This is going on right now in my rural town in Virginia, as they are planning a massive AI datacenter in an industrial park created about 20 years ago that has been mostly empty (except for a few massive tenets, like one of the largest Gatorade plants in the US at 1 million square feet). Environmental groups have already seeded the community with fear (we have this cut-throat Facebook gossip page that was posted to, and now everyone is up in arms). People have been flooding the county supervisor meetings and so on.

Just in the last couple days the county released a much more detailed explanation of the datacenter's consumption of both electricity and water, but I don't think it's eased people's minds much. Our power is supplied by American Electric Power, which has over 5 million customers and very deep pockets. We also have close to 100 MW of solar farms, and two hydroelectric dams on the New River at the edge of the county, and very robust power infrastructure here. So I don't think there would be any regional issues with power (as compared to other states that have much smaller and even municipal-level power companies that have to pass infrastructure spending onto a much small customer base).

What kinds of chips are we talking about here? I doubt these are "Missile Guidance Chip 2000" military-specific chips, but much more generic-use ICs / processors that are ubiquitous and likely even interchangeable with those from other manufacturers.

Exactly, and this is the "natural" way these plants go away over time, as the market and economics make the most sense. It is inevitable, and it is happening, and they will all be gone in our lifetimes.

That's in contrast to making this into a political football and costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in forced incentives and grants to try to speed the process along by a mere handful of years, and in the process riling up voters to fight against it. Like Hillary Clinton did in 2016 saying she would put all the hard-working coal minors out of work by shutting down all coal energy in the country. Just let it happen naturally, where there are less coal miners working due to natural attrition and retirement, as the energy production is moving onto other things.

I didn't know id Software was still a thing, especially after John Carmack left. What are they even doing now?

They are planning on building an AI datacenter in an industrial park at the edge of my small rural town. This industrial park already has some massive industry in it - like one of the largest Gatorade bottling plants in the USA.

On Facebook I started seeing a lot of posts in our local county gossip group casting pure FUD on the datacenter. Namely that it would pollute the water with heavy metals, and most of all, everyone would be "footing the electric bill" for this plant. With the electric bill the claim is that if infrastructure has to be improved, that cost is passed on to everyone. I've been trying to find information to combat this misinformation but it has been difficult.

In our case, the power company is AEP, which has over 5 million customers. There is a new 20 MW solar far less than a mile away from this location, and another 75 MW solar farm being built out in the county. We also have two hydroelectric dams on the edge of the county. This industrial park was built to attract huge industry and has massive power feeds, two interstates within a couple miles, and even rail service. So I doubt it needs anything at all, but even if it did, AEP is such a huge company that infrastructure costs would surely be absorbed across their entire customer base?

Looking at the initial posts seeding FUD, I noted that the people weren't even in our state, let alone our county.

Now there's a bunch of locals all riled up over this because they just believe anything they see online, and the next County Board of Supervisors meeting is going to be quite heated. Although I think this is already a done-deal.

There's pretty much zero probability Russia could use this to their advantage at this point - their space R&D engineering is pretty much gone. They don't even have a functioning launch platform for human flight at the moment.

The real risk is this being sold to China, or traded to China by Russia for hardware for their war machine against Ukraine.

They regularly do. At least four have flown on SpaceX Dragon flights to the ISS so far. First in 2022, most recent this year.

Bad idea. We're just a few volcanic eruptions away from wanting all the sunshine we can get.

Just imagine the cost of this over the course of a decade. The utility seems to have borne the brunt of the work, having to analyze and filter this data multiple times per year. That cost would have been passed onto customers - I'm sure it's appreciated that everyone's power bill was just a bit higher to fund this fishing expedition by law enforcement.

Then of course the investigators would be tied up digging through the 33,000 "tips" this data produced. Literally, law enforcement had to review 33,000 potential customers who met this profile, checking them for warrants or other known crimes giving them some excuse to surveil or even search that residence. Pretty extreme when you think about it - and that is just to catch people growing weed of all things. Not the dangerous drugs killing people or contributing to the homeless population on so on.

Finally, the fact that this generated so many potential leads shows how stupid the concept is in general - the "profile" they were going after regarding power usage. I can think of a hundred of other things that would cause higher power usage 24/7 that has nothing to do with growing weed.

Yeah but I bet the price of antihydrogen molecules at Walmart won't drop by 1/8th. I bet they won't even go down by half.

He'll be dead before any technology exists that can even remotely come close to bringing her back. It's unlikely she survived having died and then was frozen, let alone repair the cancer AND the damage from the cancer that was severe enough to kill her.

I'm sorry but the words "most ambitious infrastructure project in human history " were put together to form that sentence. HUMAN HISTORY. Ever hear about the great pyramids in Egypt?

Installing solar panels, batteries (are they even using them?) and charge controller / inverter for a home is an extremely fundamental thing that most anyone can do given simple instructions. In the US and other developed countries it often isn't done by a homeowner because if they intend to sell power back to the grid it has to be done by a certified installer and signed off on by the power company.

Now maybe if the sentence was "most ambitious infrastructure project in Sub-Saharan Africa" I wouldn't bat an eye, and that sounds like a reasonable statement, but not when it comes to the entirety of the human population over all history.

Over exaggerate much? Installing solar panels to power individual homes doesn't even come close to the "most ambitious infrastructure project in human history". Maybe building a railroad across an entire continent, or building a massive roadway system with thousands of bridges that span mighty rivers and gorges. Perhaps digging canals to connect the planet's oceans, or building power plants and distribution systems to provide power to a billion people...

What is funding this is companies trying to buy carbon credits. I actually tried to read this article but it was so overhyped and the guy was so giddy to blow it out of proportion my eyes almost got stuck in a permanent eye-roll.

Well it did top a chart - the Digital Download (IE purchase for $0.99) Chart, with.... 3,000 sales. As Rick says, "So it cost $3,000 to get the #1 spot."

Were the lyrics generated by AI? Were they tweaked or modified by a person? Is any of the music "real" or all generated by AI? I can't seem to find specifics on any of that.

Here's a YouTube link for those who don't pay for Spotify.

Song starts out kinda flat but the vocals really build at the end.