Silicon Valley's Bad Night

The social contract of -- progress will make your lives better too -- is dead.

We need to force it to come back or things will get really bad for most people.

> Why aren’t the dot centers bribing the locals with infrastructure?

It might be that they can't. (Well, not without spending even more money or time.)

They're looking for power which:

1. Fits on-site, rather than needing more space or being far away and dependent on the grid.

2. Can be ramped up on-demand, to keep their stuff running if there's a blackout.

3. Prioritizes their facility with "first dibs" when there are brownouts or other issues.

4. Can be built quickly so that they can finish the facility and start selling/renting.

These requirements are tend to conflict with the goals of making cheap power for sale: An offshore wind-farm might mollify local ratepayers, but it doesn't do anything for their facility reaching "ready".

If you offer to add a bunch of offshore wind turbines or build a new nuclear plant, what happens? It's basically "address NIMBY opposition by doing something that incurs NIMBY opposition".

The real problem is that politics has gotten so broken that people have lost the connection between building things and having them. You'll have the same people opposing new generating capacity while complaining about high electric bills.

Vogtle 3/4 cost 30B and took 15 years for 2GW. Gas turbines pollute and need gas infrastructure. Solar needs better batteries.

Firefox with uBlock Origin (assuming the right settings therein) will solve your problem.

> I don’t think SV leadership realizes how f—-ked they are.

So true.

I remember hearing somewhere that Mark's residence in Los Gatos there has RPG proof windows in it. Like 9(?) inches thick. Even the sea lion windows at the zoo aren't that thick. The optical distortion on such a window is just immense.

I've worked with glass that thick before for radiation stuff (leaded glass though, so quite yellow, caveats apply) and it's hard to describe how it feels looking into a room via glass that thick. You can't get an angle on things the way you'd like. Tapping on it to get someone's attention is pointless, like tapping on a concrete bench. You can see in 3-D, but the subtle variations in the optical patterns make it so that focusing and moving your head is hard, your eyes always have to adjust and go a teeny bit crosseyed all the time. Then the refractive index makes things appear where you know they are not, so you're never quite sure of the location of things. Also, glass absorbs light at different frequencies at different ways. So the color you see is always going to be a bit dulled in the reds (typically), though I'm not sure what the spectrum absorbtion is for 9 inch thick RPG proof glass.

Look, point I am trying to make is that Mark really does see the world differently than we do. Like when he wakes up and looks out the window, it really is distorted. And this is but one example of how his reality is so much different than ours.

It's been true for likely 300,000 years that the oligarchs have a different reality and pressures than we serfs do. This time is absolutely no different. And the source is always the same: hubris.

Not building out data centers would mean your $200 spend would be $500 no? Just supply/demand wise

Only in the MAGA world are we somehow given a choice between NDA-laden, Coal powered loud turbine data center projects or no data centers at all.

Feels like there’s always been an easy middle ground no? I agree nothing in the MAGA world has forced tech to pursue it, but it’s always been there.

I suspect they just got a wake-up call. In one night they lost a friendly congress by a LARGE margin, many local elections including Texas AG and Gov just walked out of their lives. Voters all over the country made their feelings on this issue clear enough that it would be difficult to pin this response on a party rather than the people as a whole.

All of this was preceded by the first economic shocks of the bubble bursting, and now it's truly underway. By this time next week it's entirely possible there will be fewer SV "Leaders" in a position to do more than wonder when exactly it all went so wrong.

Hint: It was the beginning.

I think it's a natural reaction to the "our AI systems are really dangerous and might kill you all and will definitely take your jobs" messages that have been coming out of the AI labs for the past few years.

They've dialed them back a bit now, but way too late. That message has sunk in.

Campaigning to prevent data centers from being built is the most actionable thing a US citizen can do, because it's a local issue (and hence something they can influence), plus they can use arguments about noise and power prices and water pollution to help make the case.

(I think most of those arguments don't stand up to scrutiny - as light industry goes data centers are pretty minor, would you prefer a concrete plant in your back yard? But I don't think the arguments are the point for a lot of people. It's about having a way to oppose AI generally.)

Look, I use Claude every day. It's great for my work, and it genuinely makes me more productive, and I like it.

That said, I live out in the boonies (as far east from the SF bay area as you can go before there is just nothing but the forests of the Sierras). They are talking about building a data center in Ione, a small town out here in the middle of nowhere (not quite as remote as where I am). Now, I cannot fathom why that would be a good place. There's no water, there's no infrastructure, we're not near any internet backbone. Perhaps land is cheap out here, but electricity is served by PG&E, so I don't imagine it's particularly cheap. I, and everyone I know living out here, are vehemently against building data centers out here. It just makes no sense to put them out here, especially with the wildfire risks. There's really no propaganda needed to make people hate them.

I don't see why I shouldn't be against them. It doesn't benefit me in any way, it just increases my electricity costs. Nor am I sure there is even a market for the majority of proposed data center builds, if this exponential growth/need for computing power doesn't hold we will be flushing money down the toilet, and largely on the public's dime since most of it is funded by loans and debt. Even if LLMs achieve all that is promised and more, that just means more people out of work sooner and the already powerful and wealthy gain more power and wealth than anybody else.

I have no doubt there's foreign bot armies amplifying these things, but foreign bot armies understand they're most effective when the amplify real sentiments.

And the anti-data center stuff is a very, very real sentiment.

I know actual people who are deeply opposed to AI (well, the current AI tech anyway), for what seem to them to be good moral reasons.

I find the attitude a bit weird and very left-wing purity-spiral stuff, but it is a real attitude that real people have.

i work in AI and i think we should hit the brakes: get a better oversight mechanism in place, help local municipalities get more in exchange for building them (no more tax incentives, NDAs, high emissions power sources), those are good places to start.

rushing ahead with the 'it might destroy us but we've gotta beat China!' is silly bullshit.

And the debt financing needs to stop.

There's a sensible path forward that doesn't involve a full stop, nor maintains the previous trajectory.

My electricity bill is 50% higher than this same month 1 year ago. My friends and neighbors in my city have said that they also have greatly increased electricity bills. Whether or not that increase is due to a specific data center, it's extremely easy to blame it on the increased electricity usage of data centers, no foreign propaganda required.

Many real people show up at city council meetings all the time to speak out against data centers.

And contrary to a lot of recent right-wing conspiracy theories, there isn't much of a market for paying people to show up to protests.

I'm convinced too few people know the history of the Cold War missile gap. To be fair let's take a more recent example of Iran being weeks away from a nuclear bomb for the past three decades.

My neighbors take issue with people getting the wrong roof on their house. Not surprised people being against a data center nearby.

Why...? Or is this just a sarcastic way of saying you disagree with the movement?

> I'm convinced the anti data center movement is foreign propaganda

Exactly! No rational person could oppose supergeniuses like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, etc., so if people do, the logical conclusion is that they've been manipulated by a psyop.

Science is my superpower!

Believe me brother, from the other side of the ocean I couldn't care less if you drowned in your own shit. I just don't want it on my land.

it is woke mind virus propagated via 5g towers and vaccines

You read that in the media? Or your favorite retard influencers?