Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.

(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)

I guess, if it's using fossil fuel to generate power it's also just moving heat from one place to another, but really really slowly. The relevant factor there is that the long term storage was performing a important secondary function of holding a lot of co2.

It's in Texas, surely that's an area amenable to solar production. What are they actually using there.

You're right, it's not leaking, it's dumping excess heat on purpose.

However, I get triggered whenever someone uses the term "by design" wrongly. The generation of heat is not by design. It's an undesired side-effect of the computing being done. "By design" would mean that someone decided that there should be a certain amount of heat generation and made sure that it happens.

Most often I see this term misuse from developers who explain bugs as being "by design". It happens when two features interact in an undesired way that creates problems (a bug). Developers like to look at feature A in isolation, determine that it works as designed, then look at feature B, determine that it also works as designed, then they look at and understand the interaction between feature A and B and since they now understand what is happening, they claim it's "by design". However, nobody ever decided that feature A and B should interact this way. It was clearly an oversight and every normal person would agree that the interaction is undesired and a bug. But the developer says "won't fix, this is by design". Infuriating!

Arc furnace foundry : 500 kw/tonne

Production : 150 t/hr

500*150 = 75 MW/h

So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back.

It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.

We've been able to talk to machines, have them understand that speech, and do work based on it, for decades. But we're all still typing into keyboards.

We've had devices which can track our eyes to move a mouse pointer for 37 years, but we all still use our hands/thumbs to move a mouse.

We had mobile devices which had dedicated keys for input which allowed us to input without looking, and we replaced those with mobile devices with no dedicated keys (so we have to look to provide input) and bodies made of glass so they would shatter when dropped and required additional plastic coverings to protect them. Even automobiles, where safety is a high priority, also adopted input devices which require looking away from the road.

Our world includes a government which is indented to be led via decisions from all the people, and could easily be overthrown by all the people, but only a select few people actually get to make decisions, and they don't have to listen to the people, and basically do whatever they want (wrt the other few people who get to make decisions).

Yes, life is needlessly absurd. It's best not to think about it unless you wanna end up in a padded room.

Humans produce about 20TW globally at this time (ChatGPT), while the sun adds about 174000TW of energy to the earth.

I guess you could argue that our waste heat does something, but I think the greenhouse gases that trap this enormous energy more effectively have a far bigger effect.

We use a fraction of the sun’s total energy output each year, orders of magnitude more energy are in sunlight radiating onto the Earth than in the heat rejected from buildings with air conditioning.

Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large.

On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.

You want to read about "conservation of etendue" for a technical explanation. For an easier explanation, look for xkcd's excellent "Fire from Moonlight".

We’re not a species that will likely ever reach singularity (unified, fully cooperative humanity). We operate in packs and if we don’t have a pack we’re loyal to then it’s every man for themselves.

I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species