At 42 degrees north latitude, 1 square foot of asphalt generates 80 watts of heat on a sunny summer day. A Walmart parking lot makes more waste heat than an AI datacenter.

I can shorten that a bit.

Trump: Mad.

Sure

A tech journalist sets up a company of all AI agents. CFO, CTO, HR, Sales, etc. He is following the capabilities advertised by all of the various vendors. He makes significant progress. He demonstrates that is is indeed possible. And some really absurd things happen along the way. Like the vendor advertising that agents are perfectly capable of this hanging up on one of them in disgust.

It’s been tested already.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id1753117762

Also, you may like birdwatching groups. Or astronomy meetups. Cycle rides. Or any number of activities that are compatible with an outdoor lifestyle.

He can most certainly be arrested. He can’t be prosecuted. “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride”

A bullshit arrest would be great political theater for the mayor.

My company does exactly these and more.

Top-of-the line ultra-quiet low sulfur generators used only for utility outages.

Closed-loop water cooling means the toilets use more water in a day than the cooling does in a year.

Paying for the construction of the local infrastructure needed for twice our usage of electricity. We leave things better after we build.

We do these every day. No one notices because bad news leads. There are certainly bad actors. And no one cares to think any further than that. Subtlety and nuance in understanding technology is dead.

I work for a DC company and support this. We comply with all local, state, and federal laws and we want others in our industry to do the same. Bad actors are making us all look bad.

Truer than most folks might believe. My father got through his entire life like that.

A helmet would have prevented some of the head injury, but I don’t expect even leathers would have helped a whole lot. Some kinds of stupid just have unavoidable consequences.

I agree. On all points. It is a small effect.

However, 400kwh times 500+ cars in a town does begin to approach datacenter territory. My place is 16mw. My point is that other uses are ignored in the discussion of rising usage.

30 years ago, most houses in my town had 100 amp service. Now almost all have 200. I had to upgrade mine when I purchased it in 2015. Also, many folks here have mother-in-law suites, which means two kitchens and often an additional laundry room. Most forego gas and have all electric appliances and heat. Power usage is way up all over. Our society is moving forward and uses more than the projections of the 1980s. Power generation projects rarely get approved by locals all over. Especially nuclear. We have painted ourselves into a corner.

And a rapid move to electric cars and the revoking of solar and wind incentives.

As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can’t afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.

Hey! That’s my neighborhood!

Or bend down.

Thank you

Likely ARFID.

Excellent. Do you have a link or reference so I can bring it to management? I’d be a hero.

Name conventions can be a bit more diverse than you might think.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

We are known for building big ones fast. You just need to know how and execute with care an skill. Good people are expensive, and we pay well. So we charge more. And our customers know we hit all of our targets, so they are happy to pay.

The waste heat is difficult to use as it’s not that hot. We don’t have steam coming off the servers. They have to stay cool, after all. The water is significantly cooler than many domestic water heaters.

Gas turbines are a fucking nightmare. A move of despair. When our hens are running full bore during tests, we are well under 60dB. Our groundskeeping crew is significantly louder. And modern diesel is nothing like the majority of old trucks on the road today. No odor, no smoke, low-sulfur fuel, etc.

It can be done responsibly. We do it everyday. But trade secrets and NDAs keep us from speaking outside of anonymous forums like this.