I remember reading, a while back, that something like 15% of Taiwan’s total electrical power usage goes to chip fabs.

What I read was saying that TSMC probably has a ton of room for electricity optimization, but it’s just not worth it. Like, what I was reading was talking about how they never shut off machines, even if they aren’t making chips, because just introducing temperature variations is enough to add more variables that might screw up yield rates.

Desktop PC with a lotta hard drives in it and big fans that don’t have to spin fast and make a lot of noise.

I use a USB DAS JBOD enclosure with fans, which is also an option if you have a mini-PC and just want a bunch of drive space.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ

This particular enclosure has physical buttons that lock in place so that the power state is restored on power loss, something that (to my surprise) a number of USB DAS enclosures apparently don’t do.

You could try reducing the fan speed. That might be okay, if the hardware doesn’t actually need the cooling. If the BIOS has fan curves, go fiddle with that. If it doesn’t, dedicated fan controllers do exist.

If the server is a standard ATX motherboard and if your rack has vertical space, you can also probably get a new ATX case of whatever sort you want, preferably taller, and get something with larger, slower fans and transplant the hardware. A lot of rack servers are vertically-cramped to let a datacenter put as many in a rack as possible, so you get stuff like 1U machines with those dinky 30mm fans. In general, the larger the fan, the less noise per airflow.

searches

https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-Mini-ITX-Rackmount-Chassis-Standard/dp/B0D296DVD8

I’ve never used that, but it’s a 3U and has three 120mm fans.

If you don’t care about cost, there are also sound-isolated racks. These have some sort of sound-blocking material like plywood on the outside and sound-absorbing foam on the inside. I have been interested in these in the past, because I would like one, but everything I’ve seen has been absolutely obscenely-priced, probably because datacenters don’t care about noise, and few people are running racks in homes or offices. I doubt that the people that sell them get much volume.

EDIT: Example sound-isolated rack:

https://tripplite.eaton.com/smartrack-quiet-server-rack-18u-sound-suppression~SRQ18U

I’m pretty sure that most developers that use web UIs do so for portability.

There are non-Web-based cross-platform GUI toolkits, like Java’s Swing.

As to why cross-platform desktop toolkits haven’t really caught on…I’d say that it’s because there are things that you can’t really abstract all that well. There are ways that a well-written MacOS app should function, ways that a well-written Windows app should function, ways that a well-written GTK app should function, and so forth.

EDIT:

I dread writing any native GUI that I got desperate enough to try writing a TUI but that’s unbelievably worse!

Honestly, the same is true of TUIs, too. Like, MS-DOS/Windows TUI conventions and Unix TUI conventions aren’t really the same. Like, in a typical Unix TUI program, I expect “q” probably quits. At text prompts, I expect that I probably have readline support and likely the vi/emacs key support there. It probably defaults to white-on-black. In an MS-DOS TUI program, Escape probably exits, and I’m probably using white-on-blue. I’m probably using Code Page 437 box-drawing characters.

EDIT2: ncdu on Unix:

WordPerfect for DOS:

I don’t think I’d say “inevitable”. Possible, maybe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. “Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it”, wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] The Chinese government erected the “Great Firewall” for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet.[2][3] Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]

Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of “parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes.”[4] The concept itself dates back at least to pair of articles in the journal Science and at the International Conference on Information Systems by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson in 1996 and 1997.[5][6] They argued that it the Internet and related technologies “have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact.” They dubbed this effect “cyberbalkanization” and developed a set of formal measures.[7]

Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America’s International Security program, use the term pejoratively to describe a growing threat to the internet’s status as a globe-spanning network of networks.[8]

Virtually all of these are temporary moratoriums, most-likely to let the city examine impact of some proposed development and gather feedback.

There are three permanent bans in force:

• Pemberton Township, New Jersey (27k people)

• Warrenton, Virginia, specific 42-acre area (10k people)

• Weaverville, North Carolina (4.5k people)

St. Charles, Missouri is also listed as permanent, but the text says that there is a temporary moratorium with a proposed permanent ban.

Note that this and most of the others do not appear to be specific to anything AI-related; this is all data centers.

One other note: One of the first conversations on here I had was when Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, was talking to some gay guy in some Middle Eastern country where content related to homosexuality were banned. The lemmy.blahaj.zone instance was blocked at his country’s network, but he could view the text content from any other home instance (since any accessible home instance on the Threadiverse itself intrinsically basically acts as a proxy for the content on other instances). I remember pointing out that he could tunnel via SSH. His problem was that he couldn’t view images, since the images were hosted on the lemmy.blahaj.zone server, but these days, some lemmy home instances (including my home instance, lemmy.today) automatically locally proxy images posted elsewhere to hide the IP address of their users, so he wouldn’t even have that problem now.

However, such efforts are technically flawed because the only reliable method for identifying VPN protocol signatures is deep packet inspection at the network level, which the EPRS paper doesn’t mention.

I mean, you can tunnel whatever over whatever. You can tunnel a VPN over anything else that’s encrypted, so unless you also want to ban SSH and HTTPS connections and suchlike (well, okay, for UDP-based VPNs, you’d probably prefer something UDP-based, but I think that the point stands), you’re going to have trouble, say, blocking OpenVPN connections.

Tor exists for the explicit purpose of not being blocked.

Maybe you could try to characterize VPN traffic and do traffic analysis without being able to look inside the encrypted payload, say “VPN traffic tends to look like this”, but again, it’s not that hard to add noise to the signal.

And you don’t even mostly need a full-on VPN for most of this, since it’s mostly just people trying to access Web services.

Get yourself any Linux system in some less-restrictive location (which I’ll call server) running OpenSSH. SSH into it from client like so:

[tal@client ~] $ ssh server -N -D127.0.0.1:1080

On the client, install the Proxy Toggle Firefox plugin. Set it to use localhost, port 1080 as a SOCKS5 proxy. Click the toolbar button to toggle on proxy use. Now all your browser traffic is coming from that remote server. All a network provider can see is an SSH connection. Click again, and you’re back to normal mode.

But tal, that’s complicated. Some people won’t know how to use SSH.

So is virtually everything that a computer does. Raytracing. Image composition. Decoding discrete cosine transformation encodings. Rendering real-time video game worlds. If there’s a need, someone goes out and writes software that makes it easy for the end user. And if you create a situation where there is an unlimited quantity of stuff that a lot of end users want access to behind a wall which someone can make a one-click program to bypass, it’s probably a reasonably safe bet that that those one-click programs are going to show up.

There is no loophole that can be trivially closed here. It’s a fundamental limitation — if users are going to be able to send traffic that you cannot inspect the inside of — and avoiding that would mean encryption spanning your borders being disallowed, which you probably do not want — then they can appear to be coming from wherever in the outside world they want.

And plenty of people pointed out that this was a problem before age-verification stuff was put into force. This isn’t a situation where one just does the thing and there are a few lingering minor issues to iron out. It’s fundamental to the concept of doing age verification.

But voters don’t want their kids seeing porn.

Well, frankly, if said kids have Internet access and they want to see porn, they probably are going to be able to see porn or otherwise enjoy use of the least-restrictive set of rules out there. That’s part of having a world-spanning network where people can communicate with each other. There is going to be blasphemy and pornography and political extremism and stuff saying that Santa Claus doesn’t exist out there. Some of that is going to be material that doesn’t conform to the set of social norms where you live and will conform to social norms elsewhere in the world. I don’t personally see that as all that catastrophic.

Some languages apparently don’t have countable nouns.

Some languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, treat all nouns as mass nouns, and need to make use of a noun classifier (see Chinese classifier) to add numerals and other quantifiers.

Could be that the artist speaks one of those.

EDIT: And not all languages have the definite/indefinite article distinction in English. I’ve seen some Russian-language speakers in particular have trouble with that.

EDIT2: It sounds like the artist was born in Russia prior to emigrating to the US, so I’d guess that he might speak Russian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_(cartoonist)

Shen (also known as Shenanigansen) is the pen name of cartoonist Andrew Tsyaston, the creator of the comic series Owlturd, Shen Comix, and Bluechair, and the co-creator of Live with Yourself!.

Born: Andrew Tsyaston February 1, 1992 (age 34)

Shen emigrated from Europe to the United States with his family in 1999.[3][4]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/Shen

Shen (aka Shenanigansen / Andrew Tsyaston) is an Russian-born American webcomic creator.

So he’s probably been speaking English for a long time, though he would probably have been speaking Russian until he was seven.

EDIT3: I’m not gonna try to track down the exact date of publication, but the earliest copy Tineye has seen is from 2020, so I doubt that it’s a really old comic from when he was a lot younger.

EDIT4: It’s a modified version of the original comic, so the text isn’t from the original artist:

https://x.com/shenanigansen/status/1280119418496921600

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/a85692c7-62e0-4b22-a733-62ba4a02b54b.jpeg

I think that this is the audio being referred to:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4r9ZnBycQ

I’d like to have standardized LFP battery form factors and BMS interfaces. I’m not really enthusiastic about everyone rolling their own battery form factor for a given product that isn’t going to be available forever, even if it can save a bit of space. That battery is going to degrade over time, and unless I’m going to throw the product out soon, at some point I may want to replace the battery.

We had this solved with traditional cells (AA, AAA, C, D, etc).

On eBay, I see two listings from scalpers already up for $230 and $319.

EDIT: Oh, there are a ton more, most about $210 into the three hundreds. Just only had two come up at the top. Search for “steam controller 2026” and you’ll see a bunch.

I thought that this was pretty cool — the second post that Valve put up on the Steam Controller 2.0, the one after the release announcement, was distributing the CAD files to permit people/companies to make mods for the controller, 3D print alternate cases or things like that.

My past experience with game controllers has been buying an ever-more-exotic collection of security bits to be able to open them because the vendors that make them don’t want users poking around inside them.

You sure? I don’t think I remember seeing that.

goes looking

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine

Made for Steam Controller

Steam Machine comes with a built-in wireless adapter, just for pairing with Steam Controller. (Up to four with a single adapter!) This means you can pair your Steam Controller without its puck, and you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch.

I mean, they say that it has wireless support for remote power-on for it, but nothing on that page that I see says that the Steam Machine comes with a Steam Controller. They might do some bundle with a discount that includes both, and I could totally believe that, but…

I think they truly didn’t anticipate the volume of people interested in the controller.

If you’re getting the Steam Machine 2.0, you’re probably going to get at least one Steam Controller 2.0, since it’s the closest thing to an “official” Steam Machine controller, and it’s designed to let you do a reasonable job of playing mouse-based games (which Steam has lots of) from the couch (and the Steam Machine is aiming at the living room). The two products kinda go together like peanut butter and jelly.

But…the Steam Machine 2.0 is deferred, so the people buying a Steam Controller now are buying one to use on a PC, either for use at a desk or some non-Valve-built living-room PC, which I think is probably harder for Valve to predict demand for.

Motherboards are, if anything, probably going to do the opposite — motherboard prices aren’t rising because of increased demand. Memory prices rose because of increased demand. Prices for things that use memory also rose. Motherboard sales are falling because of decreased demand; motherboards don’t use a ton of memory, and fewer people need a new motherboard because the components that they’d plug into the motherboard cost enough to cause them to defer upgrading or buying a new PC. You might see price cuts, if anything.

Initial phases of SpaceX’s Terafab project in rural Texas are expected to cost about 1.25 Twitters

I’d bet that a chip fab is a more-sensible purchase than Twitter.

I would bet that a lot of the storage that AI companies are picking up isn’t for the model itself, but for storing the huge amount of information that they want to use as their training corpus.

I’d bet that what they do is something like this:

1. Download data and store in original form, non-destructively. This is probably not used incredibly frequently. When you see bots sucking down the whole Web, this is the sort of thing that is involved.

2. Have some kind of filtered training corpus. This throws out a lot of stuff that is useless for training. This is generated from #1 by filtering software. It’s probably smaller than #1. Probably a lot smaller.

3. Probably some sort of scored index is generated at this stage to put an estimate on how useful or reliable the data in step #2 should be considered; I’d assume that this is an input into the training.

4. The generated model, generated via training.

For the data in stage #1, I’d guess that AI companies might be able to use tapes. That being said, it might make sense to use faster storage if it accelerates the time to iterate on improving the filtering software.

But, yeah, for the later stages, tapes probably aren’t gonna work.

They’re horizontal stabilizers. They serve a crucial aerodynamic role.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Negev_mid-air_collision

In May 1983, two Israeli Air Force aircraft, an F-15 Eagle and an A-4 Skyhawk, collided in mid-air during a training exercise over the Negev region, in Israel. Notably, the F-15 (with a crew of two) managed to land safely at a nearby airbase, despite having its right wing almost completely sheared off in the collision. The lifting body properties of the F-15, together with its overabundant engine thrust, allowed the pilot to achieve this unique feat.[1]

The F-15 started rolling uncontrollably after the collision and the instructor ordered an ejection. Nedivi, who outranked the instructor, decided not to eject and attempted recovery by engaging the afterburner, and eventually regained control of the aircraft. He was able to maintain control because of the lift generated by the large areas of the fuselage, stabilators, and remaining wing. Diverting to Ramon Airbase,[2] the F-15 landed at twice the normal speed to maintain the necessary lift, and its tailhook was torn off completely during the landing. Nedivi managed to bring his F-15 to a complete stop approximately 20 ft (6 m) from the end of the runway. He later told The History Channel, “it’s highly likely that if I had seen it clearly I would have ejected, because it was obvious you couldn’t really fly an airplane like that.”[4] He added, “Only when McDonnell Douglas later went to analyze it, they said, OK, the F-15 has a very wide [lifting] body; you fly fast enough and you’re like a rocket. You don’t need wings.”[3][4][5]

Sometimes things aren’t as crucial as they might seem!

Use tape libraries for the moment, with hard drives acting as a cache for them? Doesn’t need to mean moving the whole backing storage to tape, just predicting what won’t likely be used soon and letting the storage format indicate “go look on tape for this item”. Obviously, that can result in much higher cold storage retrieval latency, but as long as you are (a) doing predictive fetching with a reasonably good algorithm and (b) have a lot of hard drives, which I’m sure that The Internet Archive does, I’d think that tape should be workable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library

In computer storage, a tape library is a physical area that holds magnetic data tapes. In an earlier era, tape libraries were maintained by people known as tape librarians and computer operators and the proper operation of the library was crucial to the running of batch processing jobs. Although tape libraries of this era were not automated, the use of tape management system software could assist in running them.

Subsequently, tape libraries became physically automated, and as such are sometimes called a tape silo, tape robot, or tape jukebox. These are a storage devices that contain one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges, and an automated method for loading tapes (a robot). Such solutions are mostly used for backups and for digital archiving. Additionally, the area where tapes that are not currently in a silo are stored is also called a tape library. One of the earliest examples was the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS), announced in 1974.

In either era, tape libraries can contain millions of tapes.

Physically automated tape library devices can store immense amounts of data, ranging from 20 terabytes[13] up to 2.1 exabytes of data[14] as of 2016.

For large data-storage, they are a cost-effective solution, with cost per gigabyte as low as 2 cents USD.

I’d also guess — though I don’t know for sure — that it’s probably a lot easier to scale up manufacturing of tapes than it is hard drives.

EDIT: Does kind of make me wonder what the open-source options for tiered storage like that is. I’ve never really gone hunting, but it seems like there’d be a lot of commonality from place to place, and that for a lot of places that do it, it’s not really their core competency (that is, they just want to do something that deals with storing and processing lots of data, not that they really care principally about data storage).