In public spaces I have no doubt this is the case.
I'm more curious about residential though - see huge interesting in MCM over the last decades. I am biased but I think there is a great deal of interest in warm, modernist spaces with ideas like natural materials and lots of natural lighting, especially when compared to the beige boxes of American home building.
Indeed, the beige boxes are neither modernist nor classicist.
My family lives in a MCM house built around 1960. We bought it in a "hot" market where you couldn't be particular about anything. We chose a house based on location and the interior.
Renewables require storage because they are bursty - sun goes down, wind stops blowing. This is more expensive than just burning as much nat gas as you need.
Presumably, the data center usage could also be bursty, right?
More people will be using AI during the (work)day, than at midnight. Then they could do half solar, half gas.
Also "more expensive" when it comes to solar isn't meaningful until you also consider timeframe. Solar panels pay themselves off in a few years, and after that they basically generate "free" electricity. Gas never becomes cheaper or free, every year it will cost money.
AWS is heavily used worldwide, not just in the US. The same goes for the big AI companies.
Timeframe is accounted for if you look at levelized cost per kWh. The levelized cost of natural gas is 5 to 11 cents/kWh. In the sunniest spots, the levelized cost of solar with enough battery storage to provide 24/7 power is about the same, if you want >90% reliability. The usual four hours of storage is only enough to account for the "duck curve" during the day.
Next: I even wonder why frontiers labs don't sell batch processing and spot prices to keep 100% utilisation. If they do that and I suspect they will it will be 24/7 maxxed.
Imagine this: Fable at 98% discount because but you need to wait. Then imagine: bots that scan your tickets for easy low priority tasks to do when those cheap tokens come.
Let alone research batch compute needs. Training and so on.
One concept will drive this shift: GAAP profitability.
The cost of energy varies widely based on regional factors, geography, existing energy portfolio makeup, etc. Additionally cost is not just the unit price but the price overtime to support a specific SLA.
Texas has very cheap gas; it’s also good for solar. They are very competitive price wise, so it’s kinda depressing they are using gas. But it’s probably a slight price edge plus better reliability.
One existed, it was pulled from the market in the early 2000s. There's still a dog one, and there is at least one which is in late stage trials in the US today.
I have so much hope for lab grown meat and animal byproducts, but between opposition to "gmos" and agricultural lobbying, I think it will take a century before it's the norm.
Even lab grown red meat will have major issues with inflammatory foreign sialic acid. That's unless a genetic strain is used that has only human-compatible sialic acid.
Red meat, meaning pork/beef/lamb/goat, independent of its source, contains human-incompatible sialic acid, which our immune system attacks. This foreign sialic acid even gets used up in our tissues, and then our immune system attacks our own tissues. It takes decades for this to become sufficiently inflammatory and destructive. Even cow milk is not spared. Only hydrolyzed collagen is likely to be very low in such foreign sialic acid.
To understand, these researched NotebookLM videos will explain:
It's not that speculative, considering it the reason why in tissue transplants derived from animals, the transplants are specially engineered to not have this reactive substance. There is just no arguing with the hard data that the substance is foreign, is incorporated into our tissues, and is attacked by our immune system. The only debate is about the extent of the resulting inflammation.
Inflammation is a bit like nuclear fission, in that when a lot of inflammatory sources come together, the resulting runaway outcome is very bad, like civil war in the body. Rheumatoid arthritis, hard atherosclerotic plaque, and colorectal cancer are the result.
A carnivore diet leads to ghoulish dreams of mass murder. There only pleasure from is on the way down.
vegetable protein replacements are like 90% there tastewise as far as I'm concerned, the only time I feel a need to eat meat anymore is when someone would have thrown it out otherwise (an outrageous waste)
Vegetable protein is there in taste, but not macros and micronutrients. I think meat substitutes should first aim for the fat/protein/carb ratio of meat (i.e. almost no carbs and over 50% protein), then the micronutrient composition. Maybe it would be an acquired taste, but I think if it’s nutritious, the taste and satiety will come implicitly, better than any shortcut.
There are plenty of meat eaters with critical vitamin insufficiencies, even of B12. Animals that are fed mostly a corn diet aren't exactly going to contain much of micronutrients in their meat. Micronutrient supplements provide a much more reliable solution. I still rely on animals for hydrolyzed collagen and fish oil, but that's all.
for many people you could put a gun to their head and they'd refuse to eat an alternative and swear up and down that it's inedible regardless of quality
the US has had a strong lobby propagandizing meat for a century (not to mention the fed subsidizing it) and it will take a very long time to make a considerable dent
there's already an organized resistance to vegetable based and lab-grown alternatives stemming from the same sources, it's nearly on the level of the oil industry which has been caught masquerading as anti-renewable activists
I can’t disagree that there’s a lot of bull-headed people out there.
But I have a pretty progressive social circle and many of them have tried to go vegetarian or been veggie-curious. And honestly I can’t think of a single one who’s stuck with it. (I know many other vegetarians for life).
So that’s my only point. Even among willing participants the acceptance rate is low. Meat is frigging delicious to those who have been raised on it and it’s hard to overcome that, and that’s not a propaganda issue. It’s a technology one.
Otherwise I agree the organized resistance is very frustrating.
Totally context is huge. And unfortunately many Indian immigrants or their children become meat eaters in America, I have many of these in my social circle as well.
Yeah, milk is disturbing. Most people's intuition about what is most humane to eat does not match the objective cruelty of what they consume. The life of an average cow versus the life of an average chicken for instance.
I replicated this experiment on several production codebases and got several crits. Lots of dupes, lots of false positives, lots of bugs that weren't actually exploitable, lots of accepted/ known risks. But also, crits!
I think this really needs to be party of the message. It's great that Claude found a vulnerability that apparently has been overlooked for a long time. It's even proper for Anthropic to tout the find. But we should all ask about the signal to nose ratio that would have been part of the process. If it only was successful... That would be worth touting, too. But I expect there was more noise than they'd care to admit.
I'm more curious about residential though - see huge interesting in MCM over the last decades. I am biased but I think there is a great deal of interest in warm, modernist spaces with ideas like natural materials and lots of natural lighting, especially when compared to the beige boxes of American home building.
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