bleepblap

In many jurisdictions, "intent" is an element of the law

This is intended to be read by AI

Fuck this

And my favorite -- you need to go north from Miami to be in "the South"

In the west, there's no actual competitor to NVIDIA hardware. Yes, people make other chips, but nothing is a serious drop-in replacement for the nv stack. Between the networking and software, they're truly a different "thing" of accelerator, and I don't consider them fungible at all. The US government tried to build 3 supercomputers with each of nvidia/amd/intel accelerators and you can see how it went

AI compute hardware is not a commodity. And in a shortage, commodities can command high margins.

I don't see the distinction you're drawing about "commodity", but I'm happy to be wrong on that. My point was that spaceX's ai division is buying all their inputs from external vendors and can't meaningfully differentiate themselves from person Y who buys all the same hardware except for the fact they bought them first. Which...

Correct. But charging people now generates incumbency advantages

I don't see now this is an "incumbency advantage". There's nothing that sticks their clients to stay there and sign up for the next data center.

Maybe they have something else im the books, I truly have no idea. But once you get down from the top rung of full-bandwidth cross section networking at the 100k node networking scale "AI" infra, theres no shortage of people who can do that. Most importantly, labor isn't the big chunk of the outlay. Even if they have 50 engineers clearing $1m/yr, that's pocket change for everything else

EDIT: said 50 engineers at $50m/yr originally and meant 50 @ $1m/yr

The concert analogy makes sense (I analogized it as "staunching the bleeding").

WRT SpaceX building data centers: I think there's a natural tension between a "low margin business" and "being risk adverse". SpaceX (the rocket business) did well because it was high risk and high reward. Building a 10b datacenter to hope to get a slice of a low-margin industry is high risk and low reward and just seems fundamentally like a losing strategy.

Thanks for the post. :( I had some ideas for little projects to mess around with and thought thread would've been something interesting to learn..

What I don't understand is how it's even a good low-margin business. Maybe I'm missing something but:

Data centers (before recently) are low margin businesses because all the inputs are commodities: you buy power (joules), power (PDU), cooling hardware, physical racks, etc.. from the same vendors as everyone else. Worse, your biggest potential clients have the scale to just build it on their own and cut you out because of their scale and because you don't bring anything unique (outside of maybe physical proximity to an interesting market)

xAI has all the same commodity inputs plus another huge upfront capital expense (GPU/storage/networking), and their customer base is exclusively the well-funded companies who would normally just build it on their own.

I assume that they can't get better deals from nvidia than (e.g.) Microsoft because of their scale, so the unit cost of their inputs is the same or worse than their clients.

So the whole game is hoping that they hope to charge more now because people can't build fast enough and try to recoup their upfront costs before either a) other capacity comes online and b) the installed hardware becomes obsolete.

I'm being earnest -- it seems like they're trading one tiny margin service (datacenter) for another tiny margin service, with the added difficulty that there's an additional 10 figures of upfront expenditures and their viability depends solely on paying everything off before the price floor drops. Maybe it's staunching the bleeding, but it seems like not a great move

I'm desperate for people to make tech that's searchable. I'd like to figure out some of the thread/matter bits for my own projects and this is terribly annoying to do

Fucking hell how is this website so unusable.

Calling a CPF a "tax ID" is a bit misleading, much like calling an SSN "the way you get social security benefits". You can (even as a non-citizen) get one in a couple mins at the post office, and it's used for literally everything, including things like buying a SIM card or registering for some public WiFi hotspots.

Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission power plants have been already proposed and studied in theory.

I have a hand-wavy hard sci-fi universe I've been rolling around my head for years and I eventually came to the conclusion that fission-fusion drives would be really handy for spacecraft, since it would be much easier to start a fission reaction in a cold/dark ship than fusion because of the power requirements. Otherwise you need some other way to generate 10s or 100s of MW to start the fusion reaction.

I think you're 100% correct that people won't lose the ability. There's a scary thing I see as a person who works with and recruits students and fresh graduates -- they might not have spent the time to get the skills in the first place.

Sounds backwards -- your company is getting the benefits of your increased productivity and doesn't want to pay for it. Im not sure that's Anthropics problem?

It's like I was a graphic designer and my finance company said "photoshop is too expensive". I wouldn't be mad at Adobe for it

It's telling you chose to not answer the question and instead chose to introduce a different (straw man) question in response.

At least people in the past had the integrity to acknowledge their positions head-on. One of the lamentable things missing today

What's the ratio of citizens to non-citizens that's okay? One citizen per every hundred or are you thinking 10-1?

You keep moving the goalposts that much and maybe the patriots can win the Super Bowl.

I know nothing about the "industry" of MRIs, but from the physics side, (everything equal) more Tesla is better - at the end of the day, harder magnetic field gets you a stronger signal

There are a lot of airports in the Us and 2.5 million passengers transit them daily.

It wasn't -- was just noting that people keep saying "MRI", when there's no 5T fields around most security checkpoints

Certainly, but a) not at the prices people wanted to spend to get 25,000 of them b) not at the maintenance cost for 25,000 of them c) without the software to (by someone's metric) discriminate between shampoo and bomb with enough error

There's a whole ton of people taking about MRI -- MRIs are a completely universe than CT/X-rays

Nobody or no item is getting an MRI at an airport. It's pretty common for people to conflate that with X-rays but MRIs work on a fundamentally different process and exclusively (outside of physics 101) requires liquid helium-cooled superconducting magnets to get anything useful.

TSA (at ohare) has a repeating thing that says 100ml or 3.2oz over the loudspeaker (never mind they are different amounts)

there is actually a science change that happened, and it's not (entirely) just politicians changing their mind.

The big thing going from X-ray (2d) to CT (spin an X-ray machine around and take a ton of pictures to recreate a 3d image) did a lot to let security people see inside of a bag, but the hitch is that if you see a blob of gray is that water, shampoo or something else?

The recent advance that is letting this happen is machines who will send multiple wavelengths of X-ray through the material: since different materials absorb light differently, your machine can distinguish between materials, which lets you be more sure that that 2litre is (mostly) water, and then they can discriminate

Not that your thrust is incorrect, but a CT machine (used here at airports) and MRI machines are completely different beasts in not just cost but also complexity.

He got a cool 50k from some memecoin for this

It's incredible the change over the last few years even on the hardware side. I go to the supercomputing.org conference annually and saw folks advertising "AI power distribution units". There used to be a lot of neat innovation, and now every last thing has to have "AI" in the title, it's infuriating

Yes, I've got in my drawer two physical boarding passes with the same PNR