extreme billionaires want you to know they could have done physics vibe

they did a whoopsie, lead 210 comes from uranium 238. every 220 years radioactivity drops 1000x which means that 200-300 year old lead is mostly fine. copper notably doesn’t have this problem, is dense and is refined to high degree, at scale. it’s good enough to shield most of relatively low energy radiation from that isotope (less than 50kev gammas). couple mm of copper should be plenty for many applications

there’s been a claim of 200ish GW of new datacenters announced but it’s only something like 5GW being built and only a fraction of that is actually finished or powered on. this mostly goes for american ai dcs, which are 3/4 of them all. not sure if it holds for emirates, but it would completely not surprise me if it’s the case there also https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/#how-much-actual-data-center-capacity-came-online-in-2025-my-estimate-3gw-of-it-load

Except it is a problem, man! As I covered in this week’s free newsletter [link above], I estimate that only around 3GW of actual IT load (so around 3.9GW of power) came online last year, and as Sightline reported, only 5GW of data center construction is actually in progress globally at this time, despite somewhere between 190GW and 240GW supposedly being in progress. In reality, data centers take forever to build (and obtaining the power even longer than that), but nobody needs to harsh their flow by looking into what’s actually happening.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-how-much-of-the-ai-bubble-is-real/ (paywalled) linked claim for 190GW https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outlook linked claim for 240GW https://paulkedrosky.com/chart-of-the-day-data-center-buildout-slowed-sharply/

aside from everything else, as posted by ed zitron previously i doubt that anything is really getting built there

different tool for a different purpose. water has a large heat of evaporation which is something that allows for more compact turbines

big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime

Mate, you’re either baiting or need professional medical help

i’m guessing it wasn’t abducted by aliens

what a way to learn that she was already released

You might be better off exchanging them before travel, you would need to look up rates

dropped as cleanup-only, not allowed by their policies

i suspect that it might be vibecoded, too

it also happened with tramadol before (different plant)

- hey chaotic systems are a thing, you can’t predict every single last detail

gwern: as a proof that you’re wrong, what if we placed everywhere very fast robots that avoid getting into chaotic systems in the first place

spare a thought and a prayer for all these careers of ambitious propagandists and engagement farmers, dislocated without warning

that’s way more power than needed to feed 800W out 24/7, what happens with the rest?

fresh hellish nonsense brought to you by ai-gen podcasts enabled by techbros interpretation of consent and privacy:

https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/

WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services.

“WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”

i see elsewhere that wikipedia after all restricted a bit more use of chatbots, and i’m very interested how much kicking and screaming did it involve

Adding to that, logistics are such that direct impact will be felt strongest in places like India that rely heavily on Qatari LNG to make fertilizer, but many places have other sources of both gas and fertilizer. Americas, EU, Russia and China will get by because they have their own supply and will be only affected by price increase

without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer there’s only enough reactive nitrogen going around for something like 1-1.5B people. yea mate very sustainable to retvrn to traditional farming and starve 80% of the planet in the process

good, dare i say, based even. you better start figuring out where to put these panels, because roofs and parking lots won’t be enough (maybe taking into account soil type and how it is already used)