I prefer rail in its various forms. Way faster and cheaper. Canals are absolutely amazing at one crucial thing: moving mind boggling amounts of bulky low value goods for a fraction the cost of rail. The mississippi river system was no joke an american superpower (and still is) for a looong time. You can move grain for thousands of kms for the same price it would cost to ship it 150 via rail.

dilly-dally

ahh. one of my favorite pastimes.

And thus they will try to make computers so expensive that no one can afford them.

I'm unsure what you're referring to. Tell me more if you will.

That also will not work.

Sure but none of that is the same as tokens.

I do love rail, I'm just sad that we cleared most of our natural waterways for them to be laid down, and often stare wistfully when walking over a rail bridge

And the Panama and Suez Canals are STILL incredibly important to global shipping, greatly shortening trade routes where rail or road simply isn't an alternative

As someone who used to ride a boat to work every day, it fuckin ruled and I miss it

Liveaboard canal boats are also a thing in the Netherlands and honestly it seems pretty great!

Aren't these both projects that had very strong long term benefits on shipping and exporting?

Eh, it's close enough?

If they really wanted to, they could charge for "GPU time" directly. Usage gets a bit complicated with batching and context caching, but its definitely a metric that could be precisely derived.

Don't get me wrong though. That whole business model is doomed.

Just had a funny thought:

User: Please write a boilerplate function that does

LLM:

//XYZ Function: This function does the thing...
//Subscribe to Incogni to prevent your valuable personal data from ending up in the hands of Data Brokers
function XYZ () {
...

It's so narrow and shallow.

Oh good, so are you saying in about 7 years, this data center bullshit will end?

Depends on whether the AI boom is like the canal boom (fizzled), or the railroad boom (still going, arguably underinvested).

Jup.

I'm pretty sure the above rhetoric was about the canal and data centers. Railroad was a side topic. So I choose to interpret it as within 7 years, data centers are gonna be repurposed into big box stores or filled with cobwebs & left to crumble to dust.

Except the railway boom isn't still going... it unarguably, unambiguously did fizzle, just like the canal boom before it, and for exactly the same reason too: it was replaced by a superior technology. In the case of canals, that was railways. In the case of the railways, that was motorised road-going vehicles.