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Software is evolving backwards

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    tal@lemmy.todayT
    data centers and supercomputing facilities, which consume voracious amounts of electricity and water Memphis is on the Mississippi. Evaporating the volume of the Mississippi at Memphis with graphics cards would be a pretty impressive feat. kagis https://snoflo.org/flow/report/tennessee/ TENNESSEE FLOW REPORT August 22 2025 Streamflow levels across Tennessee are currently 92.0% of normal, with the Mississippi River At Memphis reporting the highest discharge in the state with 354000cfs 345,000 cubic feet of water per second is a pretty substantial amount of water. EDIT: Water has a heat of vaporization of 2.23 kJ/g. 345k ft³ water is 9.7×10⁹ cm³, so 9.7×10⁹g That's about 2.2×10¹⁰kJ to vaporize it (disregarding the specific heat of water, just the heat of vaporization). 1kJ ≈ 0.28 Wh. So 6,160,000,000 Wh to vaporize the water going through in a second. 3,600 seconds in an hour. So at a flow rate of 345k ft³ that'd sink about 22 trillion watts through vaporization alone. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/node/1925 In 2024, the world wide energy consumption was about 186,000 TWhs 8760 hours in a year. So global average power usage is about 21 TW. If we put the entire world's generated electricity towards heat to vaporize the Mississippi at Memphis, it'd still fall a bit short. EDIT2: I also inadvertently transposed two digits (should be 354,000 ft³/sec rather than 345,000 ft³/sec) in transcribing the initial flow rate, so it'd fall slightly shorter.
  • OpenAI’s Sam Altman warns of AI voice fraud crisis in banking

    Technology technology
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    T
    I'm not that gifted... in a lot of ways. lol
  • 157 Stimmen
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    W
    that's not just useless defeatism, but also false. effective end to end encryption exists in multiple forms today. signal, maybe even with a custom server. matrix if the server is being ran on trusted hardware. XMPP too with the right extensions.
  • France considers requiring Musk’s X to verify users’ age

    Technology technology
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    C
    TBH, age verification services exist. If it becomes law, integrating them shouldn't be more difficult than integrating a OIDC login. So everyone should be able to do it. Depending on these services, you might not even need to give a name, or, because they are separate entities, don't give your name to the platform using them. Other parts of regulation are more difficult. Like these "upload filters" that need to figure out if something shared via a service is violating any copyright before it is made available.
  • Why doesn't Nvidia have more competition?

    Technology technology
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    B
    It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.
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    I
    Arcing causes more fires, because over current caused all the fires until we tightened standards and dual-mode circuit breakers. Now fires are caused by loose connections arcing, and damaged wires arcing to flammable material. Breakers are specifically designed for a sustained current, but arcing is dangerous because it tends to cascade, light arcing damages contacts, leading to more arcing in a cycle. The real danger of arcing is that it can happen outside of view, and start fires that aren't caught till everything burns down.
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

    Technology technology
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    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
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    V
    Oh, I get it. You're a purposefully ignorant dumbass.