Are you talking about the green party in germany or other green party in the USA (i'm not aware of?) or are you talking about 'green people'?
Because if you mean the green party, it wasn't them it was the CDU/CSU shutting down nuclear power plants.
And with germany, Tschernobyl was a generational experience and at least for my mother frightning. I also did a presentation about it and watched Tagesschau from that time: People didn't know how to handle hidden rays and it was very unclear what it meant.
And still today, for certain regions of woods, you need to test your meat for radio activity because we still have issues with this.
Nonetheless, while i'm not particularly against it, the last big projects have failed, the amount of global unifed investment and knowledge needed is apparently not able to form.
With fusion, lets see. If PV and batteries are getting even cheaper and easier to use, you will potentially prefer to put PV onto everything instead of paying for fusion energy but we are way to far awai to tell
Building my app, deploying a container image and building a helm chart is not a lot of work if you have experience and the initial additional work is only happening once.
After that, you have your whole app definition in code, seting up a second or third env takes 5 minutes.
I really should write a blog article about my stack and the advantges of it (git, kubernetes, argocd, helm, ...)
I use k8s in a very small setup (3 worker nodes, 3 ctrl planes) in my startup. But i'm working professionally with k8s for 6 years.
My setup is relative big but also relative simple and most of it is also IaC. I don't need to backup my setup and i don't need to document how i setup everything.
I have blue/green deployment, multiply enviorrnments (dev, test, prod) configured 100% equal, a good monitoring stack + tracing, s3 replication, postgresql ha and offside backup.
i can shut down a node and nothing happens.
But you know, if k8s doesn't fit your time and experience and benefit estimation, don't use it.
You need to clarify with legal what happens when he dies.
In germany and other europeon countries, their family would inherit his shares which can become a problem if those family members do not care about the company at all and just want out or nothing to do with it.
We talked to our partners and told them what we want them to do and they would become silent partners without control.
Nonetheless, this is actually independent of him having cancer.
If some bits of meaningful (containing essential complexity) code imply other bits with mostly accidental complexity, writing them by hand is a waste of time.
But isn't it also a waste to use data centers full of GPUs to process terabytes of text to accomplish the same thing better programming language design could?
We spend that much GPU compute not to just generate random boiler plate code but to create the real code.
If it wouldn't be beneficial for writing code, which it is, we wouldn't use it.
But yes if we could create better languages or systems, it would be a waste. But we tried multiply new programming languages, we have no code platforms etc.
It does look like though that LLM is still better than all of those approaches.
I have to write very little boilerplate code as it is with the tooling I choose. And a lot of it is generated by scripts using some input from me. I don't need cloud GPUs to write code at all.
Its about writing code faster and potentially better. Cloud GPUs can also generate unit tests etc.
I primarily use it for languages i don't use often enough, nonetheless its only a question of time until it doesn't make sense anymore to write code yourself.
> Those data centers are easily converted to green energy.
Energy is fungible. Exploding marginal energy requirements put enormous pressure on the grid tho. In the US several gas burning plants are being planned in the last few months given AI data center growth projections. This will have a definite impact in total emissions and push back any goals of holding on to the current 2C increase in global temperature.
The percentage of datacenters around the globe is very small (like 1%). In contrast this saves us a tremendes amount of co2 due to optimization of logistics, doing your bank business at home, calling someone instead of meeting them etc.
Datacenters are in my opinion the biggest net positives for co2, are easy to make green, have the most money behind them (which means faster and better investments) and are ooperated by our leading tech companies, who will use this to push further the industry of green energy.
Those datacenters and especially AI energy investments are also the biggest research advantage we have. Optimizing solar energy gains and storage capacity. We need them for simulating/generating new materials, production processies, etc.
We need to do a LOT in regards of heating. Heating is critical.
You disagree with the widely publicized fact that several new gas burning plants are being planned for the near future in great part due to high profile plans for AI data centers that use 10x as much energy as traditional ones? Or with the fact that these plants will emit great quantities of CO2 that wouldn't be emitted had these plants not been planned for sustaining the growth in AI?
I disagree that, whatever energy those DC needs (additionally) is a waste.
I think its critical for our society to put more into R&D of materials and others for more and faster optimization of solar and batteries.
Nvidia for example does a lot now in omniverse, simulating the real world. Its also potentially co2 saving if you simulate your full car, warehouse etc. digital and iterate over it super fast and opitmize it before it ever creates any co2 in real life.
I never called anything a waste. I merely doubt the net gain in the rate of acceleration of energy demand for AI purposes.
You make a fair point. To the extent these AI tools enable better, more efficient production systems in the real world there is a case to be made it could be a net gain for society. Arguably it could also increase the carbon intensity of the economy in the short term. While renewable sources are gaining ground, most of the bulk and marginal energy demand is met by carbon heavy sources now and in the foreseeable future, and deployment of renewables also requires a lot of energy and by extension, for now, carbon emissions.
Yes and a lot of better technology has this issue.
The EV consumes more energy at the beginning, solar panels and wind turbines too. Unfortunate its hard for people to get 'economy of scale' and its super frustrating that we have the investment<>expensive<>benefit hen<>egg issue.
Heat-pumps, EVs, solar and batteries could become even cheaper even faster if we would invest faster and more. In 10 years those have eclipsed every current alternative.
Now tx to alphafold2 a huge library exists for all researchers. And i have seen many other breakthroughs.
Segment anything from facebook is a LOT better in image segmentation than what we had before. This makes it much faster for everyone having segmentation tasks to segment faster.
Wispher is really good in speech to text. It basically beats a lot of old school software on the market.
> Unfortunate its hard for people to get 'economy of scale'
> we have the investment<>expensive<>benefit hen<>egg issue.
Maybe it's easy for people to get economies of scale AND path dependence. Unfortunately society has been put in a trajectory that maximized the profits of minerals rights holders in the industrializing US.
And yes, we are in a sub optimal local minimum in terms of efficiency and need to go over a hump to get to better minimums and going over that hump may mean increasing carbon intensity of the economy for a while.
Do we have time to do that though? Should we carbon de-intensify the economy and aim for a trajectory that minimizes climate related shocks or should we go all out on an accelerationist hope that we can bootstrap a better system by running the current one red hot? These seem to be the two sides of the debate we're in.
You're right but this is such a prominent, ongoing conversation that I feel the burden is on the dissenter to show the very obvious and widely publicized facts are not accurate. We have a huge emissions problem and the tech industry is currently heavily promoting technologies with doubtful value propositions and very real and very significant increase in energy demands.
> Those data centers are easily converted to green energy.
Energy which could be used for other things. I don't say it's bad to use power for AI, but just saying "well, it's green energy anyway" is short-sighted imho. At least as long as there are still any things not yet powered by green energy.
I do understand what it means to reinvest energy and i do believe its absolutly worth it in this case.
The investment required for those data centers will act as stabilization of green energy investment and because known software companies are involved, for a better support on the software side
Because if you mean the green party, it wasn't them it was the CDU/CSU shutting down nuclear power plants.
And with germany, Tschernobyl was a generational experience and at least for my mother frightning. I also did a presentation about it and watched Tagesschau from that time: People didn't know how to handle hidden rays and it was very unclear what it meant.
And still today, for certain regions of woods, you need to test your meat for radio activity because we still have issues with this.
Nonetheless, while i'm not particularly against it, the last big projects have failed, the amount of global unifed investment and knowledge needed is apparently not able to form.
With fusion, lets see. If PV and batteries are getting even cheaper and easier to use, you will potentially prefer to put PV onto everything instead of paying for fusion energy but we are way to far awai to tell