The same physical location showing a different SSID every week but the surrounding ones not changing would be deanonymizing you much more aggressively.
People mostly don't change SSIDs or even move networking hardware - e.g. AirBnBs.
Edit: and also are you still carrying a smart phone while doing this? The device which has GPS and a cloud internet connection?
I'm more interested how this would effect providing VM graphics with migrations between hosts.
The dream would be put the user OS in a VM in a lab, and then be able to suspend and resume seamlessly if you need to push it to a new workstation, with locally accelerated graphics available.
configuration.nix is that file for me. I gave up entirely on desktops and panels, and instead use xmonad and dmenu. I've had to adapt to exactly zero change in my ux in ten years. For me, enrichment comes from studying and experimenting, not from adapting every month or two to things that make somebody else feel good about changing.
Toolbars themselves aren’t the issue, it’s too much crap dumped in them, especially when it’s a bunch of very rarely used tools.
And especially when it’s multiple layers of toolbars like a 2006 Internet Explorer.
Over the last decade we have seen programs like libreoffice and gimp not really do anything while others like Blender have had massive overhauls pushing the frontier of UI.
China can be going green while also refusing to constrain it's economic growth on the short term.
When you actually build things, throwing up a coal plant for 10 years because you need it while you grow your solar and battery industries or wait for reactors to cover your base load is just sensible.
All narratives about China always have this static world baked into them: "they're currently like this, and that's all they'll ever be". But China develops fast. Shenzhen was a farming village by a ditch. 10 years ago buying a Chinese car was inconceivable - I took delivery on one yesterday, etc.
At some point in the very near future China is going to hit a cross over point on their emissions and they'll start falling fast because reactors + renewables will be building out fast enough they'll want the coal plants gone - no one likes ruling over a polluted wasteland.
Edit: it can also be the case that they don't care at all about going green...but renewable energy technology is the most sovereign possible energy security. No one can take away your access to the sun.
Steel takes about 4.750 kw-hours to produce per kg.[1]
A 450W solar panel will make roughly 562 kwh a year in California.[2]
So one panel running for one year offsets 140kg of steel production, roughly.
Thats an I-beam based structure so it's weight efficient and a heck of a lot more then 1 solar panel are going to fit on it.
Judging from a local steel supplier[3] and some span tables it looks like you'd need about a 360mm or so I-beam to bridge a 115 ft (30m) channel (the structure looks more efficient then that though) so call it 50kg per meter. So one span is probably ballpark 1500kg of steel.
A 450W solar panel is about 0.7m wide, the structure is fully covered so call it 42 panels per span offsetting the energy production of a little over 5900kg of steel per year (and it doesn't look like we're putting one solid I-beam per row of solar panels either since I see lightweight spanning channel in there).
Furthermore at the end of the steel structures lifespan it will be recycled in a manner that is far more energy efficient, requiring only 25% of the total energy. And that's in the case it wasn't from recycled materials in the first place.
HN is kinda ground-zero for i-am-very-smart contrarians, so it's not _that_ surprising.
(Also, in the US, "solar panels take more energy to make than they produce" is a popular, although entirely false, talking point in right-wing media, so propaganda plays a part too. This claim has also been made about wind, and, bafflingly, _nuclear_.)
Fair, but my point is that a data center is not pets.com. They are a much more flexible asset, and are even more flexible than AI itself. Pets.com failed because the physical delivery infrastructure and consumer buying habits that support Chewy today did not yet exist and took years to create. Data centers can be repurposed from supporting the current generation of LLM-based AI models to an infinite variety of use cases. Pets.com could only ever hope to deliver pet food.
And Amazon.com could only ever hope to deliver physical books?
Anyway, it's clear an AI data center has utility for crunching AI inference, and that there is and will continue to be demand for AI inference. The trillion dollar question is whether you can make money doing this, and so far the answer is no.
You are not disproving but rather reinforcing my point. Amazon survived the dotcom bubble precisely because they could hope to do more than deliver physical books. It was a more flexible, generally applicable business model than pets.com, and they started out targeting a market more susceptible to ecommerce conversion than pet food delivery proved to be. Similarly, a company selling a product that can only be used for the limited use cases we have found for chatbot-style text generating LLMs will be more likely to fail than a company selling something that is more generally useful. Data centers are more generally useful than LLMs, and the companies building them are more likely to survive than those whose fortunes are pinned entirely to unrealistically high expectations for replacing white collar workers with LLMs.
Data centers aren't just physical buildings though - the vast bulk of data centre costs is the racks of servers in them, and those are being bought and installed on credit at very high costs.
Its not about "is a computer thoeretically useful" its about if it's going to deliver value to cover the cost of installing it in the first place over it's expected lifetime.
You aren't substituting generic compute: you're substituting highly optimized GPU dense server space. The application is more limited then it looks.
People mostly don't change SSIDs or even move networking hardware - e.g. AirBnBs.
Edit: and also are you still carrying a smart phone while doing this? The device which has GPS and a cloud internet connection?
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