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jankeymeulen

247 karma · joined February 10, 2015

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jankeymeulen··on Denmark: EVs Make Up 97% of New Private Car Sales in July
A decent EV will let you do 300km at highway speed. Starting at 100% at home, that's 4 times a 45 minutes break every 2.5 hours, which is a good idea anyway.
jankeymeulen··on China's Data Center Boom: A View from Zhangjiakou (2025)
From the article: 1.859 billion kWh. Divide by 1 year = 212 megawatt. Definitely not small. Not that gigantic either, compared to current day (US) AI/hyperscalers.
jankeymeulen··on Giant, all-seeing telescope is set to revolutionize astronomy
Storage densities these days are kinda amazing, it's not that much of a datacenter. Assuming you chunk it with triple redundancy, that's 220k TB raw. 10k 22 TB disks, you put them in one of those 4U 50 disk storage pods. 200 pods, 10 of those in a rack with some space left for a switch and power, so that's only 20 racks.
jankeymeulen··on Meta buys a nuclear power plant (more or less)
Adding more 9s is costly, and AI training is very suitable to be throttled and/or interrupted. I'm not talking about days or weeks of downtime, but these things are definitely being considered. Source: I'm working at a Google datacenter.

See e.g. this post from Urs Hölze, one of the fathers of hyperscale computing: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/urs-h%C3%B6lzle_rethinking-lo...

jankeymeulen··on Meta buys a nuclear power plant (more or less)
Depends on the use case. Dedicated datacenters for ML training can trade off power reliability vs. other factors like cost or carbon emissions.
jankeymeulen··on Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?
I was thinking the same, who on earth would want that, so did my technical colleagues, but since the AI summaries rolled out over here, non-technical folks I've asked about it actually seem to like it.
jankeymeulen··on BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank
A 5V drop at 1000 Amps also means 5000 Watts of heat generated, you probably want something with less of a drop.
jankeymeulen··on It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
Not really, the whole point of this type of cloud offering is that it doesn't phone home to Google / the US. Sure, it will be left to the partner to support all of it, but it can't be shut down from one day to the other.

(Googler, opinion my own)

jankeymeulen··on WH Executive Order Affecting Chips and AI Models
Take a look where (US) hyperscalers have presence, they still need to be able to expand.
jankeymeulen··on TPU transformation: A look back at 10 years of our AI-specialized chips
The TPUs are highly integrated with the rest of the internal Google ecosystem, both hardware and software. Untangling that would be ... interesting.
jankeymeulen··on Edinburgh, Scotland makes it illegal to advertise SUVs
but paper that ends up in the environment is almost surely better
jankeymeulen··on Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
There is a $6B increase in purchase of properties and equipment vs. 23Q1.
jankeymeulen··on Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
3 phase typically has 400V between the phases and neutral in Europe, the phases don't gain you anything, but the voltage does.
jankeymeulen··on Rumours of SR-71 Blackbird Successor from Lockheed's Skunkworks
Small? I saw an SR-71 at National Air and Space Museum near Dulles and I was amazed by how big is for a two-seater.
jankeymeulen··on Employees are feeding sensitive data to ChatGPT, raising security fears
Not really. Even the most evil Google one can imagine would realise "your data" is the most valuable thing they possess, selling it would be bad for business. They're selling ads to the highest bidder who's looking for someone with a profile based on your data, but not your data itself.
jankeymeulen··on OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit
So is OpenAI actually, GPT -> transformer, invented at Google. DALL-E -> diffusion, invented at ... Google.
jankeymeulen··on 3M to end 'forever chemicals' output
Good you mention a teflon-type coating in a discussion about 'forever chemicals'.
jankeymeulen··on Activist glues his head to glass covering 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' painting
sound like just the caption of the stock photo copy/pasted, they typically have these kind of very specific descriptions
jankeymeulen··on AWS switch from gzip to zstd – about 30% reduction in compressed S3 storage
Amazon will pay perhaps $50 for a 10TB disk, 10x it to cover for redundancy and the servers and datacenters to put the disks in, and you're looking at "only" 16 mil savings for an exabyte.
jankeymeulen··on Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)
They'd be retired by now, even the most junior engineer in 1970 would be into their seventies.
jankeymeulen··on DeepMind’s New Language Model, Chinchilla
Like the Oberon OS and programming language?
jankeymeulen··on Nord Stream 2 owner considers insolvency after sanctions
Belgium (my country) imports about 400% of its domestic use in LNG, to then sell it to neighbouring countries via pipelines. Doesn't make sense if LNG was too expensive.
jankeymeulen··on Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
Or, instead of creating Bitcoin with excess energy, one could produce e.g. hydrogen. Which, compared to Bitcoin, has a lot more uses.
jankeymeulen··on Google Outage in Europe
More likely someone actually will. A blameless postmortem will be written, and the people that will fix the bug or systems issue will have something to work on with high visibility and high impact, which tends to translate in good performance ratings.

(Googler, opinions are my own)

jankeymeulen··on Time Card and PTP on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
Yes.

For professional setups, typically you'd have a coax going from the roof somewhere to the rack inside the data center where your time server is located.

jankeymeulen··on Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s
How's that? I could see climate change decreasing biodiversity for sure, but how would decreasing biodiversity lead to climate change?
jankeymeulen··on Will Apple Mail threaten the newsletter boom?
Will Apple do it differently?
jankeymeulen··on El Salvador Bitcoin bill passes and president hints volcano energy for mining
Good luck converting the BTC back to energy though.
jankeymeulen··on YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips
Also Googler, you can add Stadia here as well. Needs fast and low-latency transcoding.
jankeymeulen··on YouTube is now building its own video-transcoding chips
You can transcode as a service on Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/transcoder/docs
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