> In practice, when you reach for a database engine you're actually reaching for four basic features: unique constraints, transactions, indices, and history tables.
That might be a very specific assumption. What about serializability? Replication? Materialized views? Procedures? Locking? Access control?
It’s cool to experiment and try new approaches. Neat one here.
You can work around 12. with constraint satisfaction solvers.
After generating the level structure, emplace an entrance and exit such that they are maximally apart. And emplace a strong monster in one of the rooms around the exit. And emplace a health potion in one room before the strong monster. And emplace treasure in the exit room.
That sort of stuff and be specialized and coded towards your particular games structures fairly easily.
Scale is much harder though. In something like NMS it’d be intensive doing such a constraint solver on the whole galaxy. Might work in chunks or regions though.
The problem is setups like in slay the spire, if we imagine there was no path selection, you can run into scenarios that are functionally unwinnable (I recall someone finding a seed in StS that was literally unwinnable, but ignoring that). Eg Act1 elites that counter your build, but too early for you to consistently have secondary options/workarounds.
Obviously people have high consistent wins in StS1/2 so it’s not like they’re guaranteed unwinnable, but for the average human (mostly just boils down to “path to do act1 elites until after you probably have a counter to all of them)
Your options are:
1. All scenarios are easy enough that you can get away with just about anything sensible
2. You don’t have any counter mechanics, which is basically the same as 1, and is difficult to do anything interesting with
3. You announce up-front what you’re going to deal with, so the onus is now on the player to find a solution in the meantime
4. You give the player a NOPE utility
In a roguelike, I think 4 is the better design, but 3 is also reasonable. 1 & 2 just makes things less interesting.
One thing I am getting really tired of is the growing inability to distinguish legitimate sources. I don’t want to have to play, “can you tell the difference?” It’s not fun being had by a liar.
I want human written content or nothing at all. I care about the struggle. I like the spelling and grammar mistakes. I enjoy the story between the lines. I like the growth of the author and watching them and their work evolve.
Generated fiction is boring because it has none of that. There is no life in it. No author.
“A human wrote it,” is a light trick. Ok, who? Where are they from? If you have to lie to give answers in order to convince someone they like the story you’re not proving that people prefer AI stories in my estimation: you’re proving that the test is a convincing lie. And maybe that people are gullible.
> just about everything in modern life, from streaming Netflix to running a dishwasher, consumes water at levels that can be portrayed as wasteful by hair-shirt environmentalists.
Ad-hominems in an Economist article. This reads more like an opinion piece than reporting. There are plenty of documented problems with water usage of data centres. Some can use it efficiently but it costs more to do so and many (most?) do not.
We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres.
Don’t think many people are going to read this and think, “Gosh, I was a fool!”
Using a dishwasher can be up to 5x more water-efficient than hand washing. Hand washing one load of dishes can use 20 gallons of water, whereas water- and energy-efficient dishwashers may use as little as four gallons.[1]
Can is doing an awful lot of heaving lifting there.
Given that my sink cannot contain 20 gallons of water and that I do not even fill my sink full to do my dishes by hand, I cannot possibly be using 20 gallons of water to do my dishes when I do my dishes by hand.
I don't apart from when I'm initially filling the washing up bowl and doing some cups and glasses. My theory is that the washing up water has less surface tension and thus runs off the crockery better when they're draining/drying.
Where does this leave us then? All the dishwashers include a rinse in their standard cycle, so should it be surprising that you can save water by cutting corners like not rinsing?
Dishwashing machines probably have more need to rinse the dishes as they are using more concentrated formulations. I don't know if it's safe to lick dishwasher tablets, but I hope it's safe to lick dishwashing liquid, though probably not very nice.
I understand, but the point is that they don't do so categorically.
They might, and even probably often do, but not always.
If the intent is genuinely water conservation, it is important to understand that there may be situations in which the dishwasher is not the most conservative option.
it really depends how you do it, I don't think one serious non biased study has ever been done. probably an ultrasound bath is the most energy and water-efficient method
People have. That's a common objection to golf courses.
The difference here is that data centers are both economically and environmentally extractive. People in the community, or at least in the surrounding area, will play golf there. Data centers are purely extractive, and that's why they have become so galvanizing. It's transferring probably the only real asset these communities have left, their open spaces, directly to the elite.
What is the exact value proposition of AI as it exists right now for the average person who lives where these things are being built? They don't even get jobs. With golf, they can enjoy the outdoors and escape a little bit.
I'm not entirely certain, but I think a data center might just provide more temporary and permanent jobs than a golf course, and with likely higher mean and median wages.
The golf park isn't even the best natural-adjacent use of the space.
A regular park or a trail will service a significantly larger portion of the population than a private property that transfers wealth from the community to a single person or corporation.
>I'm not entirely certain, but I think a data center might just provide more temporary and permanent jobs than a golf course, and with likely higher mean and median wages.
Well, you're right to be uncertain. After they're built, once the crews that built them move on to the next one, they don't even bother to keep the lights on. They might hire private security guards to patrol the exterior, but that's hardly an infusion of capital into the community.
> The golf park isn't even the best natural-adjacent use of the space.
> A regular park or a trail will service a significantly larger portion of the population than a private property that transfers wealth from the community to a single person or corporation.
Ok. Then they can decide to build a nature trail instead. The local community should make the decision and not be coerced because someone from the coasts thinks that they're a minor annoyance that needs to be lectured on the future of humanity or whatever lessbad rational-du-jore is being peddled.
> going to go out on a limb here and guess that net-net, a datacenter provides more benefits to a broader spectrum of society than a golf course does.
Is that true locally though? Having a golf course nearby your home is better than the golf course just existing somewhere, at least if you play golf, but that is decidedly not true of data centers. You might benefit from at least some of them existing, but derive very little benefit from having one in your backyard and a lot of potential downsides.
> Having a golf course nearby your home is better than the golf course just existing somewhere, at least if you play golf, but that is decidedly not true of data centers.
Isn't that the standard NIMBY argument, which ensures nothing ever gets built? Who wants a power plant, or dump near their house? Even if there's some vague local benefit (eg. a dump that benefits the county), you could always make the argument to put it on the other side of the county or whatever.
> I've not seen a single politician calling for statewide bans on golf courses.
I've not seen a single state where anyone is trying to build a ton of new golf courses. There are around 140 being built in the whole country, and I think the most in any one state is under a dozen in Florida.
There are more than an order of magnitude more data centers under construction with some states having more data centers under constructions than the whole country has golf courses under construction.
I bet if you tried to build 2-300 golf courses at the same time in one state it would become an issue for state level politicians.
I seem to recall that data centers require orders of magnitude less water than a golf course too if you want to compare apples to apples.
Look, just say what you mean. If you think "AI is BAD" just say that, don't try to couch it in some disingenuous argument about water usage or climate change.
I did say what I meant. You overlooked the context.
The person I was replying to was trying to make inferences from the fact that data centers have become a statewide issue in some states but golf courses have not.
My point is that because golf courses are being built at a much lower rate than data centers they remain just local issues in most places. Try to build 200 golf courses at the same time in some state and I bet you'll see that get statewide attention.
No one would give a shit about two hundred golf courses being constructed in Texas.
Even with the massive data center build out, existing golf courses today use more water than all projected data centers globally are expected to use in 2030.
Also, the "pollution" from data centers is just "major construction project temporarily disrupts water table" not "facility is pumping random chemicals into the water".
That is to say, nothing about next door neighbors to a major construction project getting mud out of their well for a little while is unique to datacenters.
I did not say that golf courses are pollution free, but there is many degrees of magnitude difference between the mere possibility of illnesses becoming more common around golf courses and data centres that have to pay millions in fines as they are not following the rules.
I feel like you're constructing straw men arguments here despite the very obvious polluting behaviour of datacentres.
Go look up articles from mid to late 2010s. There's where you will find frustration about golf courses, during the time where water restrictions were being put on residential lawns. Do not conflate the more recent, more successful campaign of anti-data-center sentiment with the non-existence of a past campaign against golf courses. It existed, it just petered out.
Look, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. Either water consumption is a problem today, or it is not. If it is a problem, then golf courses are today a better target for people who want to solve the water problem than data centers. If water consumption is not a problem, then the data center's water consumption is not a problem.
if we limit the number of data centers so that it cannot exceed number of golf courses in any zipcode in america than this is a solid argument, otherwise it is strawman
I am not doing any such thing. You are pulling whataboutisms left and right, and I'm trying to get across that the lack of a successful campaign does not prove the lack of sentiment. You need to carefully pick which political battles to take and, more importantly, when to take them.
If you think the current data center installations have problems you want to be addressed, you don't also bring up golf course water usage, farmland water rights, residential lawns, factory runoff, and climate change effects on rainwater. You'd just be distracting from the conversation.
No, but someone yelling about data center water usage while clearly not giving a shit about the things that use way more water quickly make it clear that they’re either very ignorant, or this isn’t actually about water.
The left has long been opposed to excessively watered golf courses too. I could probably find another piece of The Economist calling them foolish for that as well, if I searched.
The "leftist" take is "we should seize the means of computation" not "we should protect intellectual property rights!"
The hate for data centers is a liberal thing, not a "leftist" take. Although, being against golf courses should be supported by everyone. Golf courses suck.
True but not campaigning against golf courses make anti data center campaigns look hypocritical.
My personal criticism of data centers is mostly regulatory failure. The tech companies are choosing random ass states and stealing land from poor farmers instead of the traditional data center states like Virginia mostly because of tax breaks. The local government is just as if not more responsible for the issues with data centers. It's easy however to just point fingers at big tech instead of he underlying market failures in a lot of the states. The traditional data center states almost always have a supply of clean energy and water with a proper regulatory framework.
Might as well say you're a hypocrite for calling these people hypocrites but not others, and unless you criticize all things at the same time, which is impossible, it's all magically invalid.
If you really cared about people calling things out, you would be focusing on other topics than datacenters because people call all kinds of things out all the time. That fact you only care about data centers is telling.
> We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres.
That is not what is indicated by consumer behavior.
Though it isn't healthiest, people prefer sugar water and so the sugar water companies have been able to afford to acquire water rights and they have driven up the cost of water.
Drilling holes through aquifers and not capping them, over-grazing and over-tilling, and wasteful industry production processes have driven up the cost of water.
Given a low-enough energy cost and basically unlimited salt water from the oceans, we shouldn't be out of water. There should not be coastal water scarcity.
> We need to use AI to redevelop AI datacenters in order to cancel the harms.
This is worth money. It is worth a lot of money to solve the AI data center sustainability problem. And, solving the AI datacenter sustainability would preserve the AI value multiplier in other sustainable process redesign efforts.
Well, perhaps a thought experiment about this then:
- One person lives in a world where people have applied AI (the smartest tech we have) to solving for datacenter impact and broader climate change objectives.
- The other lives in a world where they use AI to expensively generate infotainment videos (and for example statements about lack of political will) but not solutions that solve for cost and sustainability.
I agree that the growth of new data centers could be problematic in some areas especially as the infra build-out ramps up. But as many sibbling comments imply, that water can be put to much more economically valuable tasks in data centers than other, drastically more water-hungry uses like golf courses.
Compare data centers to golf courses. But many people like golf courses
Compare data centers to refrigerators. But almost everyone likes refrigerators
Compare data centers to dishwashers. But many people like dishwashers
Compare data centers to almond trees. But many people like almonds
It goes on and on
If people really liked "AI" the way they like golf, refrigerators, dishwashers, almonds, etc., then data centers might be an easier sell
I don't think this opposition to data centers is "environmentalism", it has too much broad support. I think this is simply lack of enthusiasm for "AI". Silicon Valley and Redmond can effectively force people to use certain software but cannot make people like it
This third era of "AI" is probably going to end like the last two; reality will ensure this
People have managed (and sometimes do manage) to do without golf courses and refrigerators and dishwashers and cars (and roads for cars) etc, and should learn to be able to manage to do without such things, for multiple reasons.
> We are also in a time when most people would prefer to use that water for drinking, washing, cleaning… basically anything except data centres.
And those people are stupid or to be charitable "ignorant."
Full stop.
I'm not trying to be an ass here, I mean it genuinely. Those people are ignorant at best. Email runs on datacenters, Google runs on datacenters, netflix needs them. Delta airlines uses data centers to route flights and host their massive amounts of data (and so do all the other operations out there). The NWS is using super computers (and big data) to predict the weather. The good, the bad, everything runs on giant clusters of data centers, compute, and power. How many datacenters host the most popular steam games and movies? Indeed, the very message of "Data Center BAD!" is hosted on data centers. You think this wild anti-progress ideology could exist in a world without them? Of course not.
Our modern life is enabled by these damn near miraculous technical tools and the people screaming about water or anything else are seldom against the things that they like. Plenty of people shit-talk data centers then go fly to Paris on vacation. Plenty of the same people water their lawns and drive to work when they could walk. In my experience, "DATA BAD" is just code for "AI BAD" - they're really against AI. You talk to these people, and the same thing always comes up, "well, AI is bad for artists" or "AI is going to take over all the jobs" or something along those lines. It's always some scifi fueled Yudkowskian fever dream or fear of losing their jobs or "Elon/Bezos/Gates/Whoever = BAD!" Very little of it is based in any sort of actual evaluation of the world.
And I'm not necessarily arguing with them on these guys being jackasses. But the world is not just a black and white thing typically, and the complaints about all of these changes (and that's what all this is, a fear of the new and complaints about change) are reactionary grasps yearning for a prior era. It's terminally (and ironically) online people complaining that they can no longer find meaning in an increasingly competitive work place. It's fear!
I've now seen this with many people I know. I've seen this in a huge amount of online spaces. I've seen it in the real world. This is "millenials getting conservative but not realizing it." It's people being afraid of change. Watching the biggest pirates I've known suddenly talk about "defending artists" and strengthening copyright is amusing, but it points to a bigger problem. People being unwilling or unable to adjust to change and it is at it's core a conservative mindset despite the liberal (not leftist mind you) costume it wears.
Logic and reason aren't going to convince these folks of anything, they didn't get to their views with logic, they're not going to logic their way out of them. It's modern liberalism's version of climate denial, and it's literally a reactionary way of viewing the world.
To your point, very few of these people are likely to read the economist and think "whoa, I was wrong." You're spot on there - but I also don't think that people know where their water comes from, their food comes from, their power comes from, their Net Flix comes from, their medication comes from, or really anything else. They're thinking "I DON'T LIKE X, X NEEDS Y, THEREFORE Y BAD!" That's it typically.
The radical leftist position should be "seizing the means of computation" and "man the barricades, this is OUR data center now!" Not, "WE NEED BETTER LAWS TO PROTECT PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE SPACE OF IDEAS TO PROTECT JOBS MAKING LOGOS AND WRITING AD COPY!" This is millenials getting older and confusing reactionary nostalgia for "a better world."
> Watching the biggest pirates I've known suddenly talk about "defending artists" and strengthening copyright is amusing, but it points to a bigger problem.
Millenial here, hello. Yes, we were the biggest pirates, because we had no means to buy the music we liked, period. CDs were kidney-money (if the album we liked available at all), digital distribution was non-existent and cassettes were sounding worse than first generation shellac records in some cases.
I personally bought most of the music I used to pirate. I buy the eBooks I like, and keep a backup copy for myself. Heck I even hounded a CD from a disbanded group for a couple of years and ordered it online because the music was good and they deserved another sale.
Because for us, piracy was about the service at first. We went to concerts, bought merch, etc. to support them.
Also this brings me to the second point: You miss the point entirely about datacenters & AI datacenters. Second, you miss the point between AI, the tech and the building of AI the tech.
First, datacenters are nothing new, and nobody is opposed to "normal" datacenters. The difference between a standard datacenter and AI datacenter is almost night and day (power density, compute load, hardware portfolio, etc.). I always talk about AI datacenters, because I work at a datacenter. I know how these things can be made more environmentally friendly, but no, everybody has to move fast and break things. In this case, we're mostly breaking down our planet, accelerating water stress and global warming related side effects while destroying livelihoods of communities as a whole.
Second is AI as a tech vs. how it's built as a tech. Heck, I'm not even opposed to copyrighted works used as training data, many of us want consent. Control over whether their works are used for training or not. Not compensation, not money, but consent. Not to be seen as slave of these AI providers to feed them.
For artists, compensation is their right. Have you ever composed music, or performed even? Do you know how much effort goes into doing this (hint: We used to rehearse for 10 hours/week for 14 weeks to give a 90 minute concert)? Watch this [0] if you want some insight how a single song is assembled over ideas, takes, tries with blood, sweat and tears. Same for writing. Did you read Hyperion Cantos, Lord of the Rings, Neuromancer, Zones of Thought, etc.? I mean, even the fact checking in Ready Player One could easily take a year. These books created worlds, changed minds and the authors of these books and others deserve some fair compensation for this.
You may find graphic design, art and photography mundane, but when you're not taking selfies and shooting stories or taking videos of a concert which you won't be able to enjoy because of the video-grabbing session for likes, these can be very powerful mediums for storytelling or getting your message across.
Not everyone is against AI as the tech. I am not. I have developed agent-based systems with emergent intelligence before people knew the term autonomous agent.
Yes, we need better laws to protect property rights in the space of ideas, but not to solely protect the jobs, but TO PROTECT THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMANS AND THEIR FREEDOM TO CREATE AND OWN THE THINGS THEY HAVE CREATED.
"You'll own nothing and be happy" is a drug to make masses comply, and unfortunately, you're apparently one of the flag carriers of that crowd.
This post is written with a real brain, approximately 10 fingers, at 1x by a physical human you can talk with.
Big congratulations to the world leaders and policy makers who were at the signing of the Paris Accord. Went home. And did very little about it. Now we output more CO2 faster than we ever have in our entire history.
At least the economy is doing okay… oh wait.
Maybe the reason action hasn’t happened is because the solutions would drive down income inequality?
Was hoping my kids wouldn’t have to live with the worst of it but it looks like we failed at that.
It is a bit of a pedantic argument but I get upset when people misuse the term, abstraction, and can feel the impulse to write a blog post like this.
I think it’s important to make clear the RL part and the alignment and parameter tweaking that gets done on models and inference engines. It makes them more understandable as mechanisms and less like wish-washy super intelligences that make their own decisions.
When these systems win math Olympiads, it’s not terribly surprising or interesting to me. Of course they will: we trained models to play nearly optimal chess games and Go. You tweak the rewards and sigmoid and you start optimizing the function towards your goal. This is how learning systems of all stripes work.
It’s still next-token predicting at the end of the day. I don’t think it’s a reduction-ad-absurdum.
But a lot of people still call it, “intelligence,” and try to use language that obscures what is happening in terms of anthropomorphic behaviour and not machine ones. That really does influence how we use these tools and profits those who would use them on us.
> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them
This might be true in a true, free market without monopolistic collusion and the abandonment of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the US.
In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative. Or because they don’t know how to change the defaults that come installed on their computer. Or they get a big scary warning if they figure it out and try.
I would have a hard time believing anyone who said Google was competing fairly and not juicing their numbers with Gemini. Like with search and ads, they have a lot of vested interest in profits and little regard for much else. There’s no reason to. Almost all safeguards on corporate behaviour have been taken off in the last bunch of years.
Google jumped at renaming Lake Ontario.
Of course they’re going to shove AI mode as the default on search and claim every user loves it.
The top people at these companies don't spend all day building useful products, they have entire teams of people working strategy and looking at numbers to ensure their foothold in the various markets stays air tight and free of any real competition. The simplest example of this is the "switch your search engine back to Google" pop-up that effectively encourages users to switch back to Google if their default search engine changed via installing an extension.
Yup, sitting here on a work-issued laptop that's locked down tighter than a walnut - I couldn't install chrome if I wanted to, and yet every time I have to actually go to google for something I get the "would you like to install chrome" begging.
> In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative.
no, they have an alternative - abstinence. And yet, large majority overwhelmingly chooses not to abstain. Therefore, it does not matter what they say, because actions are the truth.
Try living without a Google or Apple account in a country where most bank accounts or other services (incl. in some cases government services) require a smartphone app only delivered through the monopolists' app stores and (in the case of Android, where installing degoogled Android images is technically possible) requiring Google Play Integrity to pass.
I wrote an interpreter in Zig not too long ago. I’d definitely recommend more folks try it out. It’s a straight-forward enough project to dip your toes in emulation and see if it’s your jam. And it’s not a big enough project that you’ll get overwhelmed before you finish.
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
Carbon taxes can be implemented such that average folks benefit from them, e.g. by paying everyone back the average tax amount. Wealth generally correlates with carbon emissions, so wealthy people would pay more than they get back. This would greatly incentivize less emissions-intensive products and services.
Unfortunately there's no way the rich would ever let this go through.
> Wealth generally correlates with carbon emissions
That may be true but there aren't enough wealthy people to just attack their consumption. In aggregate, regular people use a lot more energy. There's no way out of this that is going to be popular.
> That may be true but there aren't enough wealthy people to just attack their consumption.
Not sure I understand, the goal isn't to attack anyone's consumption? The whole idea is to stop costs from being externalized. The concept doesn't require wealthy people to make sense, but existing wealth disparity makes it even more attractive for regular people.
> In aggregate, regular people use a lot more energy.
Why would the aggregate matter? Individually, regular people use waaaay less energy than the upper class. That means these regular people would, on average, come out slightly positive. And the "cleaner" someone's lifestyle is, the better this scheme would leave them (which poor people necessarily tend towards, since they cannot afford spending much on consumption).
I don’t like LSPs. They’re slow and bloated. I’ve been using clangd but I think I’ll stop. It’s slow as molasses. It constantly tries to insert headers into source files that cause compilation issues. There are easier and faster ways to jump to definitions.
I don’t use LSPs with Haskell anymore. I work on multiple projects which use different versions of GHC and the base library which means having multiple LSPs installed for each one. Trying to get eMacs to reliably detect which project is using which version is not something I have been able to figure out. Plus it’s slow and uses way too much memory.
At current job I’m doing C# and man does the ecosystem there really push you to use an IDE. Most of my org uses Rider. I find it just as fascinating that people actually like using tools like it. Too bad it doesn’t have a decent text editor built in.
For me, though not blown the dust off it for emacs is to simply use direnv with nix and direnv will set your bins to the correct lsp server configured correctly for that project via nix and then load it using eglot (I have set eglot purposely to not load by default for as you say it can be slow and not always what one wants to load especially for small edits).
I have to agree with your comment about lsp in general they feel a little over engineered or old tags are nicer and feel less bloaty even if less powerful.
That might be a very specific assumption. What about serializability? Replication? Materialized views? Procedures? Locking? Access control?
It’s cool to experiment and try new approaches. Neat one here.
Could still end up moving to Postgres.
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