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petabites.bsky.social
Houston Do'ug
@petabites.bsky.social
160 followers 420 following 310 posts
X-free since 2022/11/02

* the profile pic is from my background photo ... which is from some fifty year old album art (that I can't name one song from)
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Reposted by Houston Do'ug
jesbattis.bsky.social
At this point, our intro comp/first-year English course has been so heavily revised, it no longer includes a novel, or "extended reading" of any kind, no "specialized" or "historical" reading, mostly in-class assignments, no research essay...and we are still seeing a 40-50% rate of AI misconduct.
November 28, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Reposted by Houston Do'ug
edzitron.com
NVIDIA's story is insane. Data centers take years to build, cost hundreds of millions of dollars in construction, labor and permitting, and require massive amounts of power, and *to this day* we still lack a complete understanding of what they cost to run.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
Let Me Explain To You How Expensive And Arduous It Is To Actually Build A Data Center, And Remind You That Every Single Time Anybody Buys NVIDIA GPUs They're Probably Dealing With This So, let me give you a theoretical example. I swear I'm going somewhere with this.You, a genius, have decided you are about to join the vaunted ranks of "AI data center ownership." You decide to build a "small" AI data center — 25MW (megawatts, which in this example, refers to the combined power draw of the tech inside the data center). That can't be that much, right? OpenAI is building a 1.2GW one out in Abilene Texas. How much could this tiny little thing cost? Sidenote: It’s a minor thing, but I want to clarify something. I said “in this example” in the previous paragraph because when we talk about the power capacity of a data center, we could be referring to one of two things. The first is the power draw of the servers in the facility — which is called the IT Load — or the total amount of power that can be provided to that facility. Here’s where it gets tricky. A facility that can draw, say, 25MW of power from the grid can’t just use all of that in one go. You need a reserve for what’s known as the “design day,” which is the hottest day of the year, when the facility’s cooling systems are under the most strain, and when power transmission losses are at their highest. That reserve is, from what I’ve been told, around 30% of the total available electricity. Cooling systems are power-hungry! Who knew? Me. I did. I’ve been telling you for over a year. Okay, well, let's start with those racks. You're gonna need to give Jensen Huang $600 million right away, as you need 200 GB200 racks. You're also gonna need a way to make them network together, because otherwise they aren't going to be able to handle all those big IT loads, so that's gonna be another $80 million or more, and you're going to need storage and servers to sync all of this up, which is, let's say, another $35 million. So… Anyway, sadly data centers require something called a "building." Construction costs for a data center are somewhere from $8 million to $12 million per megawatt, so, crap, okay. That's $250 million, but probably more like $300 million. We're now up to $1.02 billion, and we haven't even got the power yet. Okay, sick. Do you have one billion dollars? You don't? No worries! Private credit — money loaned by non-banking entities — has been feeding more than $50 billion dollars a quarter into the hungry mouths of anybody who desires to build a data center. You need $1.02 billion. You get $1.5 billion, because, you know, "stuff happens." Don't worry about those pesky high interest rates — you're about to be printing big money, AI style! Now you're done raising all that cash, it'll now only take anywhere from 6 to 18 months for site selection, permitting, design, development, construction, and energy procurement. You're also going to need about 20 acres of land for that 100,000 square foot data center. You may wonder why 100,000 square feet needs that much space, and that's because all of the power and cooling equipment takes up an astonishing amount of room. So, yeah, after two years and over a billion dollars, you too can own a data center with NVIDIA GPUs that turn on, and at that point, you will offer a service that is functionally identical to everybody else buying GPUs from NVIDIA. Your competitors are Amazon, Google and Microsoft, followed by neoclouds — AI chip companies selling the same thing as you, except they're directly backed by NVIDIA, and frequently, the big hyperscaler companies with brands that most people have heard of, like AWS and Azure. Oh, also, this stuff costs an indeterminately-large amount of money to run. You may wonder why I can't tell you how much, and that's because nobody wants to actually discuss the cost of running GPUs, the thing that underpins our entire stock market. There're good reasons, too. One does not just run "a GPU" — it's …
November 24, 2025 at 5:04 PM
petabites.bsky.social
George Santos is iconic and ironic, it seems...
November 24, 2025 at 2:35 PM
petabites.bsky.social
so he is saying when it comes to only certain 'countries' making batteries, "Europe is not one of them."

* next will be his take on production in the 'country' of Africa, too...
November 24, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Houston Do'ug
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
We are seeing this admin over and over again decide to target people who have become technically deportable through no fault of their own other than government delay.

Why? One reason is because they’re the compliant ones who are easy targets for an admin who wants quick boosts in arrest numbers.
November 23, 2025 at 4:22 AM
Reposted by Houston Do'ug
cupstid.net
Gosh, I hope the lamprey is okay.
November 21, 2025 at 6:16 PM
petabites.bsky.social
back then I figured it wasn't going to be Blue-vs-Red by 2022 ... after all, Soylent Green Is Purple! (spoiler)
November 23, 2025 at 1:19 AM