yes, but a refusal to at least soberly acknowledge tech's central place in human conflict and it's litteral weaponisation would be another death by capitulation.
that this place retains a certain civility whilst ubber geeks, money grubbers, lightly bored acedemics, and every variety of ax grinders have a go, is testement enough.
the common denominators bieng drive, curiosity, and however grudgingly to count someone elses point, or let it go.
though I will posit that the stakes are higher than just this place, as tech is central to everything now, and figuring that out is everyones respinsibility, so a little heat is guaranteed.
Bieng a pyrologist it's something I am comfortable working with, and while I might discuss something hot, I wont shove somebodys head in the flames.
no adhominum right.
What's the association between censorship and an editor of a publication making an editorial decision about an item? Those appear to be different subjects. Or is it censorship of B when an editor decides to cover A today instead?
If I buy a car with a Make Love Not War bumper sticker and cover it with a Peace Through Strength bumper sticker, I have not committed censorship, but if I don't buy the car first, I have.
The head of the news organization pulled an investigative story presumably because the facts it presented either didn't support her own politics, because she was afraid of the current regime's reaction, or because she doesn't know what journalistic standards are for running this kind of story because she lacks experience.
Two of those reasons are a kind of self-censorship for political reasons tied to who is in power. Democracy needs journalism that's ready to stand up to the people in power or we become a state like North Korea where people can't speak the truth.
Because that editor was installed in order to be able to censor CBS. They also bought Tiktok, and are trying to buy other media companies in order to be able to better control the flow of information.
But suddenly adding cameras that resulted in catching more people fixed the issue? Surely if the catch and release was the issue, that wouldn't make a difference.
Of course, you should instead believe your own anecdotal evidence that marks a tally every time you hear about a crime, which if you watch local news is always, but doesn't mark a tally every time there isn't a crime.
Fun fact that's totally not related, did you know
that people who listen to true crime podcasts are more likely to believe a crime could happen to their families and are also more likely to install higher levels of security on their house?
Microsoft committed to purchase the plant's capacity for 20 years. And US electricity demand grew very slowly from 2005 to 2020. It is growing rapidly now.
At around $110/MWh, according to the article. This is about 50% higher than what utility-scale PV or wind would cost. Guess they're using OpenAI accounting.
The electricity cost is actually very low compared to the capital cost of the stuff the the electricity runs. But not having access to the electricity means that all that capital is going to waste.
So Microsoft is less price sensitive than other electricity customers.
Plus they get the PR and hype boost from saying they are using nuclear, which is huge right now. Which is big enough that the other hyperscalers thought they had to announce new nuclear projects, even though it will be a decade before those new nuclear projects could ever come on line.
Are you comparing cost against what electricity currently costs or what it would cost to add capacity? I feel like Microsoft is not acting on hype here, they're going to pay a premium just because it's cool to refire a nuclear plant? Surely they've done the math to decide the feasibility of building out a few acres of solar panels.
There could also be incentives beyond the loan or political pressure we’re not privy to. Such pressure is part of the reason Boeing ended up acquiring McDonnell Douglass even though it wasn’t exactly the financial best move for Boeing. If the US government is serious about restarting its nuclear industry then this is a small first step to build up the skills for building new reactors or refurbishing old ones.
It’s not really that farfetched, either. If the government expects a conflict in the next few decades, solar build out might become much more expensive or impossible since our domestic production might not be enough to support NATO’s growth.
> Running a data center on unreliable energy would be shockingly stupid.
For the right kind of workloads and at sufficient scale, I wonder if this is actually true. (It probably is, but it's fun to hypothesize.) I'm assuming the workloads are mostly AI-related.
AI training presumably isn't super time-sensitive, so could you just pause it while it's cloudy?
AI inference, at least for language models, presumably isn't particularly network-intensive nor latency-sensitive (it's just text). So if one region is currently cloudy... spin it down and transfer load to a different region, where it's sunny? It's kind of like the "wide area grid" concept without actually needing to run power lines.
Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy. Maybe in a world where hardware somehow got way cheaper but energy usage remained high we'd see strategies like this get used.
> So if one region is currently cloudy... spin it down and transfer load to a different region, where it's sunny? It's kind of like the "wide area grid" concept without actually needing to run power lines.
> Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy.
There's some balance between maximizing capex, business continuity planning, room for growth, and natural peak and trough throughout the day.
You probably don't really want all your DCs maxxed out at the daily peak. Then you have no spare capacity for when you've lost N DCs on you biggest day of the year. N might typically be one, but if you have many DCs, you probably want to plan for two or three down.
Anyway, so on a normal day, when all your DCs are running, you do likely have some flexibility on where tasks run/where traffic lands. It makes sense to move traffic where it costs less to serve, within some reasonable bounds of service degradation. Even if electricity prices are the same, you might move traffic where the ambient temperature is lower, as that would reduce energy used for cooling and with it the energy bill.
You might have some non-interactive, non-time sensitive background jobs that could fill up spare DC capacity... but maybe it's worth putting a dollar amount on those --- if it's sunny and windy and energy is cheap, go ahead ... when it's cloudy and still and energy is expensive, some jobs may need to be descheduled.
> AI training presumably isn't super time-sensitive, so could you just pause it while it's cloudy?
or pause it when "organic traffic" has a peak demand, and resume in off-peak hours, so that the nuclear powerplant can operate efficiently without too much change in its output.
A machine that operates continuously is a perfect machine, and no machine is perfect.
The greater the number and diversity of machines, as well as their geographical dispersion, the greater their availability.
In this respect, a mix of renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc.) deployed on a continental scale, along with storage (batteries and V2(G|H), hydro, green hydrogen...) is unbeatable (total cost, availability, risk, etc.).
I imagine data centers make the best economic sense when they can run full tilt 24/7. You’ll double your payoff time if you can only run work when the sun shines.
Do you have a source for that, when i googled it came up closer to $200/MWh for new york, but that was from older sources. The only thing i saw approaching this price point was if you were somewhere like las vegas.
I also think you would need more than 24 hours battery. You have to prepare for freak weather events that reduce system capacity.
I also wonder what time horizon we are talking. solar and batteries presumably have to be replaced more often than nuclear.
> I also think you would need more than 24 hours battery. You have to prepare for freak weather events that reduce system capacity.
In general, yes. Not really in the context of utility generation for a DC, though. A DC should have onsite backup generation, at least to supply critical loads. If your contracted utility PV + storage runs out, and there's no spare grid capacity available (or it's too expensive) you can switch to onsite power for the duration. The capex for backup power is already required, so you're just looking at additional spending for fuel, maybe maintenance if the situation requires enough hours on backup.
The article cited a report which said new build solar and storage could cost from $50 to $131. And new build wind and storage could cost $44 to $123.[1]
Civilian nuclear reactors replace fuel gradually over 3 to 6 years typically. 20 year old solar panels work now. New solar panels are expected to work over 30 years. Utility scale lithium ion batteries are expected to last 10 to 15 years.
The article said Jefferies analysts estimated Microsoft might pay $110 to $115.
The article cited Lazard analysts' estimates to say this was more expensive than solar or wind. But Lazard's report said new build solar and storage could cost from $50 to $131. And new build wind and storage could cost $44 to $123.
Costs will rise over 20 years almost certainly.
And Microsoft had already large solar and wind power purchase agreements.[1] These could be affected by China's rare earth export controls scheduled to start next year. Hedging this position would be sensible.
You ignore the fact that these datacenters also operate at night and in windless times.
PV did get spectacularly cheaper, but is not a panacea.
Nuclear is great fit for constant load, for example a cloud datacenter where relatively constant utilization is also a business goal and multiple incentives are in place to promote this. (eg. spot pricing to move part of the load off from peaks)
Nuclear power is reliable 24/7 while wind and solar are not and handling this costs money. Microsoft has said that they have more GPUs than electricity to run them so even at $110/MWh it makes sense for them.
I don't know where this '24/7' stuff comes from; they have maintenance outages like anything else. Refueling takes months every couple years, so you're going to have to "handle this" even with nuclear.
"they have maintenance outages like anything else"
not often and most importantly they are PREDICTABLE. You do understand why being able to control when a power plant is operating is a very important thing, right?
The point here being that every single datacenter that's running off nuclear also has a natural gas pipeline running to it or else a massive propane infrastructure because nuclear alone can't get the job done. If your 'clean energy' solution requires a gas pipe, you're misrepresenting its ability to drive the datacenter.
i thought the conversation was regarding utilization of capital, in which case 80% is 80%, predictability doesnt change the fact you have to let GPUs sit idle 20% of the time.
I guess if I knew there would be two months with less power I might design my data center to fit into 40 foot containers so I could deploy wherever power and latency are cheapest
As for France's capacity factor, that has a lot to do with the presence of intermittents on the continental grid, combined with the EU's Renewable Energy Directive making France liable to pay fines if they use nuclear power in preference to wind/solar.
That is just plain incompetence. These are recent US nuclear capacity factors
2023: 93.0%
2022: 92.1%
2021: 92.7%
2020: 92.5%
Nuclear has the highest capacity factor of any other energy source—producing reliable and secure power more than 92% of the time in 2024. That’s nearly twice as much as a coal (42.36%) or natural gas (59.9%) plant that are used more flexibly to meet changing grid demands and almost 3 times more often than wind (34.3%) and solar (23.4%) plants
Nuclear power plants had a 8% share of the total U.S. generation capacity in 2023 but actually produced 18% of the country’s electricity due to its high capacity factor.
That is the problem with large single points of failures.
The US fleet might be large in absolute numbers smoothing out the average, but multiple plants in Florida having simulatenous failures won't be saved by Washington State plants having amazing capacity factors.
What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)
The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.
I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.
Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.
I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.
It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free.
The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AR15.com
They use to manufacture. Not much of a gotcha
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