Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas. Meanwhile, data center demand is surging. By 2030, PJM expects 32 gigawatts of increased demand on its system, with all but two of those gigawatts coming from data centers.

    So this is a combination of utter mismanagement by the power companies, combined with growth in data center demand. Data centers are not purely AI. And I would expect that if PJM continues to be a basket case with exceptionally high prices those data centers will move elsewhere, or at least not get set up so more in those locations. Data centers generally don’t have to be located in specific places, by their nature. AI-specific ones in particular since the bandwidth required is a lot smaller than their processing power.




  • Some years ago now, a bunch of bike lanes got added to the streets in my city. The city did a big project of adding them and afterwards proudly declared that X number of kilometers of bike lanes had been made.

    When an investigation was done into how the decision process had gone for where to add them it turned out that the only consideration had been “how cheap is it to add bike lanes in these locations?” Not “would bike lanes actually be used in these locations?” They were solely trying to maximize the kilometers-of-lane-per-dollar-spent so that they could put out that headline with as big a number as possible.

    Subsequent studies showed that a lot of those lanes weren’t being used by bikes in any significant number. Bike lanes had been added on streets that ran alongside sidewalks that were already designated bike paths. I’m a bike rider myself, some lanes were added in my neighborhood but they somehow managed to put them everywhere except the routes I usually took. The city wound up spending a bunch more money to remove a bunch of the bike lanes that were doing nothing but increasing congestion.

    It may be that this was a similar situation, where someone wanted to proudly show off headlines of how they’d pushed for bike access and got X numbers of kilometers installed and those were the only real metrics that mattered.












  • What I mean is that when Musk-owned companies have successes people are very often quick to accuse him of “just hiring smart people” or “just buying a successful company.” It’s only when those companies have failures that he gets credit for being hands-on in their design decisions.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think Elon Musk is a pretty terrible person both in terms of his personality and his politics. But pretty terrible people can nevertheless be smart and make good engineering decisions. Just look at von Braun as a prime example.