• 17 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th November 2026English
    5·
    16 hours ago

    A Scandal at the Center of the Economy

    This scandal holds an irony that’s especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industry’s No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valley’s AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating China’s AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.

    This is the type of warped incentives that the AI race produces. Playing the game necessitates embracing preposterous risk to justify an idealized future outcome. To run this race requires its participants to withstand intense cognitive dissonance and behave in ways that make them appear ever more inscrutable and reckless to those who are not involved. If nothing else, Huang is a useful example to understand what happens when the fortunes of countries and many of its most powerful citizens are all tied up in one progressively intricate technological and financial bet. In this way, Huang is the AI boom personified, a hyperobject of a man who has wound his way into the center of the economy and whose influence, depending on how you look at it, may usher in either prosperity or untold doom.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th November 2026English
    5·
    2 days ago

    I think he’s out on a thin limb.

    If there’s one thing people who espouse “reasonable pro-AI” views push, is that the US has to go ahead building chatbots because otherwise the Chinese will beat us.

    In the current point in time, AI is under perceived attack by the Democrats (I doubt they’ll go against the lobbyists but w/e) and the US Right has realized that no-one really likes Big Tech - they’re convenient scapegoats for all sorts of things. Sure they want billionaires in charge but people like Sam Altman aren’t really their kinds of people.

    Throwing the book at Jensen would help both sides.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th November 2026English
    11·
    4 days ago

    I think they’re saying that stopping a datacenter won’t do squat to stop AGI takeoff

    at least this a reading of

    Efficiency gains from AI are absolutely massive, and while they don’t apply to training, they do apply to inference, and even accounting for endogenity, state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.

    so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal’s wager:

    1. if I stop a datacenter near me, the world will still be taken over by a superhuman intelligence, albeit 9 days later, and my local environment will be moot
    2. if I stop a datacenter, and no superhuman intelligence appears, I won’t have a datacenter near me

    I’m not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th November 2026English
    9·
    5 days ago

    you unfortunately have to dig quite deep for sneers in this weird post about datacenter votes in the recent US elections, but they’re there

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vakRzGKXLknQNJ9M/stephen-martin-s-shortform?commentId=ec8LnnTjBMcow3C82

    especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else, like Iceland (retracted after someone points out that Iceland is probably even more woke than, say, Vermont) and Paraguay (which recently had a digibank seized and closed, leading to the president stepping down).

    Then there’s this gem

    Data center inputs, unlike almost anything else are much more subsitutable than any other input, and can be built in places where humans don’t care to raise NIMBY concerns.

    So cutting through the jargon, “inputs” in this case means

    • power
    • cooling
    • construction / planning
    • the actual fucking contents in the racks
    • data

    All of these are constrained in various ways. The places with abundant accessible power tend to be relatively developed parts of the world. Same with water which is the most efficient mode of cooling.

    Building your datacenter in Texas means you’re on familiar ground with local laws and regulations, and can draw on skilled manpower to actually construct the thing and keep it running. I’d wager that the actual hardware is cheaper than almost anywhere else. Once it’s built it’s in the security zone of the USA, which means property is efficiently defended by LEO and emergency services.

    Paraguay? You need to find a skilled workforce there, or import it. Same for all the bits and bobs needed. Then you probably have to pay more for the same, as well as having to deal with an unfamiliar planning process. Not to mention political instability. And you might have to build a shit-ton of supporting stuff yourself, like power generation and fiber comms.

    These people are delusional.