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This is only a problem if the datacenters are not powered by renewables. Nearly all renewables are the result of solar energy, AKA photons, AKA heat that is hitting the Earth regardless of what we do with it. Solar panels are obvious, but even for wind, it’s the result of the sun heating different regions of the atmosphere at different rates, converting thermal energy from the sun to kinetic energy in the air. A wind turbine converts some of this kinetic energy to electrical energy (which slows the air down ever so slightly), which is dissipated as heat mostly in the data center. The thing is, if the wind turbine didn’t exist, whatever kinetic energy that would have been captured would directly be dissipated as heat anyway in the form of friction in the air. Renewables only move solar heat around, and doesn’t generate heat of its own. Even with geothermal energy, where in theory you’re bringing heat that was trapped in the Earth to the surface, the geothermal sources we can practically take advantage of are already so close to the surface they would have been released through simple conduction anyway.
It is only when you burn fossil fuels that you’re actively generating heat that would otherwise have stayed as chemical energy. But even the heat from this not the actual concern, it’s the byproducts it generates that cause solar energy that would have been released into space to be trapped in the atmosphere. The heat generated isn’t even a rounding error compared to retaining even 1% more solar energy in the air. Same for nuclear where you’re reducing the overall binding energy inside atom cores and the reduction in energy is equal to the heat generated.
Why put them in the ocean when you can just put them on the coast and pipe ocean water through the heat exchanger? That way you can actually access the servers without a ship with a giant crane (powered by fossil fuels) hauling them back up.
Also gonna guess the maintenance intervals are atrocious with all the salt corrosion. Why not a river or lake where the water doesn’t actively hate the thought of metals existing and you don’t have microscopic creatures that will attach to literally any surface and create a calcified dome for itself plugging up the places water is supposed to flow through?
I was baffled by the Microsoft “sea cooled datacenter” and I’m still baffled now. Like surely there are better ways to do it.
Let me guess, only the big name authors and none of the countless people posting their writing projects to the internet (which probably accounted for a way higher precentage of the training data than published novels given how much more of it there is) or the people having back and fourth discussions on Reddit (which was likely vital to ensuring the AI responded to technical conversations in a normal sounding way).
The thing I hate most about the copyright system is how blatantly it helps the biggest creators concentrate wealth while actively excluding smaller and amateur creators. The copyright system is the barrier to entry. You can only exercise the rights theoretically given to every single creator if you make enough money from your art, but to make enough money from your art you need to be able to exercise the rights to it.
US libs: “PEOPLE IN COMMUNIST CHINA ARE FORCED TO USE SLANG WHEN TALKING ABOUT CHINESE ATROCITIES TO GET PAST CENSORSHIP!!”
Also US libs: “Unalive” “Music Festival” Bleeping out Palestine “This is fine and way better than communist China”
Also interesting how Tiktok only started doing this after they were forcibly sold off from the Chinese parent company and was forced to conform to “Western values” eh?
Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.
Seriously at what point did search engines stop matching results by keyword?! Just a few days ago I tried looking for a quote I didn’t fully remember, but knew the basic thesis and some identifying terms it definitely mentioned and all I got was tabloid articles for pages and pages on end which only vaguely matched the thesis but didn’t mention any of the identifying terms I remember the quote using. It threw me for a loop because I remember being taught in school to search for stuff this way and I don’t know if I’m just stupid or misremembered the quote or search engines don’t actually match keywords anymore. Why would they remove the most basic form of search, literally just regexing for all the strings given?!
China is really practicing what they preach by making the fruit of the workers’ labour available for all. They could have made infinitely more money by offering this as a service and that’s what every Western C-suite would do even if every engineer that worked on it wanted it made public. Both Huawei’s co-op leadership and presumably the Chinese government (even in Western “free market” capitalist countries decisions this significant by this big of a company would be subject to government oversight and export control) choosing to make it open source for free is saying a lot. They’re also seemingly not concerned about preventing the West from using their technology in the same way the West denies China use of their tech, despite the obvious strategic and economic benefits of having something the West doesn’t.
Same with a lot of other Chinese tech investments like Deepseek and RISC-V implementations.
I wonder if they’re making these things open source to counter the Western propaganda that Chinese tech has spyware or built in censorship. If so, I think they’ve made pretty good faith strides and if they’re hoping for countries like Canada to jump ship and work with them on tech instead of the US, I as a Canadian software developer would gladly work for a Chinese company over a US one.
Ironically the US keeps trying to warn that if the world keeps trying to move away from oil, those “money hungry” and “savage” Arab oil producing countries will drag us into the next world war because their investments are threatened by renewables. When in reality the US will probably be the one to do that when everyone else has moved on to renewables and the US has to get a “return” on the obsolete fossil fuel infrastructure only they invested in and nobody wants.
NO ONE SHOULD CARE unless you’re a semiconductor exec. Give me cheap Japanese knockoffs of TSMC chips, I’ll take them along with the cheap Chinese knockoffs. Corporate espionage is morally neutral to me and there are no “good” corporations to begin with, I don’t get why the consumers getting gouged by these corporations feel the need to defend them when other corporations steal their IP.
The appetite for 6G looks much bigger in China and the US than it does in Europe
Don’t know about Europe but most people in North America are still on 4G even though new phones are 5G capable because the ISPs charge a huge premium for 5G plans. No one wants 6G here because no one wants to pay even more.
But hey, China is getting 6G BUT AT WHAT COST?? Probably a lot less than even the 4G plans over here.
Looks pretty similar to the Japanese SCMaglev. But does that means the track would need to be active like the Japanese one? I tried to research this in the past and all the sources say that the Japanese Maglev has the linear induction motors on the track, in addition to passive coils that the train’s electromagnets interact with.
That’s in addition to Maglev’s intrinsic need for power delivery coils in the track (the bottom of the track basically needs to be primary side of one giant very smart transformer).
Imagine building from Beijing to Shenzhen’s distance in ultra high tech tracks that can’t interop with regular trains, where they’ll have to safely handle a 600 km/h train passing over them in the harshest weather conditions. And you can’t have very thick armor for it because you need the magnetic fields to be as close as possible to make the power delivery efficient, It’s both a construction and a maintenance nightmare. The tracks themselves will offset a lot of the ecological benefits of trains over flying.
SNCF set the wheeled train record at 500 km/h with a test train. Why not try to beat that?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIUae04Ip2c