Promiseland

[Fetian]

I'd been looking forward to them so, so much

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We didn't even get all the raking done. Not that that really matters now

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I don't know why people who know LLMs are glorified autocorrect and hallucinate constantly keep thinking you can ask the computer about its programming (what it was trained on, what it's been instructed to say, etc) and trust the answers

[Fetian]

This article on the effects Elon Musk's power plant in south Memphis is having on the community makes it hard to square the 'LLM electricity usage concerns are overblown' circle

Some quotes:

The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road. That’s according to calculations by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonpartisan legal advocacy group that focuses on the South, which used turbine manufacturer spec sheets to estimate xAI’s annual emissions and compare them with pollution that other South Memphis plants have reported to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Emissions Inventory.

The turbines were necessary to get the third version of the company’s AI chatbot up and running in time, Musk said at the product’s launch in February, adding: “We have generators on one side of the building, just trailer after trailer of generators until we can get the utility power to come in.” He has not publicly addressed the pollution concerns and did not respond to requests for comment about the turbines powering the plant and their lack of pollution controls.

The Memphis xAI showdown could become a national test case for artificial intelligence, which demands more electricity than regular internet searches to complete even simple tasks. Utilities across the country have struggled to keep up with the electricity demands of “hyper users” like data centers, which are often left to find their own power sources behind the meter.

Memphis Light, Gas and Water and chamber officials initially suggested last summer there were 18 turbines of varying sizes. But then, when xAI filed a permit application in January, it listed 15 machines, at 16 MW each. Then, at the end of March, environmental groups flew over the facility and came back with aerial photos showing 35 turbines onsite. Memphis Mayor Paul Young defended the company, saying only 15 were actually running and that the rest were for backup.

But in late April, environmental groups sent a plane with thermal cameras to fly over the facility and found 33 turbines giving off significant amounts of heat — a sign they were also generating electricity and pollution.

Together the turbines produce enough energy to power 280,000 homes. XAI has been relying on them because the data processing center’s voracious appetite for energy has outpaced electric utilities’ ability to serve it.

XAI’s demand for power has only grown since it came to Memphis last June. After months of tests, Colossus came fully online in September. That same day, Musk posted on X that it would double the number of computer chips onsite to 200,000 “in a few months.”

He has said Colossus will require 2,000 MW to power its expansion. So far, TVA has only approved xAI’s initial request for 150 MW. The 15 turbines it wants permitted produce only 420 more. In October, xAI asked Memphis Light, Gas and Water to study the possibility of supplying an additional 260 MW through a new substation on another swath of land xAI recently leased in South Memphis, but the substation can’t be built until TVA approves sending electricity to it, which could take months.

A lot more terrible things in the article, I'm only highlighting the power consumption elements and not the blatant disregard of human life, the environment, and regulations designed to protect them.

It's just 'numbers go up' all over again. Maybe LLMs don't take that much electricity to run, but you can always make them bigger, and make more of them, and multiply and multiply their costs. Maybe they didn't take that much electricity to run last year but they do now. They will in the future. I don't really know, the whole issue has been very confusing from the get-go, but this doesn't look good.

[Fetian]

'Well sure Elon Musk's LLM takes up all the available electricity and then some, but that's because he set up a bunch of shitty generators, surely other corporations would be more conscientious--' are you hearing yourself.

Anyway the article also talks about various efforts to remove the regulations that are supposed to stop them from doing that, so you can bet more companies will be at it soon, if they aren't already. The article talks about how Memphis (not the affected communities, of course) is trying to get other digital corporations to move their factories/headquarters to that area.

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has made efforts to boost the nation’s burgeoning artificial intelligence industry. Vaseliou said her agency is “eager to work with AI leaders as it begins work to streamline permitting and regulations that will help accelerate American data center development.”

She added that EPA “looks forward to working with AI leaders” as it begins to roll back some 31 pollution-limiting regulations announced in March. EPA has also billed its move to relax pollution rules limiting how long reciprocating internal combustion engines can run without a permit as one to help boost AI. The engines are commonly used to power pumps and compressors in power and manufacturing plants, often during emergency events. New EPA guidance would allow some of those engines to operate for up to 50 hours per year outside of emergencies in a move it is billing as “the first and certainly not the last step” to ensuring data centers and utilities have reliable power.

Since landing xAI, the Memphis chamber has rebranded the city as a “Digital Delta,” and chip manufacturer Nvidia, as well as Dell and Super Micro, has expressed interest in coming to Bluff City, according to the chamber and xAI.

“We have established the efficiency, the partnership, really the culture of ‘yes’ that we are able to get to what you need and really provide for our community,” Townsend said.

Companies don’t need residents’ permission to locate industry in South Memphis, he said, “as long as they are going through the correct process of permitting.”

“It doesn’t always require a community to say, ‘Well, we are OK with that or we are not,’” he said. “It’s a capitalistic thing. Companies come in and they operate.”

[Fetian]

fAnS dOn'T aCtUaLLy CoOl ThE rOoM

Weird because I turned the fans on and the temperature in my room immediately dropped a degree, funny how that works

The latter, and also they're insufferable pedants who think there's some kind of concrete difference between 'cooling the temperature of a room' and 'moving the heat out of a room so the temperature of the room drops', and also there's a subspecies of argument about running fans in winter because yes doing so will average out the temperature of an enclosed space which can technically make the room warmer if you have a heater running, but counterpoint it will make the room feel colder if you're doing it while you're in it (because it's removing your body heat) and if you've got a pocket of warm air in the used part of the room it will cool off that pocket which is probably the part that you actually want to feel warmer instead of, say, the upper right corner or under a chair

I have another question for these people which is if they've ever blown on hot food before

[Fetian]

It's Fan Season which means I'm thinking about The Discourse

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Social media where your posts are only visible to the first 100 people to see them

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i'm too furry for this

[Fetian]

I'm watching the Language Creation Conference streams for this year and my main takeaway is that the loglang community is much more chill than I was aware of it being back when I was first getting into the conlang community