ianm218

I suspect if you follow dev groups in developing countries people are much more focused on token/ price efficiency.

For funded startups it mostly just doesn’t matter a ton unless you are passing on inference in your product at scale

> I'd argue fast-tracking projects is always a bad idea, as is trying to route around community consultation

Building infrastructure and housing in the US is painfully slow and a huge tax on everyone, almost everything should be fast tracked. We have some of the most productive economic zones in the world (SF <-> LA, Boston <-> DC corridor) and we have made it largely illegal to build housing and transit in these areas due to bureaucracy and red tape.

Do you think the high speed rail between SF and LA needs more rounds of community input?

The OP is literally talking about “mass extinction”, it’s not a real concern that climate change will cause mass extinction in the next 5 years.

It should absolutely be focused on anyway. I don’t know how you got the other impression. The US gov paying to stop windmills and solar is insane.

The existential risk people are worried about a much shorter timeline - like the next 5-10 years. Climate change is serious but very unlikely to lead to anything like ending the Anthropocene in the next 5 years.

If your against on site natural gas I think there is real arguments there and maybe it should be banned.

But there’s a difference to that and being just straight up against data centers or anything being built.

The Olympics are seen as a net negative for local economies though because it requires tons of local investment for a temporary payoff so the juice (billions of dollars of infra) isn’t worth the squeeze (a few weeks of high utilization followed by a glut).

For data centers you get a medium term boost to the economy + long term tax revenue. The externalities of data centers are quite low if you don’t put them right in someone’s neighborhood.

> I mean, how do you explain the backlash then if their byproducts don't generally bother people?

I think the general populace has pretty irrational political stances. For example in NYC where I live "gentrification is bad because it will raise the rent" is a fairly common stance, despite the cause of high rent being restricted housing supply. There's a popular case of residents being OK with a truck stop but blocking any new housing [1].

Congestion pricing was incredibly unpopular and controversial, despite most New Yorkers not being drivers and the policy being very effective in many other cities. Now it's extremely popular.

There is also just a lot misinformation that goes around, the water aspect being one of them. Data center use something like 1/8th the water of the California Almond industry [2]. There is some limited indications anti data center sentiment is spread by US adversaries [3].

[1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/nyregion/harlem-truck-dep... [2]. https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/data-centers-less-wa... [3]. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...

Sure but progress over perfection right? More tax revenue puts you in a better spot to attack those problems than not having it.

Even just doing what Northern Virginia does and lowering people’s property taxes gives homeowners more disposable income/ lowers prices for renters which is a start.

Data centers don’t cause water pollution generally or turn entire towns into industrial zones. There is more than enough room in rural WI towns for industrial and non industrial parts.

> No one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere.

Northern Virginia is one of the top locations for the kind of people who “can live anywhere” and is the world capital of data centers. And part of that appeal in NoVA is low property taxes due to data centers paying taxes.

There is some real aspects of the data center debate but I don’t think your engaging with them

This is a needlessly low effort reply that hurts the discussion.

Some data centers are paying lots of taxes and upgrading local grids, others are bribing local politicians or lobbying for abatements.

That is a much more substantive discussion than blanket anti growth.

We’re talking about rural Wisconsin - there is no world where you need to make a trade off between having school and a data center. Put a school in one field and a data center in a field further away. It just seems like you should tax the data center and then build a school or whatever else you think would help the local economy.

If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes surely it would help though right? In theory the taxes would go towards pro social uses.

Is there any reason to think that training weights has peaked rather than is accelerating? It feels like now they are increasingly able to pick some low hanging fruit by using the models in order to improve themselves and test optimizations.

I mean yeah its vacancy rate is like 20% in NYC… I asked for a source on buildings that are purposely vacant for advertising and it seems like that doesn’t actually exist

It feels like the real cost might be negative though.. They use frontier math as a way to test improvements in their model. So solving the problems is like a positive externality, but the important thing is they can verify that the model is improving instead of looking at useless benchmarks. Plus it is good for marketing and attracting talent.

They and Anthropic have indicated that the models are substantially augmenting the research and doing large amounts of work autonomously at this point. Here is one of the many blog posts on it [1]. Many people would dismiss this as "marketing" so take it for what you will.

My guess from following this stuff quite closely is that these companies are still a couple years away from fully autonomous research staff.

[1]. https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...

He said there are several others like this which I think is false, TFA wouldn’t be relevant.

Source? My understanding is this is no longer true

Ok but bio weapons could theoretically kill everyone… so it’s not like a knife that could maybe kill a few people.

It stands to reason you would regulate a knife differently than a nuclear bomb.

I don’t know what you mean man people obviously don’t own personal tomahawk missiles and that sort of thing. If you have a Shahed loaded with explosives on your property you will probably have to deal with LE

Meh you gotta go for progress over perfection. Screening model releases is progress, you know that companies aren't mass distributing dangerous releases. There might be some foundational security work in terms of how to make models hard to modify after that is possible.

When the risks are as high as discussed here it doesn't really make sense to give up because you haven't found the silver bullet.

Sure nobody should. Still the comment says it wouldn't be better for the world when I would rather someone whose arrogant over a literal psycopath?

And that comment just mentions that it's on the US government's radar I don't think it is fair to call him a toady.

I think we probably have a lot more in common than you think man, I am deeply troubled by things happening in the country and the world right now. That said, during difficult times it is more important than ever to think critically and not lose your head in a parallel reality.

Anyway, you really didn't make a point where it's fair to call Dario a fascist which was the point of this thread.

> Nonetheless, where the price does not matter much, like for supercomputers or military technology, China can afford to match or exceed the US capabilities with their internal production

No they can’t. They are seriously compute constrained and no amount of money will close the gap in the short term. The chip export controls have been incredibly effective in that regard.

I don’t have much input on US companies buying Chinese memory but there are more bottleknecks than just memory.

> Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology. Its core features include a dictatorial leader, the complete suppression of opposition, and the belief that the nation or race is above the individual.

So no the current regime is not fascist in nature. There’s pieces that rhyme for sure but still words have meaning - the opposition isn’t meaningfully oppressed, we don’t have a dictator. Trump is awful but words still have meaning.

> Would you not agree Palantir is at the forefront of this transition towards fascism?

No more towards a surveillance state.

> Of course most of them worked in the industry before the current regime came in and made its fascist turn so they didn't set out to do so

So was Dario in his field?

So yes I don’t think there is a serious argument that Dario is a fascist.

So do you consider everyone who works at defense primes like Raytheon fascists? How about people who work at Boeing on dual use technology?

I’m in the camp that words have meanings you can’t just call everyone a fascist who you dislike.

On point 2 he talks about it being an area for them to collaborate on. I’d imagine he would be OK with them having input on the bio risk part but maybe not the “did Tianamen square happen” part of the test

It seems completely unhinged for civilians to have naval guns. You could level an entire neighborhood with one of those.

Here is an example from the conflict in Ukraine.

Ukraine is currently leading a long strikes campaign. You could prompt the right model to A. Find all the refineries in Russia B. For each refinery annotate all the equipment, find the most value-able C. Make a fluid model of the refinery and figure out which components most likely to set off a chain reaction if hit.

Add stuff like drone swarms monitoring the front line etc on top of that.

Supply chain issues like rare earths are real… but not really related.

What are you arguing against? He doesn’t advocate for a ban on Chinese open source or non Chinese open source.