Where were you when I complained we needed additional transmission lines to keep bringing more renewable energy online?

I’ve strongly argued for this in the past.

All these tech bros with AI datacenters are putting their spare couch change together to build HVDC lines across the continent, right?

You can think that, but you’d be wrong. A ChatGPT search uses 10x the power of a regular Google search.

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about#%3A~%3Atext=A+request+made+through+ChatGPT%2C+an+AI-based%2CGoogle+Search%2C+reported+the+International+Energy+Agency.

Google has quietly removed their net-zero pledge from their website:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/google-quietly-removes-net-zero-carbon-goal-from-website-amid-rapid-power-hungry-ai-data-center-buildout-industry-first-sustainability-pledge-moved-to-background-amidst-ai-energy-crisis

This stuff isn’t being built with renewables.

When a family in the global south uses coal to cook their food, they release CO2. When a billionaire flies around the continent on a private jet, they also release CO2.

Do you consider the two to be equivalent in need or output?

People downloading stuff for personal use vs making money off of it are not the same at all. We don’t tend to condone people selling bootleg DVDs, either.

I’ve never heard anyone say “we need less data centers” until ai came along. What, all the other data centers are totally fine but the ones being used for ai are evil? If you have an issue with the drastically increased power consumption for ai you should be able to argue a stance that is inclusive of all data centers - assuming it’s something you give a fuck about. Which you don’t.

AI data centers take up substantially more power than regular ones. Nobody was talking about spinning up nuclear reactors or buying out the next several years of turbine manufacturing for non-AI datacenters. Hell, Microsoft gave money to a fusion startup to build a reactor, they’ve already broken ground, but it’s far from proven that they can actually make net power with fusion. They actually think they can supply power by 2028. This is delusion driven by an impossible goal of reaching AGI with current models.

Your whole post is missing out on the difference in scale involved. GPU power consumption isn’t comparable to standard web servers at all.

Because humans are really, really hung up about sex in general, and we make it complicated. The idea of a potion that cuts right through all the bullshit sounds pretty good to just about everyone at some point in their lives.

That conflicts with my own theory. Back in 2013, Half Life 3 was quietly released as an easter egg hidden inside a random indie title somewhere on Steam and nobody has noticed yet.

There was a gap in [some military capability] during the Cold War, and the USA was losing it. Almost anything you stick in there, Russia was behind. They sometimes implied otherwise, but it’s rare that they ever were. Occasionally, they used everything they had to just about match.

By the 1960s, their navy was pretty good, though. Don’t let anyone tell you they were just a bunch of vodka drunk idiots. Not at that time, anyway.

At the opposite end of what this thread is about, Dr Strangelove is far more correct than it should be.

Water cooling computers. Pretty much all aesthetics. It’s expensive, hard to maintain, and isn’t that much better than decent air cooling these days. Looks really cool, and I still want to do a glass tube build.

Would not recommend to anyone else. You really have to want to do this just because.

Lesbians making pies? Lesbians eating pies? Lesbians made into pies? I’m so confused by this headline.

Yup, everyone in the world is just winging it. Everyone.

Before Pornhub, quite a bit. The better tube sites pushed the bottom feeders down.

BTW, if ID verification takes root in a few more big states, those type of sites are going to pick up again. They don’t give a shit about following the state-by-state rules. If they do get shut down or blocked, they’ll just spin up another one. Some people will use VPNs to access Pornhub anyway, but that takes a level of tech savviness.

You can’t ban porn, you can only ban (nominally) ethical porn. Yes, there are ethical issues with Pornhub. It has fewer issues than the bottom feeder sites that don’t verify their pictures or videos at all.

Similar situation to abortion. Can’t ban that, either, you can only ban safe abortion.

Just watch how many try to “start” a campfire by using gasoline. Which tends to eat all the oxygen so nothing else has a chance.

Big Bang Theory is stuck in some '90s ideas of nerds.

Back then, people would joke that guys would never find a girlfriend while playing DnD. Now I have a pair of friends who got married and originally bonded as part of our DnD group, and that seems completely normal.

I’m sorry, is this thread under the misconception that the X360 outsold the PS3? Because that’s wrong.

https://www.vgchartz.com/charts/platform_totals/Hardware.php/

X360 did win in North America, but PS3 had a small lead globally. The PS3 was completely dominant in Japan, and had a sizable lead in Europe.

If it wasn’t for the Red Ring of Death, the X360 probably would have won. In many ways, Microsoft’s gaming division never recovered from that.

You could use that same argument for any other type of math. Boolean logic. Linear algebra. Hyperbolic geometry. You have to pick something for high school, and you should pick what’s most likely to be useful to anybody.

. . . the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.

People understand the idea of instantaneous speed intuitively. The trouble is giving it a rigorous mathematical foundation, and that’s what calculus does. Take away the rigor, and you can teach the basic ideas to anyone with some exposure to algebra. 6th grade, maybe earlier. It’s not particularly remarkable or even that useful for most people.

When you go into a college major that requires calculus, they tend to make you take it all over again no matter if you took it in high school or not.

Probability and statistics are far more important. We run into them constantly in daily life, and most people do not have a firm grounding in them.

Those could both be true. People feel like they need $125k more to be secure, but when they get it, it doesn’t make them as happy as they thought it would. They need another $25k more to feel that way.

Especially in this economy.

It’s because of this:

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/465289/ps5-vs-ps4-sales-comparison-june-2025/

Align PS4 and PS5 sales to their launch date, and you’ll see that the PS5 has been lagging behind. Not by a lot, but it’s noticeable. This is despite the fact that The Xbox Series X/S is doing a bit worse than the Xbox One, and the One did a lot worse than the 360. Nintendo, of course, is in another room doing its own thing.

Sony expected every generation to sell better than the last. The market has clearly hit a saturation point, so that expectation is no longer valid. Combine that with the fact that Moore’s Law (originally defined as the price per integrated component dropping) is completely dead. That means you can no longer expect better hardware to get cheaper. You might be able to find fabs that can give you more performance, but it’ll cost you.

This is why the GabeCube is a good idea from a business persepctive. It will likely have better performance than the Xbox Series X/S, but not as good as the PS5. What it can do is be affordable with good enough hardware. The specs appear to be a bit Frankenstein, which is what you’d expect if Valve grabbed whatever deals on things they could find to put something together.