I looked at the Github page and of course it's vibe coded. This is the sort of project that someone would have spent a few months doing as a learning exercise while they were reading through something like Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" series. I don't see the point of vibe coding it. You still end up with a toy compiler that nobody will actually use, except now you haven't learned anything about how compilers work. It's pointless.
I imagine I’d learn a fair bit about how to go about vibe-coding developer tools by implementing this, so it hardly seems pointless? It seems like an interesting exercise.
In particular, I’d want to experiment with how to get coding agent to generate more readable code and better documentation. I can get it to make the code somewhat readable, but haven’t really solved yet.
Vibe code means the human did not look at the code: how do you know that's true?
It's easily to spot a code base that's build LLM-assisted. But to know that no human actually took interest in the code is hard to know without talking to the humans that prompted the LLM.
The blogpost about the compiler is AI written, the README file in the Github repo is AI written, all the documentation is AI written, the reverse engineering analysis of Borland Turbo C++ is AI written, all the comments in the code are AI written, and every single commit in the repo was done by Claude. I don't think it's reasonable to say that the author took any serious interest in the code. I suppose they might have glanced over it before telling Claude to commit, but you don't get much out of that vs. writing a toy compiler yourself.
Exactly. Some "Prolog interpreter in Tcl" is a prompt away in LLMs but what's the point of inferring and dumping it on github? Same goes for any vibe-coded project.
Yep, and the code is an eyesore to look at. Almost no logical separation of code blocks (everything mashed-up together) I was really expecting LLM to annotate every line of code with (useless) comments, considering many vibecoded js projects are like that.
Either my C skills are getting rusty and that is how a C codebase normally looks like, or LLM was trained on some suspicious codebases.
I checked a few source files at random and it looked fine to me overall. It's broken down into small-to-medium sized functions, contrary to what you suggest. If your issue is just the size of the individual source files, then you can find much larger in non-vibe-coded C projects like QuickJS.
Wait, I had a look and this looks really like any other C code base to me. I even think it's unlikely this is LLM-generated?! The presence of some large functions, for example, is a sign of human-generated code, LLMs tend to be strongly opposed to that, unlike C programmers.
No you're right, this code is terrible. Running a linter like clang-tidy would surface many issues. Not sure why the LLM didn't think of ever doing that.
It's because Canonical spams LinkedIn with tens of thousands of job posts (despite only having ~1800 employees) because they put ads for the same remote job listing in hundreds of different cities. As a result, basically anyone who's ever looked for a tech job on LinkedIn has at least looked at the first step of Canonical's job application process (including where it asks about how well you did at math in high school, your SAT scores, your college class ranking and GPA, etc).
During the dot-com boom, Cisco was the underlying infrastructure of the Internet. A lot of investors that believed themselves to be savvy bought Cisco stock. Their reasoning was that individual dot-com startups may go under, but the Internet itself was here to stay. In practice, the Cisco stock price peaked in March 2000, and anyone who invested at the peak would not have broken even (in nominal dollars, not real dollars) until December 2025.
The investors were right that the Internet would be important, and that Cisco would continue to be an important manufacturer of networking infrastructure. This just fundamentally did not matter because after the dot-com bubble popped, the market decided that Cisco simply wasn't worth the price it was selling at during the height of the bubble.
Clean-room reverse engineering gets around the copyright on the software. What the Synaptics legal people are arguing is that the code is infringing on two of Synaptics's patents, not on its copyright. Even if you have a completely new implementation of the code, it's still patent infringement if the code implements patented inventions.
A lot of people here are portraying the opposition to data centers as being uneducated hypocrites who are against anything getting built. When you look at what the opposition are saying, they generally know what they are talking about. Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor
A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers. I think it makes sense to say that the buildout should be paused until fairer terms can be worked out on a national level, rather than letting this continue to happen.
Not only steamrolled but, and at the fault of local BOS, hand-tied under NDAs. Nothing will give voters a worse distrust of leadership than being willingly gagged. Oh and in some cases, for personal gain: https://www.richmonder.org/a-chesterfield-employee-who-helpe...
Yea, a lot of the opposition is around these deals being cut at 3:00 in the morning in secret meetings in a shady, smoke-filled room, deliberately avoiding public input and scrutiny. Even if it's not grift and corruption, it certainly looks like grift and corruption.
>>“- There must be community benefits agreements negotiated transparently with the local community
- Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
- Some of the revenue generated by the datacenter must be set aside to improve power reliability
- Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
- Datacenters must be built using union labor”
Deal. This sounds like a great list. I would add, “no property tax breaks”.
Just get the state to pass this as a law and set appropriate enforcement mechanisms and then just let data centers go ham if they meet this criteria?
No more “per community meetings” and municipal haggling (see: corrupting) local governments. Buy the land build the data centers. The municipality can figure out the exact benefits that works for that community from the giant tax coffers.
Regulated monopolies can be more efficient than state ownership... if the regulatory framework has the correct incentives. Unfortunately, that's very hard to do.
The benefit with regulated monopolies are that you have a separation of control between regulation (from PSC/voters) and monopoly (running its business).
If the current regulatory regime isn't producing the desired results, it can be changed.
With straight state ownership, things are much more entangled.
I don't think people are a ignorant or provincial as people here are suggesting.
Broadly, the people in areas with datacenters understand that AI is leading to a loss of control and concentration in power and money. A lot of people in these rural areas have been on the receiving end of this sort of screw job for generations. Their skepticism is earned, and the way our field has tried to ram these projects through with what I will try to gently call a "ship it" ethos has not helped.
This is probably a healthy reset for the field overall, and for the country. A number of the leadership of these companies have seemed to develop manifest destiny or messiah complexes that are offputting to most people. Polling data supports this.
It's a local problem., but it's not just a local problem.
Seeing multiple data centers sprouting up all over rural Ohio on a recent drive across the state was quite jarring. All of a sudden there are like ten massive cranes and a dozen huge turbines sitting in the middle of a field of corn and soy. It may me understand a lot better why people in the area hate them.
I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing. Right now their sales pitch is basically we know it might suck having a data center in your backyard and it's a major bummer that any product involving a computer chip is vastly more expensive for the first time ever, but on the other hand our new AI technology is going to take your job and maybe destroy humanity.
I'm sure these guys aren't dumb, but they certainly act pretty dumb. What really solidified it for me was the choice they made to build data centers literally right next to neighborhoods and then run incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7. Even if they were legally allowed to do that, how they did they imagine it would go explicitly signalling that they couldn't give two shits about people living in the community? It's definitely some combination of incompetence and hubris to not predict the resulting backlash.
> I would love it if this type of thing convinced the AI people they need to take a different approach to their business and marketing.
It won't. These people are fully convinced that literally everyone but them are all just clueless morons pushing back against their godlike infallible genius because we're all jealous of their wealth and power.
> Here's Abdul El-Sayed (new Michigan senator) talking about his ideas for regulating the AI industry: https://youtu.be/YX44XDt0gXI?t=182 . For datacenters specifically, he isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them. He views moratoriums as something that localities and states should be doing until those rules are in place federally. The rules he suggests are:
That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.
The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"
The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this. What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
> The problem is you can't really stop economic change with protectionism like this.
Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.
> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.
Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.
The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?
Not sure what you suggest to do. Plenty of countries will love to have datacenters. And these datacenters do compute, they don't need fast data transfer, they can be anywhere, pings don't matter. Plenty of countries actually love AI.
I'd argue, the biggest problem with AI is that it makes totalitarianism a lot more attractive, because it is an infinitely big state that controls all resources: so if AI becomes everything and deprives people of agency, it's no problem: government marshals all resources anyway and people have no agency even without AI if country is totalitarian - but it can also make quick decisions with no political bullshit.
> The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs
I believe you could not be more correct but it seems extremely difficult to get people to take any meaningful action, or even talk about this openly
I have stopped even saying anything like this aloud to people because the reaction I get is anywhere from "it won't be that bad you're exaggerating" to "you're a conspiracy theorist nutjob"
Like I said, if you watch the video I linked it's him going over his ideas for regulating the AI industry in general. I only typed up the parts regarding datacenters because it was what's most relevant to the article and the discussion.
I would like the Overton window to be where you are. Till it gets there, when people are still accusing opposition of being clueless, this is a good counterpoint and resting place for agreement.
It was recently announced that Meta was building a DC about 75km from my city that is going to be using ~1.8GW of power.
What I'd like to see from my provincial government is the leadership and foresight to regulate that development in such a way that the waste energy from this DC is used to heat greenhouses in our very cold winters.
That could go a long way to bootstrapping a local greenhouse industry and to improving regional food sovereignty.
That's the kind of stuff that government should be doing. They stand at the intersection between all the various stakeholders and they handle the big levers that can force / coordinate them into doing things that increase value and quality of life for the people that elected them.
Add effective enforcement with harsh penalties for "ask for forgiveness rather than permission" behavior. We've been on this ride too many times not to know what to expect.
Florida passed a state law that has standards are somewhat close to what you wrote, yet communities down here still voted to ban datacenter construction.
This is why free markets need reasonable legislation.
Even if a good willing CEO wants to do what's right, he is pressured not to do it by the unlegislated free market - his company is at (economical) disadvantage with the opposition, putting the company at risk or not meeting his obligations to shareholders. Let's not blame consumers either, because they cannot be informed about consequences in the nth order either.
If the legislation is reasonable, everyone must play by the same rules, both the good and the bad willing CEOs. The companies gain trust, the government too, and the consumers (and affected citizens) win.
I worked for a lab that was building a new computer room and it spent about a year in the permitting process with the local town council before getting approved. Most of the focus in that process was on the geothermal cooling system.
Corporate power is now so great that they successfully lobby to reduce/eliminate their tax burden so they don't pay for infrastructure they need.
Workers pay that cost through increased market prices and taxes (eg energy) which also drives up other prices. It's not inflationary because it's a real value adjustment but everyone can pretend it is while real term wages drop even further.
Why must this be done at the federal(I presume what you mean when you say national) level? Seems to me, this should be up to the local community, if they want a datacenter or not.
But I am in general for decentralisation and democracy.
> A lot of the communities that had datacenters built in them ended up getting steamrolled in negotiations by the tech companies because you had the local government (in small towns, this is people who work part time making a few thousand dollars per year) negotiating a deal with the Google/xAI/Oracle/etc corporate lawyers.
I think the immediately preceding sentence pretty clearly laid out their rational. (Not saying I agree or disagree, just that I think your question was already answered).
Because the tech companies operate at the national level and individual communities are at a massive disadvantage if they just negotiated individually.
People are clamoring to control what others can do on their own personal property, and then people would complain they are banned from fixing their car in their backyard. Why do people want to make their own lives worse? Do they think these laws only apply to some "other" group?
This all seems reasonable. My question is, how would data centre bossess genuinely respond to these points?
I find it difficult get to the genuine points, as the whole topic is piled high with “arguments”, PR, marketing, and other junk discourse being emitted from all sides.
I like a lot of what El-Sayed has said about AI, but he's kind of disingenuous here. If you add enough rules like that, nothing's ever going to get built.
I think he's perfectly fine with you (and everyone else with a functioning brain) to take the very simple logical leap to infer that if they can't meet the list of requirements for building, then they should not build.
But you want him to come out and say something that he doesn't believe (and has personally contradicted): that he's opposed to data centers as a point of principle, because you're ideologically convinced that that is his viewpoint, because to you that's the only reason someone would put up any type of roadblock to data center build-outs.
Maybe the people building the datacentres should come out and say they can't build them without screwing over local communities, see how that goes down.
The issue is not the intent of the rules, but the actual effect, which is 1) increasing the time and cost involved in building anything, and 2) abuse of those rules by bad-faith actors who wish to block or delay a development that would on average benefit the local community.
I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
> that would on average benefit the local community.
The AI boosters appear to have badly failed in convincing local communities of this.
Perhaps they should have started off with an informative AI positive PR campaign rather than ... whatever it was that put local communities off the notion.
The heads of the big AI labs do seem to be pretty catastrophically bad at PR, I do agree. But this is hacker news, I thought we were meant to care about and look at the facts and not get swayed by the PR?
The facts will depend on each individual datacenter proposal. I'm not saying they all should be built or that none should be built, but that each one should be based on understanding of what each proposal entails that is grounded in reality as opposed to emotive broad-strokes generalisations that are either false in general or not necessarily true for every example, and ideally the tools available in the decision making process empower the former and not the latter.
What is the benefit of a data center to the local community? This is the real problem. Best case, it’s eh, whatever. It doesn’t provide jobs, but if planned and built properly it is largely inoffensive (provided that it does not cause electricity rates to rise; this is pretty locally specific as different electricity markets work different ways). Worst case, you have Elon Musk putting old jet engines next to your house, or that Bitcoin miner in Texas where neighbours report 90db noise.
At the very least, laws need to prevent the second case.
These are not different from normal nimbyism. Me demanding that before any housing can be built near me it should benefit ME, all is potential negatives like traffic are mitigated, it must be built extra expensively, etc. Is just bog standard nimbyism and why housing is not getting built.
Any real estate regulation can be labeled as NIMBYism. You're invoking it here as a thought-terminating cliché.
Building without considering consequences at all, or building the way that capital demands, is how you end up with urban communities getting obliterated by highways[1], or rural communities getting decimated by industrial plants[2], or indigenous communities getting destroyed by military testing[3], or indigenous people AND fragile ecosystems getting erased by military testing[4].
What i always wondered - why wasn't building completely new cities from scratch where nothing stands now, and far from other residential areas, considered as a solution to NIMBY problem?
Not really. The regulation where everyone has to meet the same long term, unbiased standard on noise, emissions whatever, while it can also be excessive, is different from the regulation where to make use of your private property you have to follow the whims of whoever has the power. Why would data centers need to be built using union labor when there's no such requirement for anything else? In the old days you needed to placate the whims of a king to be granted the right to use your own property, now you need to placate a union boss or some design review bureaucrat.
And of course most of the examples you give are irrelevant - they don't even involve private property or specifically involve the government taking private property.
Eminent domain used to seize private land is more similar to prohibiting construction on private land, than allowing it.
Perhaps it's just you, because the votes say otherwise. Housing NIMBYism is people who already have homes preventing new ones from being built, for their own benefit (Price increases on existing stock). That's not what's happening with data centers.
NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes, and covers more than just homeowners. Instead, it covers when residents oppose things like schools, public transit, electricity generation, infrastructure, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
The person I initially responded to was specifically talking about housing NIMBYism, not NIMBYs in general. I pointed out how homeowners are typically the ones opposing new housing, which is not the case with data centers.
You responded with “NIMBYism covers far more than just building homes” which is true but not what was being responded to.
Yes, I want the datacenter just not in my backyard. Of all buildings, a datacenter is the most amenable to being put somewhere else. Maybe we can have it nearby if the corp is bringing something to the table. What's the problem?
And yeah I use cloud services. They aren't charities, I pay for those.
Or put another way, NIMBY is used as a slur but not every NIMBY position is unreasonable.
We need landfills but I don’t want to live next to a landfill. Maybe we could come to a compromise where you build the thing in a way that doesn’t negatively impact me.
By the same logic, you obviously won't mind if there are open-cut-mines; a sewage plant; a tannery; a telecommunications rocket launch facility and a container shipping terminal next to your backyard.
I won't mind a shipping terminal. The rest have some pollution issues so probably should be some distance from residences. Data centers have no pollution issues and I won't mind living next door to one either. I never had problems with seeing industry, I like seeing industry, its a great sign of progress and technology.
Data centres causes noise pollution which has health impacts. Similarly, a shipping terminal, will generate particulate pollution (until they move to EV and/or trains), noise pollution and perhaps light pollution (if it's a 24/7 port).
But as you've (rightfully) indicated, not all pollution is offensive to all. You might even be able to benefit from that, I imagine housing near industrial areas might be cheaper. And we do need mines; sewage system; leather; satellites...and even data centres.
By no means am I suggesting that polluting industries should be completely banned. I believe there's a middle ground between carte blanche and a complete ban. The backlash against data centres isn't just because they are data centres. It's because they are often located in residential areas and are taking advantage of previous investments by the residents in power/water infrastructure. If they located data centres in industrial (or commercial) zones and invested to upgrade the power/water infrastructure, there'd be significantly less backlash.
Lastly, my reply was primarily directly at parineum's comment which contemptuously rejected people's legitimate concerns as if they lost all rights to democratically lobby for sensible regulation simply because something has a legitimate use in society.
Yes, personally its not just about money for me, a shipping port is scenic to me and if I could, I won't mind at all living near one.
Its because the current movement is insane and absurd made from completely imaginary flat earth level reasons, many of these protestors won't be happy with any dc at all even if they made it 10000 miles from their house. I am okay with reasonable dialog and compromise. I feel these people aren't. This is a uniquely strange phenomenon, I am not wholly ruling out the opinion of some who think this might be amplified ad sabotage by foreign powers, but then again one should never underestimate the native stupidity of americans. They elected trump twice after all.
I live near a sewage plant. One or two days a year when I am cycling past the fence on my commute, I might get a whiff of something. People really overestimate the problem.
Collossus 2's pollution from on site power generation is well documented. There's also noise; depending on the design you could have a 24/7 hum plus infrasound. These things can be unbelievable nuisances if they are built without caring, near residences.
Even if they do use AI and are happy with it, and I'd be willing to bet that isn't always the case, the services they use today clearly don't depend on data centers that haven't even been built yet. Maybe some are happy with the current shitty AI that's a fun toy to play with, but don't want new data centers built and used to train an improved AI that will make them unemployable.
Not at all. I gave houses as an example, but I hypothetically also don't want bus or rail stops anywhere near me. Or shops. Or bars. I guess it's not nimbyism since I don't own a bus stop or a shop.
Yes, I'm a NIMBY. Someone want to build more houses, maybe that's good, but the roads need to be scaled up to match. Want to build a datacenter, ok but what's in it for me? The people long-term invested in a town are the ones who should be making decisions on how to develop it, not someone coming in from the outside to make a buck.
> isn't against them being built but thinks that there need to be rules in place so the communities that they're being built in actually benefit from them
Yes this is exactly what NIMBYs who want to prevent new housing from existing say. And preventing people in a community from having a day in what gets built in their neighborhoods is precislely what state level YIMBY laws in California are intended to do.
If you cannot see the fundamental difference between building datacenters that suck power, provide no local jobs, are a nuisance, and can be located almost anywhere and housing for people I simply don’t know what to tell you.
Your point is that the arguments are topologically similar but you are ignoring the impacts.
The impacts of data centers on people living nearby are basically nothing, and pretty much all anti-data-center-sentiment is driven by misinformed or willfully-delusional people. Even the idea that it's a problem that data centers "provide no local jobs" is crazy - there are all sorts of built structures that provide no local jobs because they simply have nothing to do with a business that hires employees, the idea that a data center doing much the same thing justifies making it illegal to build is crazy.
I think there's a better case that building additional housing causes an impact on people nearby than there is that data centers do - because the people who would live in that housing are a type of impact on the people who already live nearby - and I'm still extremely unsympathetic to NIMBYs because NIMBYism is the main reason my own housing costs are so high. Data center opposition is even less justified than housing opposition.
If data centres were forced to contribute what was required to build the utility infrastructure required to support them, that might be true. For example, electricity costs.
Datacentres are generally built where poor people live. If you are on minimum wage and suddenly someone increases your electricity bill by $300 because of data centres, on top of all the other increases tied to things like energy insecurity... I can understand why people would consider that an impact.
Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
>Why should by default anyone have a say in what legal activity someone does in their own private property? If they don't like it, it is on them to prove some damages.
I can legally operate a slaughterhouse. How about I buy the plots on both sides of your house and start killing, gutting and cleaning cows, pigs, sheep and other animals?
Any waste can be removed a couple times a week.
I'd expect that you'd object to that perfectly reasonable business plan, yes?
What's that? There are laws (usually zoning) about who (If anyone) can run a slaughterhouse on your street?
Whatever do you mean?
Who are you to tell me what I can do on my private property?
I don't mind that. Run a slaughterhouse around my house if you want. I live in a low regulation place regarding mixing residential/business and in fact there is already a slaughterhouse next to me.
More "Not in any backyard until deal structures are guaranteed to respect the gross asymmetry of participants, but at that point reasonable so let's establish those structure guarantees with federal leverage sooner than later"
In other words, welcome to NIABUDSAGTTYGAOP, BATPESLETSGWFLSTL
But I get how that's not as fun to engage with for pithy internet rhetoric.
“Nono, I’m not NIMBY, I just want to set up some goalposts that I can arbitrarily move whenever I want. I just want veto power. Trust me, I’ll use it responsibly”
The US is in a very fortunate position at the top of the global AI food chain. We don't build the chips, we don't build the machines that build the chips, we don't mine the rare earths that make up the chips.
But the chips land on our soil and are programmed by our companies (often by immigrants).
I think if we forfeit our spot it could be pretty bad economically.
Actually the datacenter boom is already making it so only the rich have access, and the rest of us can maybe rent a little. Prices out a new box lately?
The supply of computer components in the next few years is in fact fixed and cannot be changed.
After that, when more Litography machines have been built and facilities constructed, that may change. But even then I don't see how this will reduce component prices below the pre-AI-boom numbers? Chip production was already very efficient and already had very good economies of scale. Any attempt to ramp up production quickly will just lead to higher costs in facility construction, that need to be recouped. (Unless AI is a bubble that bursts, at which point components will be cheap, but only for a moment)
You’re making the case against infrastructure spending to meet demand needs in general. Your argument applies to oil prices, housing prices, inflation in general and I think that’s silly. CapEx Eventually does get subsumed into profit and debt.
Other than war, price pressure is the only lever we have for abundance and a pivot against a future of rationing and constant whinging and committee hearings about which technology is allowed to use how much RAM.
> Any new datacenters being built cannot raise utility rates
DCs do not raise utility rates, utility companies raise rates in response to demand, but aside from that nitpick there is a bigger problem here. If the DC is not connected to the grid then the DC is going to generate power on its own, using inefficient (due to the small scale) and polluting systems (e.g. turbine generators).
If you actually want to address the utility bill impacts of DCs, you should require them to pay the local community. We have a similar arrangement for oil drilling -- to avoid a situation where companies pile onto oil fields and put derricks up on every property, we instead have the companies pay people who own the land above the oil being extracted and that is why Beverly Hills is such a wealthy neighborhood. Give money to the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the data center.
Frankly we should require DCs to pay even more when they are not attached to the grid to discourage pollution.
> Datacenters must not touch our waterways at all
...at all? Not even with a connection to the local water utility? That would mean there cannot even be a toilet in the building.
Data centers are industrial operations and should be treated as such -- I do not know of any other industry where this kind of absolute isolation from the local community is being called for, and there are plenty of concerns about industrial water use beyond data centers.
This is like saying "tech employees don't raise rents, landlords raise rents in response to tech employees offering their fat salaries" - it's a distinction without a difference and the end result is what people object to.
OK, let's take that example. It is true -- landlords are responsible for raising rents, and they do so in response to demand for housing. In some places, landlords are not allowed to arbitrarily raise rents -- for example, by limiting rent increases to follow the CPI. In theory you could regulate utility rates to insulate communities from the impact of DCs and other industrial operations.
Like I said, it is a nitpick and there are bigger problems here.
Right, but the point is not that it is possible, it is that there are other, more important issues here. Let's say we regulate the utilities so that residential customers will not be impacted by industrial users (or by DC operators specifically). The result would be higher utility bills for those industrial users, which would encourage the use of things like turbine generators -- which I would say is a negative outcome we should avoid.
It needs to be carefully thought out (Congress does not have the best record on this -- see e.g. the ban on onion futures). As I suggested elsewhere, a better idea would be to require DCs to pay the local community in proportion to the electricity consumed by the DC, and an even larger payment to the local community if the DC does not get its power from the grid (to discourage less efficient/more polluting power generation). Yes, rates would be higher, but people would be compensated with cash and it would be a big incentive for industrial users to be more energy efficient and a small nudge for residential users.
This reminds me of the short-form video (Daily Show?) I saw recently of a man in a red hat insisting that the government should facilitate union workers increasingly gaining ownership of the companies and corporations they work for.
You know, like workers seizing the means of production.
But then in the next breath condemning the concept of socialism. But probably because JD Vance himself has redefined socialism to mean forcing girls to play with boys in sports.
Rents rise in proportion to the rest of the market, you look at comparables. The market is a function of supply and demand. When my city passed a bunch of tenant laws ~16k units left the market and rents went up proportionally.
> utility companies raise rates in response to demand,
That's less than a half truth.
Here's the full version:
Utility companies raise rates in order to build new power plants for the sole use and benefit of a single big biz customer who demands that all pay for the new plants his big biz needs.
For any non-Americans reading this, note that saying "x% of Americans support [vaguely progressive policy] (i.e. universal healthcare, wealth tax, $15/hour minimum wage, mandatory paid family leave) is basically irrelevant to whether the policy will actually get passed. The US system of government is is intentionally and explicitly designed so politicians are not accountable to private opinion, and so the representatives of a small percentage of the population can stop legislation that is popular with the majority from getting passed.
> When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
It doesn't mean it will get passed, but it does mean you can campaign on it. If a majority of voters want something, and can be persuaded to vote for a candidate who is against that, it says rather a lot about the power of money.
What I'm saying is that if you read about the history and creation of the US Constitution, the people who created it clearly and unambiguously expressed their distrust in giving too much political influence to the general public, and made limiting popular influence one of their main goals. Some examples of this are the way the Senate is apportioned and the 6-year Senate term, the Electoral College and the way that it's apportioned, how difficult it is to amend the Constitution, and the lifetime tenure of federal judges. If you're interested, there's a good paper going over the motivation behind the Constitution, how it was created, and how it was ratified: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3370359
If doing a gig app job full time doesn't count you as unemployed, I think that's a decent explanation for those numbers. Those jobs can be gotten by anyone with a car, but a job with a formal employment agreement and benefits is still difficult to get.
Most job growth for the past several years has been in the private education and health services, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl... . These sectors are harder to automate with AI compared to white collar office jobs, which have seen major losses.
Weird? It looks much more elegant, if you know what I mean. They should also remove the "WR" sign. But I guess Casio knows what sells and what doesn't.
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