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.
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.
We don't have time for a handy, Jim
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.
Gonna rate my take on this point by point because you're speaking my language and I like where your head is at
AI will by nature become easier to run. We're pushing Moore's law already but technology will in general keep improving. I don't know how worth it it'll be, and most companies seem to be into the idea of the average consumer not actively owning the computing power, instead of doing everything on the cloud. Time will tell how that goes.
Big corporations will likely eat each other when the AI bubble pops, whatever that looks like. Should be a fun time though.
NVIDIA will do the same thing over and over. We saw it with crypto, same with AI. They will surrender to whichever monetary source is biggest at the time, and dumpster the loyal customers. If they change for the better, it's either by accident or because customers lost faith in the company and went elsewhere. I don't have high hopes for that company.
We are seeing china start to make ram, I vaguely remember seeing another graphics card manufacturer? It's very possible that there's a market niche that will be filled here.
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 those would be great for the sail boats we need to fix the climate crisis
In the 1800s canal boats were pulled by horses and people, sailing is pretty impractical for a straight narrow waterway
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.
Existing water*
Diging canals is dangerous and expensive.
Depends if there's malaria.
We have tech that can solve most of the dangers, except malaria.
Shit Metro Vancouver has an amazing long deep river we only use a fraction of our waterfront of commerical use, it's a joke.
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.
I'm just waiting for the cheap GPUs
Can't happen soon enough
Really curious how it'll impact crypto mining
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
They're at the bottom of the canals, obviously.
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 don’t know that obsolete data centres will bring us this degree of recreation
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.
We still do.
Who is John Galt?
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.
Not to mention that they were able to run the new interstate highways right through Black neighborhoods.
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?
Who framed Roger rabbit
I think we all know who.
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...
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.
Also some nice bike paths today along the canals in NY
So AI data centers will be replaced by an even more polluting alternative? Don't get me wrong, I love trains but they are more polluting then a mule drawn barge on a canal. And the pattern continues with trains being replaced by even more carbon intensive cars and planes.
Idk what the message is supposed to be here, should we enjoy the good times when we only have to deal with these milder data centers? Or should we stop them now so we don't develop the next generation of data centers, ie. Sabotage the canals so we don't get trains?
Trains as electric and extremely efficient at moving people and cargo.
Right now, data centers are in a boom phase. Everyone wants in, everyone wants to make a buck.
There's a good chance a massive scale back, much like that of the dot com bubble, will leave many holding the bag and a lot of unfinished or unused data centers
It's not a 1:1 with canals, but moreover the dot com era imo, but it works.
The message seems to be that there are going to be a ton of half-finished data centers when the next big thing comes along.
"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.
