"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Why then are our European ThinkTanks sounding the alarm because USA has 75% of worldwide FLOPS while we in Europa only have about 5% if datacenters are so unimportant?
They think we will be USAs Vassal!
Please, dont stop the hate against datacenters in usa. Youre doing us a favor! π
Ehh, this post just makes me wish they had finished a badass canal network
or kept and expanded on the rail route
They did keep and expand on the rail routes! The US had an awesome rail network, including extensive passenger rail, until roughly the 1950s.
Yup, large automakers bought up a lot of rail lines, especially local inter- and intracities, and tore out the tracks as part of the highway program. My hometown had extensive tram lines (and a halfway built subway that we ran out of money for in the 20s) that got ripped up when I75 got built.
A lot of cities also just did this of their own accord, partially to enforce segregation and redlining. Awful harder for black and brown people to get to your Rich White Neighborhood if there's no train or bus service to easily take them there.
Americans aren't car brained, they're trapped in a system they didn't build and can't control.
A distinction without a difference.
A mouse raised in a cage will be cage-brained.
Too many USAians can't imagine life without driving a car, the same way that mouse can't imagine a forest.
How do you expect someone to imagine life without a car, when they live in an area where you have to drive three miles to get to the nearest store, and there are no sidewalks or bike lanes?
Can you really shame the caged mouse for being unable to imagine a forest?
Who framed Roger rabbit?
Not to mention that they were able to run the new interstate highways right through Black neighborhoods.
Something something forcing a shiny, new technology into places it doesn't belong so that big corporations could profit, disrupting whole communities, and causing massive environmental and health problems. Can't quite put my finger on what the analogy might be, though...
There's also a fundamental infrastructure problem in that it's more impressive to say "I've just signed off on this impressive new project on which we are breaking ground" than to say "We are continuing or maintaining the project that the last guy built." New is sexy. Old and functional is boring.
That's fair, and personally I love the idea too, but as someone who grew up in a city with a major commercially-significant canal, it's a bit overrated in reality and you are probably underestimating the traffic chaos it causes. Bridges can cause huge delays, are vulnerable to extremely dangerous allisions, and strictly limit the size of ship that can get through the canal. Even with tunnels, which likewise limit the size of truck that can go through, the constant maintenance (and cost, and lack of expandability over time) is a real bummer. If you're willing to limit it to relatively small ships like they do in Europe it's potentially manageable without too much fuss, but if you want big bulkers and container ships traveling deep inland you're going to find your road network ends up chopped up into loosely connected islands with big delays and traffic bottlenecks real quick. It's a pretty big compromise.
Trains do a much better job of interoperating and coexisting with existing road networks without majorly disrupting them. (and for what it's worth, canals mess up train networks just as bad if not worse than they mess up road networks)
I live right near a canal that was completed in 1832, and it was essential and a massive success.
Many people know the story of Canada (or Britain and its North American colonists) burning down the White House. It wasn't just the White House though, it was a bunch of public buildings in Washington including the White House, the Capitol and the Washington Navy Yard. What people don't know is that this was in retaliation for the Americans burning and looting York (today's Toronto), which was at that point a small town and the capital of the province of Upper Canada. The Americans broke the laws of war when they did that, so there was a temptation to do the same to them in Washington, but cooler heads prevailed and only the public buildings were burned.
After the war of 1812 ended, the British realized how vulnerable Canada was to the Americans. In particular, the only way to ship things from Montreal to the strategically important towns to the west (Kingston, York, etc.) was down the Saint Lawrence seaway, and the Americans controlled the lower bank of that route. As a result, the British decided to build the Rideau Canal, so goods could be shipped from Montreal to Kingston (and then from there onto the Great Lakes) while avoiding the choke points on the St. Lawrence.
The Canal was finished in 1832 and it was a huge success. Not only did it protect Canadian shipping from a possible US attack, it also avoided all the rapids, etc. on the St. Lawrence. For a few decades it was the main way to move goods and people west, allowing for areas to the west of Montreal to be settled. Canada's capital, Ottawa, wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Rideau Canal. Kingston, at the mouth of the Canal gained a lot of economic significance because of the Canal and was a unified Canada's capital from 1841 to 1844. And Toronto was settled by people moving through the Canal, it nearly doubled in size between 1832 and 1834.
By the late 1850s, a railway was built between Bytowne / Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, and this railway was used instead of the canal. But, the demand might not have existed for the railway if people hadn't been able to move west thanks to the canal.
It may be that people saw the success of that canal, and of other important canals, and that there was an overbuilding as a result of that. And, that when the railways came there was a more effective way of doing some of the same things. But, canals were incredibly important for a few decades and shape the world we live in now. So, how dare you compare them to AI datacentres, you jerk.
And despite the canal not being heavily used for shipping anymore, it can provide lots of community value for water sports and winter skating. I donβt know that obsolete data centres will bring us this degree of recreation
My closest city is actually filled with 100+ year old buildings that have old pictures of the building in various points in history. Someone went through a lot of trouble about a decade ago to get everyone on board with displaying historical stuff.
There's a road that follows one of the old canals, and a tunnel still technically accessible beneath the main downtown road where deliveries were hauled in order to keep the road up top for PEOPLE to walk on, and carriages were rare until the 1900s.
Then everything changed in the early-mid 1900s and no hint of canals even exists today in the city, other than one road named "canal" and one named "water". But without knowing the history, they're just names.
Moving Goods by water is the most economical way to move them, trains are next, trucks are last, I mean after like wagons and shit. We do things the inefficient way because vested interests make money doing it that way. Good luck trying to be more efficient. It's not going to fucking happen. Not with these fucking clowns in charge. Or the previous clowns that are supposed to be our clowns.
Never have I seen so many ships carrying goods in my life than on the ChangJiang, when I lived in Wuhan.
Absolutely mind-blowing. A line of ships going both ways all the way to the horizon, all day, every day. I can't even fathom the quantities being carried.
We use trucks because of the "last mile" problem. Ships are the most efficient. But you ain't pulling up a container ship to your front door. Same with trains. Both are great at moving a lot of stuff from one major point to another. But not good at all for local delivery.
Nor are they good for fast delivery of smaller amounts. And y'all want your Amazon shit delivered as fast as possible to your door. Or the arugula and potatoes you will buy at your local grocery for supper tonight. I'm not pumping up trucks, but they make that possible.
Logistics is tiered and integrated every last inch of the way.
So, not finishing much-hyped projects is a species thing and not just a personal flaw of mine?
Good to know, I think?
We did finish the railways. We just ripped them out when we built the interstates
I'm thinking data centres might be like landlines. For a while they were the only option, but then mobiles came along.
In today's context, the mobile is analogous to a fast home computer that can run AI locally.
We might end up with more telephone exchanges than we need.
(for the international audience, mobile = cell phone / handy; landline = inland phone, PSTN.)
Similar analogy can apply to trains etc.
My ideal scenario:
Although what will probably happen is the companies will fuck each other over, prices will stay high forever and the data centers that go out of business will just burn all their hardware and all of this will have meant nothing.
I agree with almost all of this, however, much of the RAM during data centre selloffs would be in the SOCAMM format, so not useful for anything consumer nor anything older than a couple years in the enterprise space. If there is such an influx however, I suspect that SOCAMM might become a new format for consumer and enterprise electronics after some time. Other than that, there would also be standard DDR5 DIMMs.
Oh, Nvidia want's locally ran ai, but not on your hardware. They want their locked down hardware on your property, using your power and resources.
Oh, that's great! Because when the DATA centres grind to a halt, you can send all the contruction workers and civil engineers to finish up your canal projects!
I mean, they'll be great places to provide free housing to the homeless.
Err, no. ICE will probably just hollow them out and turn them into concentration camps.
Guess it depends which way the pendulum swings.
Datacenter buildings aren't suitable to be homes. Warehouses maybe, factories with some adjustment.
When the internet dot com boom happened telecom infrastructure providers were putting more lines into the ground than there was demand for it since they predicted that growth would accelerate. But then the bubble burst and the overcapacity was not used for years aka dark fiber. But then growth picked up again and since there were already lines in the ground the growth on demand wasnβt putting pressure on supply and thus companies could buy bandwidth very cheaply. This will probably happen with all these datacenters when the bubble bursts. The big tech companies will retreat, scale down investments and leave these datacenters underutilized. Either they will sell their assets or rent it out cheaply and thus startups and smaller companies can use the overcapacity at a low cost.
The difference between dark fiber and datacenters is that datacenters need a company with enough revenue to maintain the structure. Most data centers are built like big box stores: super cheaply and not meant to last more than a couple of decades while in active use for their intended purpose. You know that Shopko or K-mart that shut down 5 years ago and is still empty? You see how quickly that building has started falling apart with no company large enough to own the space and maintain it? That's what empty datacenters are going to be like.
Fiber on the other hand is just strands of glass with some material covering it to prevent light leaks and provide strength. As long as that glass is unbroken there is zero maintenance required whether the fiber is in use or not. Fiber also has theoretically infinite bandwidth (they're currently working towards releasing 1.2 terrabit transceivers) and usually when fiber is run they run a big fat cable with dozens of not hundreds of strands of fiber so there's dozens if not hundreds of times the amount of bandwidth of a single pair of strands (and lots of spare strands should a few be broken). Sure old fiber won't be made with the tight tolerances that we have for fiber made today, so you might only get a few gigabit out of a single pair, but that's still a ton of basically free bandwidth just sitting there as dark fiber that you can use to get off the ground then start running your own once you have some cashflow
Fiber is a super special case as just about the only infrastructure material that can sit in the ground for 20 years unmaintained, and then get connected to state of the art endpoints and work at modern standards.
Canals and trains are still the two of the most important parts of the goods transport network. It's not a good analogy, cities who finished the canals and trains did better.
I grew up on the Wabash/Erie canal. It was finished and brought a load of commerce to the region. This is not a post about data centers.
Interesting analogy. I've been pointing out the first synthesizer, built in 1897, which was so big that it took up the entire city block basement of a building. It worked, but it was so enormous that it was essentially useless. After a few decades of progress, the same instrument could be put into a suitcase, and carried around.
That how I see Data Centers. They are like that 1897 synthesizer - Sure, they work, but at what cost? They're huge, resource guzzling, pollution spewing monstrosities. Perhaps in a few decades, all those problems will be solved, and we can have data centers that aren't more destructive than productive.
I'm just waiting for the cheap GPUs
Can't happen soon enough
The GPUs from these data centers are virtually useless for end users. Even worse than the bitcoin ones, because at least a lot of bitcoin GPUs were consumer cards with a custom BIOS that could be reflashed. The ones in data centers are more dedicated l solutions as the companys building these data centers are much bigger.
The big question will be if Nvidia and AMD will survive the bubble burst.
You're telling me their canals won't help my swimming pool at home? But they both use water
If only tax money were were funding the datacenters.
We should be TAXING THE DATACENTERS
Hi I'm from the present and that gives me the unique ability to predict the future.
