opposition to data center buildouts is fundamentally driven by public anger about money in politics.Their words
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.
8 August
5 August
4 August
3 August
2 August
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korrents.com
When a decision is called too complex to make, the real explanation is almost always weak leadership.Their words
what I definitely learned is like most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't. Leadership's just weak.
24 July
23 July
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30 June
From one piece Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) – AI disproved a famous math conjecture. Now what? 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I kind of suspect that actually they'll also be like quite good at doing that and probably just like better than most humans are at like doing the explanation half and distilling half and that's actually not what's left for the mathematicians is like digesting and and explaining what was going on.
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One is it seems like there's a really strong correlation between the people who come up with genuinely novel insights and also who are actually quite clear in their communication of it.
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Their words
I think we would always still prefer like a human that we had a relationship with because the way that we get motivated to be interesting interested in things is a social phenomenon.
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Um even if it's proven just like there is a difference between proof and explanation.
26 May
20 May
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Their words
And what this is is that in the guide level explanation, you explain your feature as if you were writing a guide as if the feature already existed. And in the reference level explanation, you explain your feature again as if it already existed, but as if it would be in the language reference instead of a tutorial.
13 May
From one piece Why Anthropic’s ultra-dirty deal shouldn’t surprise you at all 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there is nothing fundamentally inherent to the concept of a building full of computers that causes choking air pollution, water impacts and climate change.
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Their words
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.
8 May
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Their words
And so one possible explanation for that is just that there's only a handful of generations maybe five over which the natural selection would operate. And so maybe if the selection was 2% a generation you would still only see maybe a 10% compounded effect and there's just not enough time to detect it. But the Bronze Age is not 300 years, it's 3,000 years. It's the power of compound interest and you have enough time to begin to see a strong effect.
5 May
2 May
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Their words
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).
1 May
From one piece The exact wrong lesson to learn from data centre infrasound fears 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI data centres cannot be meaningfully reformed without a fundamental change of course and ideology in the industry.Their words
Reformation is impossible for AI data centres, at least, not without a massive change of course and an ideological reckoning.
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korrents.com
Data centres are being built in such number, size and speed that the industry cannot realistically be reformed.Their words
There are simply too many data centres being built, and they're too big, being built too fast.
30 April
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korrents.com
Data centres will become the majority driver of electricity demand growth in Australia's National Electricity Market.Their words
Even if a small fraction of this pipeline ends up operational, data centres will drive far more than 50% of demand growth in the NEM.
24 April
7 April
From one piece Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And I think the like the third and the most interesting possibility is no, that like they're they're a new type of object in some in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as as explanations, but where in the past we haven't had the ability to really do anything with them.
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Their words
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
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korrents.com
Once an explanation is revealed, people tend to believe they already knew it, even when they did not.Their words
Once you see the answer it's easy to believe that you already knew
23 March
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Their words
Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.
20 March
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Their words
so for example, micro GPT, like I asked I tried to get an agent to write micro GPT. So, I told it like try to boil down the simplest things. Like try to boil down my um neural network training to the simplest thing and it can't do it.
13 March
From one piece Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Getting a data centre permitted in the empty middle of America is far easier than putting one in orbit.Their words
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
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Their words
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.
11 March
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Their words
And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. And it’s because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.
22 February
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korrents.com
Third-party frontier AI auditing is urgently needed and would help prevent extreme concentration of power.Their words
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.
We're in Triage Mode for AI Policymilesbrundage.substack.com
13 February
From one piece Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential” 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
12 February
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Their words
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.
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Their words
microgpt “hallucinating” a name like “karia” is the same phenomenon as ChatGPT confidently stating a false fact.
10 February
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Their words
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
Space AI: I guess we’re doing Moon factories nowcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
6 February
From one piece Why I joined OpenAI 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
eBPF, Ftrace, and hardware performance counters are proven tools for finding datacenter performance wins.Their words
given those technologies are proven for finding datacenter performance wins, it seems likely
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korrents.com
AI datacenter growth makes performance engineering critical for saving the planet, not just cutting costs.Their words
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.
8 January
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Their words
I don’t think this is very productive (expert users of a piece of software are notoriously bad at being able to tell if an explanation will be clear to non-experts), so I needed to find a way to identify problems with the man pages that was a little more evidence-based.
7 January
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness ItTheir words
can lead to imposter phenomenon. In this book, a leading psychologist looks at the science behind our inner voice and new research into how to harness it and improve your physical and mental health.
8 December 2025
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Their words
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.
20 November 2025
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Their words
Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.
11 October 2025
From one piece The AI water issue is fake 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A data centre earns its county far more tax revenue per gallon of water than a golf course does.Their words
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:
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Their words
It’s very common that I’m told that data centers poison the water around them.
30 September 2025
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korrents.com
Telegram has never shared a single private message with anyone, governments and intelligence services included.Their words
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.
21 September 2025
30 August 2025
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korrents.com
American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.Their words, before
Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day.
Their words now
So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.
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Their words
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.
I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumptionconstruction-physics.com
22 August 2025
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korrents.com
Clinical diagnosis can have a therapeutic effect independent of any other intervention.Their words
Their experiences highlight a striking, neglected and unchristened medical phenomenon: The therapeutic effect of a clinical diagnosis, independent of any other intervention, where clinical diagnosis refers to situating the person's experiences into a clinical category by a clinician or the patient.
15 August 2025
From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
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Their words
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.
13 August 2025
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Their words
The trade deficits have widened since Trump, right? They haven’t closed the imbalance with China and with the rest of the world because ultimately the US saves less than it invests. And that’s a macrophenomenon. It’s not a trade phenomenon
3 August 2025
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korrents.com
A performance test without an explanation of its limiting factor should be treated as unanalyzed and possibly bogus.Their words
Any performance test should be accompanied by an explanation of the limiting factor, since no explanation will reveal the test wasn't analyzed and the result may be bogus.
31 July 2025
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Their words
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him, his anda was a questionable relationship but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
9 July 2025
14 June 2025
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Their words
I don’t believe it’s providing a kind of formal explanation of the different positions. It’s just saying which position is better or not that you can intuit as a human being, and then from that, we humans can construct a theory of the matter.
11 May 2025
6 May 2025
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Their words
Unless you’re an extreme power user, asking AI questions every day is still a rounding error on your total electricity footprint.
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?hannahritchie.substack.com
5 May 2025
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Their words
But then I think that there’s a confusion that dead stars, these very, very massive stars that die, are synonymous with the phenomenon of black hole. And it’s really not the case. Black holes are more general and more fundamental than just the death state of a star.
4 May 2025
13 March 2025
12 March 2025
13 January 2025
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korrents.com
If the AI build-out does become a bubble, power and data centres are the assets that will carry it.Their words
In today’s world, I think the increase in self-fulfilling asset prices will be due to power and data centers.
1 January 2025
31 December 2024
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Their words
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.
10 June 2024
From one piece How to Build an AI Data Center 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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.
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korrents.com
Available power, not land or capital, is what now limits how many data centres get built.Their words
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
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Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.
22 April 2024
From one piece Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
That is absolutely possible. I’m actually putting less credence on that one just because you need to happen every single time. If even one, I mean, this goes back to John von Neumann pointed out that you don’t need to send the aliens around the galaxy. You can build self-reproducing probes and send them around the galaxy.
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korrents.com
The simplest explanation for why we have never noticed an alien civilization is that there are none out there.Their words
But I think your intuition is right that it would’ve been easy for there to be lots of civilizations then we would’ve noticed them already and we haven’t. Absolutely the simplest explanation for why we haven’t is that they’re not there.
18 April 2024
From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The cooling systems in most data centers are energy hogs and contribute no direct value.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Efforts to improve efficiency and remove vestigial features pay off handsomely.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Deleting the UPSs could knock off ~$750/kW after considering equipment, installation, and square footage reduction.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
+ 2 more
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Their words
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.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
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Their words
Some efforts, like nuclear-powered data centers, are reminiscent of Toyota's hydrogen push.
How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site
4 April 2024
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Their words
The copper backplane in the data center rack is effectively the new advanced packaging in the system-level Moore’s Law race.
9 February 2024
12 January 2023
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Their words
Our best explanation is that the UK adopted what we call the globalized system of procurement, privatizing planning functions to consultants and privatizing risk to contractors, which creates more conflict; the UK also has an unusually high soft cost factor.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
7 December 2022
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Their words
It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.
Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com
7 September 2022
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korrents.com
Life probably arose only once on Earth, and the deep split between bacteria and archaea is the evidence for it.Their words
But there’s a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they’re not quite as diverse, but nearly, and they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account, as well, for why they’re so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.
8 May 2022
1 February 2021
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korrents.com
Body fat is biologically regulated, so losing weight provokes a starvation response that pushes the weight back on.Their words
This is a phenomenon I call the “starvation response”, and it happens because body fat mass is biologically regulated.
3 September 2019
Nothing matches.
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