teamonkey

My favourite theory is that the climate crisis is stressful to think about, reducing its impact requires everyone to make sacrifices, and there’s a lack of control over the situation.

People will be inclined to latch on to anyone making an alternative suggestion: it’s a hoax, it will all be fine, the real problem is those people making you make sacrifices. It’s a relief to think that way, because the alternative is harrowing. It’s an easy sell for populists who are willing to say anything to get votes.

See also Covid: it’s easier to think of it as some kind of hoax than parse the true horror of the situation. Someone comes along and says it’s far less bad than the news is reporting, that these solutions aren’t necessary. You don’t need to feel guilty that you want to break isolation, find masking uncomfortable and find the jab unpleasant, because it’s all made up.

The current trend is saturation. The current rate is over 4000 new games a month on Steam. The problem isn’t that great new games aren’t being released, it’s finding them.

I think it describes the methods needed to obtain and process a large amount of data in a field where getting a small amount of data is expensive and requires incredible hardware.

Bluntly, I think this just highlights why software engineering is not a serious engineering discipline. There are some exceptions, like safety-critical systems, but on the whole, software is not designed and developed with a rigor comparable to physical sciences.

You don’t need spinning reserve, but you do need enough reserve power that can supply grid-forming generation on demand.

Batteries can react fast enough to peaks and troughs in voltage load, so long as there are enough of them where needed. Grid-forming batteries can react to frequency fluctuations electronically.

Flywheels are another approach for grid stabilisation without a baseload.

It’s not an either-or.

‘(Lisp would like a word)

Nobody is trying to remove all street lighting. There are plenty of practical suggestions on here and in that document about how things can be improved without reducing safety.

I posted several metrics by which the power used by these data centres is ‘excessive’.

You’ve decided that those don’t matter and you’ve created some other metrics by which you could consider the power use typical.

But just because you’ve found a way to say that they’re typical in one way, that doesn’t mean they’re not excessive in another way. They do use power to excess in some ways, therefore it’s perfectly legitimate to describe them as excessive in that way.

Data centres’ power use is becoming a problem for multiple reasons. The problem isn’t going to be solved by denying that a problem exists, or by taking offense when an adjective is used that draws attention to said problem.

> zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct)

Indeed.

Merriam-Webster says:

“Excessive: exceeding what is usual, proper, necessary, or normal”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excessive

The power use of data centres is objectively exceeding what is usual or normal. Therefore it is objectively excessive.

> considerable decline

Again, I think, citation needed, since conservative media does like to bang on about this a lot, but I’ve not seen actual proof that education standards are falling, or worse than they were when I was at school.

What I think has happened since the close of grammar schools is that the gap between most educated and least educated has closed significantly. This government report from 2023 shows that gap closing, while also showing an improvement from previous years.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330e020bcf...

> This person is hilarious, for non-UK people who are wondering what this is, this is a joke candidate for an MP who is getting a lot of attention because of the political system in the UK not working very well.

Yes and he’s running against Count Binface

(sorry)

I went looking for stats saying the UK has declining literacy rates but could only find ones that said that literacy was improving.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/e...

In addition to the other comments it’s worth pointing out that MPs are not allowed to resign. They’re elected by the people.

They can be moved into another public service role, and there are ceremonial roles designed to ‘shelve’ MPs, but other than that, criminal acts and incapacity, they can’t actually stand down. Starmer is resigning as Prime Minister, he is not resigning as an MP.

This is why the other parties see the whole thing as a farce. The chancellor approved the budget for the by-election by saying “if he wants to spend his summer talking to a bin, so be it” but it’s unclear if there’s any constitutional legality to it.

Of course it’s excessive. Questions should be asked about any one industry using 23% of a nation’s generating capacity, when it was not built for this purpose.

Of course it’s excessive. Ireland’s electricity is not cheap or in such plentiful supply that homes are not affective by this. These data centres are driving up the electricity prices for everyone in Ireland.

Of course it’s excessive. There are only 80 datacentres that used 7.8TWh between them in 2025. That amount of power is used by only the heaviest of industries; it’s 3x more power than the UK steel industry uses, for example.

Of course it’s excessive. The amount of energy used means that more fossil fuels is being used to power them than would otherwise be necessary. Legislation has been written so that new datacentres must in future provide their own [fossil fuel] generators. This in a time of man-made climate change where we all urgently need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It’s not just excessive, it’s deeply irresponsible.

Objectively, yes. It means to consume excessive or plentiful amounts of something, and 23% of Ireland’s electricity generation capability is objectively an excessive and plentiful amount.

I don’t really see the link between data scientists and datacentres, or even AI researchers and datacentres.

The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.

Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.

Anything up there needs to reflect as much as possible to avoid building up heat. That which it can’t reflect is absorbed and needs to be emitted as efficiently as possible. Vantablack would likely make it absorb heat readily and glow in the near-IR.

I think there’s a human bias where we remember predictions being wrong more strongly than those being right.

The study shows that they weren’t wrong or right in equal measure, they were right more often, considerably so. But that doesn’t mean that they were always right.

I don’t disagree with the problems you mention, but US and European wages are high, and margins keep getting tighter and tighter.

A lead studio with a small headcount can outsource work internationally for often much cheaper than the same job done locally, but also not have to pay those workers in stages of development where there’s not enough work for them.

A unique look is 99% art direction.

Yes, that’s what I said. Powerful and flexible, at the expense of not being able to know how it will be used ahead of time.

Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.

Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case.

There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.

On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.

You can mix and match to some extent, though Nanite, Lumen and Megalights are intended to work together. Megalights really needs Lumen, and Lumen works best with Nanite.

There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.

You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.

There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.

It’s not “moving to India” so much as Western studios are now forming smaller core teams locally and farming out much of the content to outsourcing studios in India, Malaysia & Eastern Europe rather than doing it all in-house.

I’d love to blame collective internet myopia on bots, just as I’d love to blame leaded gas for the mental state of geriatric politicians, but in my heart I don’t buy it.

There’s indeed quite an uproar and I’m not unsympathetic to it, but only 3% of Sony’s 2025 revenue came from physical game sales.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)

Cowpox was used to vaccinate against smallpox. Cowpox is a less severe infection that stimulates the same immune response as smallpox, but it’s not the same virus.

Inoculation is where a weakened pathogen is introduced to create immune resistance against that same pathogen (see inoculation parties).

That’s what Dr Fauci said for seasonal flu in 2004.

Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.

Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.