That feeling when your society is so dysfunctional that only corporations can build much needed advanced infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Solar Panels are really cheap now.
Which is great when the sun's up and the weather is good. Similar deal for wind power, it's great when the conditions are good. We still haven't got very large scale storage where we need it to rely on renewables full time. Nuclear helps while we sort out storage but we need to be very, very careful about corruption - if corporations can screw over the public for money they've demonstrated that they will, and nuclear implementations cost a lot of money.
much needed? Nuclear Power for AI?
Nuclear power
what?
Nuclear power is not exclusively used for AI. Additionally, if they have their own power, then that frees up whatever energy they use for AI from other plants to be used for other purposes.
it still isn‘t a net gain for public infrastructure. which already lacks much needed investment.
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Government doesn't build infrastructure either, it mostly just funds private companies to build it for them.
Theres a whole contract bidding process and everything
That’s … actually pretty neat.
Makes a lot of sense given the amount of power needed to run a data centers like that. Definitely cleaner in the long run too.
They’ll still need backup power/generators but they’ll need a lot less of them and they’ll mostly be needed for the nuclear parts.
They could just run renewables since they already need batteries as you said.
Also i dont want incompetent people operating nuclear reactors. We saw what happened with that multiple times already and you still shouldnt eat boars in eastern Europe bc. auf radiation levels thanks to fucking Tschernobyl.
You should research this a bit more because ironically more people get exposed to radiation in the coal industry than in nuclear, percentage wise. Also I live in Eastern Europe and all game is safe to eat.
Nothing compare to the radiation levels in tchernobyl and under the 1,4 billions euros sarcophage.
Also I live in Eastern Europe and all game is safe to eat.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-germanys-wild-boars-are-radioactive-180982856/
https://www.grs.de/en/news/contamination-mushrooms-and-wild-boar-radioactive-caesium-137
Your government is probably lying to you then.
I take it you haven’t read the relatively new study that showed that the radiation in the animals in Eastern Europe is actually more from unregulated atomic bomb testing rather than Chernobyl.
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Clippy: it looks like you are trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown….
Oh yes, what could go wrong. Windows can’t even run an advertising board without blue screening…
“The core is about to melt down! Hit the shutdown button!!” “I can’t, it’s installing updates!!!”
Microsoft cloud runs mostly on Linux.
It mostly runs. An Azure-optimized HyperV build is the primary hypervisor I think, but I'd wager that most customer VMs on Azure are running Linux. However, if you want to run Windows in the cloud, it's a decent option.
My experience with Azure has been less than stellar. They have good API documentation, but tooling & core compute is a bit janky. The web UI is also a throwback to a past era, but you can't really avoid it when debugging issues which you have to do often during development. Then the developers want to forget all about it ... which is a problem when something inevitably breaks.
Somewhere in some timeline relatively close to ours this actually happens, the idea of 3 mile island/Chernobyl 2.0 event happening to microsofts personal reactor because a forced windows update screws over emergency override software is peak absurdist dystopia that I get chuckles from
I don't think Bill Gates has any significant involvement with Microsoft these days, but wasn't he pushing for greater nucleus power usage, including trialing reactors in India?
wasn't he pushing for greater nucleus power
You’re thinking of Gavin Belson. Nucleus was a Hooli product.
LOL I didn't even realize I made that typo. I've been typing nucleus a lot more than nuclear lately.
He is the primary investor of TerraPower. Not sure about anything with India. They do have something that is being planned in Wyoming.
Ah, thanks. I looked it up and apparently he had planned something in China but the plans were scrapped and now it's Wyoming. This is what I get for not looking it up to refresh my memory beforehand.
He was promoting something called traveling wave reactors. Which never panned out. Just like nothing will become of this.
This would wrap up the whole story arc of Mr Robot to 1 season. Lol
Somehow, the idea that a company with a safety and security issues history like Microsoft would run a nuclear reactor sounds like a very, very bad idea.
Do you remember the Aegis cruiser debacle? They didn't even manage to run a f-ing diesel engine under Windows.
Not the worry you should be worried about. Once they can cut the governmental power cord corporations would have exactly zero limits.
companies like Microsoft are always considering novel methods for powering (and cooling) their data centers
If they are near population centers, they could use the excess heat from both for remote heating.
But mostly adding a nuclear power plant to a data center will require additional cooling.
Microsoft and nuclear reactor are words that should never be in the same sentence - easy recipe for disaster
This is talking about SMRs and not traditional reactors. SMRs still haven't left the prototype stage, but maybe they'll start to be useful in a decade's time, who knows.
That would be a wildly optimistic timeline. And even if they managed to produce a working system by then, it would still take decades longer to scale up to the point where these things could make a meaningful contribution. That's time we simply don't have.
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