Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

You could buy a house and a private jet with these if you held just one more year.

Usefulness and overvaluation are not mutually exclusive. AI is useful, but it is not a fraction as useful as these companies spending rates would have one believe.

If it is, then the world is going to lose pretty much all white collar jobs. That's not really the bright future they're selling either.

In my experience LLMs mimic human thought, so they don't "copy" but they do write from "experience" -- and they know more than any single developer can.

So I'm getting tired of the argument that LLMs are "plagiarism machines" -- yes, they can be coaxed into repeating training material verbatim, but no, they don't do that unless you try.

Opus 4.6's C compiler? I've not looked at it, but I would bet it does not resemble GCC -- maybe some corners, but overall it must be new, and if the prompting was specific enough as to architecture and design then it might not resemble GCC or any other C compiler much at all.

Not only do LLMs mimic human thinking, but also they mimic human faults. Obviously one way in which they mimic human faults is that there are mistakes in the LLMs' training materials, so they will evince some imperfections, and even contradictions (since there will be contradictions in their training materials). Another way is that their context windows are limited, just like ours. I liken their hallucinations to crappy code written by a tired human at 3AM after a 20 hour day.

If they are so human-like, we really cannot ascribe their output to plagiarism except when prompted so as to plagiarize.

it all takes years. it takes years for permitting to open up the power plant to run the chips. at the scale the Big 3/4 (google, amazon, microsoft, and meta-ish) are going, we don't actually have the capacity to BUILD the capacity, despite a forecast of just 1% national electricity consumption growth this year, partly because we were expecting electricity demand to slow down and for an orderly shutdown of our fossil fuel plants. we couldn't even fill >100GW of gas/coal turbine orders over the next 5 years if we had to, and we might have to, because some of our grids (notably PJM's) are forecast to be under their safety margin of over-production in the following years.

meanwhile, regional grid operators are faced with Big Tech driving tens of % of total power into private contracts where there's only one customer; they are making the decisions normally reserved for nation-states, right? reopening Three Mile Island sounded like a pipe dream a few years ago. I hear They have something like 50 more experimental, small-scale NPPs they want to fire up across the country in the next few years, too (but despite sounding like a big boon for energy, they're ~meaningless short-term in the face of how much demand we're looking at). -so this power (uh, literally) gets wrested away from the grid authorities and from what was largely the domain of government, to now be managed by techbros and a select few partners who will be reliant on their money; I'm sure that will work out fine.

anyway, part of the reason it does make some sense in the US for the government to push for more coal/LNG turbines, is because they're already there and we need them now; the permitting to un-mothball, prevent mothballing, or expand facilities, is far less arduous than what a company'd have to go through for a new facility (tho again, we don't have capacity to build all the turbines we require inside 5 years anyway). I'm not saying it's a good idea to start sending up more GHGs, but it's maybe better than pricing out electricity for residences and "real" industry. hey, who knows? maybe they'll simply build natural gas pipelines that don't leak this time.

-oh, and then there's the problem with these new datacenters disrupting the traditional power demand curve, because they don't really do as much peak draw anymore; their peak draw is approaching base load, as LLM batching (when a company has a bunch of stuff they want processed and can wait a day for it to run in "off-hours") is sold, and if unsold, that time can be used as training time; so the modern datacenter is a 24/7/365 organ; the heart, powering our society, Moltbook. the importance of this is it makes solar less financially attractive, because now we need to be able to bank more energy since more demand's shifting to overnight. we might also want to consider just getting the moon really, really hot? then we can get a truly substantial haul of lunar light for our panels. you know, we decided against nuking hurricanes again recently; maybe we could build some new ones and nuke the moon, a lot.