Thanks to the techbros, for whom the environment is their very last consideration. Nvidia had a keynote address to announce their latest big data center engine, a processor that will suck down even more energy. It’s such a greedy machine that even a tech writer was appalled.
While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don’t give financial advice, I can say that if you’re an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday’s keynote presentation.
For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that ‘digital humans’ are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.
It uses almost twice as much power! That might be fine if the increased power allowed for increased efficiency, but that’s not how this works: usage will expand to meet capacity, and that means more AI and more crypto, two things we don’t really need.
There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia’s Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That’s 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that’s 1,875 watts per GPU.
The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.
Here’s something else that won’t help: the Republican presidential candidate is suddenly gung-ho for crypto. He’s pandering to Silicon Valley, you know.
Former President Donald Trump pitched his plan to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world,” pledging to establish the nation’s first strategic Bitcoin stockpile, if elected.
Trump is the first presidential candidate from a major political party to make Bitcoin and cryptocurrency a campaign issue, and the first American president to speak at a Bitcoin event, addressing an enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd at the Bitcoin 2024 conference at the Music City Center in Nashville, two weeks after surviving an assassination attempt.
“If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA,” Trump said. “If Bitcoin is going to the moon, as they say, ‘it’s going to the moon,’ I want America to be the nation that leads the way.”
Oh god. Why? Bitcoin is a scam. It does nothing. It does not contribute to productivity or the economy. It’s a tool for suckering money out of gullible investors, so I can understand why Trump would have an affinity for it.
“For too long, our government has violated a cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart: never sell your Bitcoin,” he said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration for the United States of America to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires.”
HODL! To the Moon! He has mastered the buzzwords.
There is one good reason to hold Bitcoin. It takes too long to sell it. One of the many reasons why it will never be used in retail.
Pierre Poilievre talked about making Canada the blockchain capital of the world soon after he was elected Conservative Party leader. He doesn’t seem to have talked much about the idea lately, perhaps because of the FTX scandal and other crypto messes.
At least with tulips you get some nice flowers out of the deal.
And Trump is a serial scam artist. It’s a match made in the gutter.
“…never sell your bitcoin…” because you should never buy it in the first place. There are fundamentally only two uses: tax evasion and money laundering. Everything else is noise level.
Oh, joy. Hoard a currency so that it doesn’t circulate, which is kind of one of those things a currency is supposed to do, isn’t it? If you hold onto the currency, it’s not a currency, it’s a collector’s item. I’ve got my own collectables, but they have value to me beyond profit motive.
As for the power hungry hardware, it’s really disturbing that a lot of these are all about scaling up for diminishing returns instead of using the energy efficiently and getting more out of each processor cycle. Of course, that’s why picks and shovels are where the profit comes from in a gold rush.
I’d like AI that works smarter, not harder.
Certainly doesn’t seem to be doing wonders for nVidia’s stock price. It’s down 10% since yesterday’s open.
Why Bitcoin?
There are today around 23,000 cryptocurrencies.
If the USA is going to be the world’s superpower in cryptocurrencies, shouldn’t we control them all?
And, shouldn’t the USA issue their own cryptocurrencies?
If anyone can make up and issue a cryptocurrency, then the USA should be able to do so as well.
If we don’t then countries like China, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon will.
I sort of understand cryptocurrencies but then again, I don’t.
What good are they? How are they useful?
AFAIK, cryptocurrencies are useful for tax evasion, money laundering, and moving money around the world undetected.
They are also useful for buying and selling illegal drugs and illegal weapons.
None of that is of any interest to me whatsoever. I lead a boring life.
I don’t need or want a kilo of fentanyl or a machine gun.
That’s one of the fun things. Crypto currency ceases being scarce if anyone can invent and mint their own with enough processors.
Remember a cartoon called Recess about a bunch of school kids who discover capitalism in one episode, using popular “monstickers” as currency to pay for use of playground equipment. Main kid goes villainous tycoon and establishes a monopoly, owning the vast majority of the monstickers. Eventually, he decides to take a break from tycooning and go on a slide. “Sorry, your monstickers are no good here. We only take Japanese Robot stickers.”
If one entity hoards a currency, it can easily become worthless.
Pie-in-the-sky dream/speculation: Someone invents energon for easy storage and transfer of raw energy to use as currency. I suspect that would fix a lot of perverse capitalist incentives going on right now. “But is this output worth the all the joules of energy we invest in it?”
Most Cryptos cannot even do the “moving money around undetected” job well. https://arstechnica.com/features/2024/01/how-a-27-year-old-busted-the-myth-of-bitcoins-anonymity/5/
Because it’s a public ledger of every transaction, and is readable by anyone online.
Bitcoin has also become notoriously centralized (due to concentration is computing power caused by power of scale) so “decentralized” is bust.
But again, it is known that most crypto bros are living in their imaginary land waiting to be harvested by scammers.
I just had thought of a “Butlerian Jihad”, not because the machines are shooting at the humans, but because they’re otherwise rendering the planet uninhabitable. I’m unable to condense the sentiment into something as pithy as “Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”. All that processing power for sweet fuck all.
The metaphor of “Silicon Valley” is probably not accurate. It’s yet another example of the us/them thing that’s going around so much. He’s pandering to a specific group of people, such as Thiel and Andreesen, who are pro crypto. They are not “Silicon Valley”. Not everyone living in Silicon Valley is gungho on crypto, and certainly not gungho Trump.
By the way, I saw the video where Trump was urging his “lovely Christians” to vote so they don’t have to vote in the future because he’ll fix things. I swear he said in that rant the words “I’m not a Christian” and that’s what the subtitles showed. Promptly we both misheard what he said but I heard it twice.
The USA will be so screwed!!! If we elect Trump.
Today the former guy Trump said once again that he will set up a xian theocracy and end the US democracy.
If he is elected again, I believe him.
The USA will never have another vote for president.
Because the USA will cease to exist.
I doubt the West coast and NE will tolerate living under a fundie theocracy by a small minority of the population. They will just de factor leave. The white fundies only make up 14% of the US population and their best friends, the Trad catholics are 5.6% of the population. So 20% of the population will rule us. Not for very long IMO.
.
The south and midwest might though. They might not even notice much difference.
raven @ #15 — I wonder if the 14% white fundies will let the 5.6% Trad catholics have much say…and there’s the rub. Protestants and Catholics have been at war for centuries. That was one of the foundational aspect of the original colonization. And even among Protestants there are many factions that earnestly disagree. I have a feeling that once they get their theocracy it will break down as they bicker over whose version is in charge.
Right now the white fundies and the Trad Catholics are best buddies.
Project 2025 is authored by a Catholic guy with links to Opus Dei.
In fact, a lot of Trad Catholics are converts from fundie churches.
Vance is a convert.
There isn’t much difference between fundie Protestants and fundie Catholics these days.
As to what happens if they gain a lot of power in the next Trump maladministration, who knows? Both are broken systems centered around acquiring power and money.
Strangely enough, a lot of other xians will oppose them, the Mainstream, moderate Catholics etc..
Here is an example of Catholic xian nationalism from a xian source.
You can’t tell a fundie Protestant from a fundie Catholic.
It’s just right wingnut politics with a cross stuck on for show.
The cross isn’t important any more.
And yeah, the notorious Project 2025 plans for destroying the USA and setting up a dictatorship is a Trad Catholic document.
Regarding general awfulness:
“Trump Hosted A Party With Epstein And 28 Girls”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hEjB5H-MVBw
This information has been around since 2019 but no one saw fit to draw attention to it.
I’ve read a lot of people claiming that EVs will take up all of our electricity and more. But I haven’t read anything comparing their guesses with AI electricity consumption.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/31/universities-australia-cheating-issues-ai-chatgpt
The times, they are a-changin’.
Rachel Maddow had a segment on her show last night about how many times trump has flipped 180° on something right after he’s met with a billionaire who’s invested in that thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGaItaXE7e8&list=PLDIVi-vBsOEyETRGoRP9y8zhyu6bHl6iK&index=1
@14. robro :
I heard that too and was surprised more wasn’t made of it.It did sound like Trump was aying “Ï’m not a Christian” to me.
The latest headline.
They really are just babbling now, tossing mud against the wall and hoping something sticks.
It is well known that VP Kamala Harris is married to a Jewish guy. Her stepchildren are also Jewish.
Everyone always forgets the third use of crypto – paying sex workers, or certain websites that right wing Christian fanatics hate, in something other than straight cash, since Banks almost exclusively pander to the bigots and won’t transact credit transactions, or disperse funds, if they find out it involves things that those bigots disapprove of. But, this is more of a symptom of such things being deemed, by said bigots, to be the same thing as money laundering and shady money manipulation (and what ever crime may be going on behind it), than because anyone actually wants to f-ing use it.
The first rule of Ponzi schemes is that they fall apart when people start selling and there isn’t a inflow of new money to fund the sales, thus the first rule of crypto.
It is getting more difficult for anyone in government with any common sense to hold this country together. With tRUMP, xtian terrorists, the elongated muskrat, mark fuckerberg, project 2025, etc. it’s as if main stream media (sucks) is cheerleading for the mutant crazies to burn it all down. The imbeciles here in scarizona are pushing for more huge ‘data centers. They don’t seem to care that there isn’t enough electricity or water as it is.
Help! It seems that there is nowhere can we find that is a refuge from all this violent insanity.
@26 Except, crypto is worse, because its #1 reason for needing more and more new vic.. uh, I mean “investors” is that the effective cost of paying the electric bill, to run the servers, keeps outpacing the amount of money the actual service produces. The equivalent would be if some scammer actually built multiple theme parks, but never installed any rides in them, but got fools to both a) buy pre-opening tickets, and b) invest increasing amounts to build even more of them. Pretty soon you have a theme park in every town, in every country, none of which actually have anything but landscaping and walk ways, still no rides, and the “owner” of them have inexplicably disappeared with $20 billion dollars of the investment, and the cost of “upgrading” to actually make any of it useful is another $40 billion, which the “business” doesn’t have, because all of its money either went into the pocket of the owner, who has gone missing, or into watering plants, paying lighting bills, hiring security guards to keep people from damaging the unused parks, and possibly taxes (unless part of the scam was something like the Ark Park pulled).
Basically, they are all losing money, to the point that the semi-legit ones are actually, ironically, looking to ditch the block chain crypto part of crypto, move to something closer to what our own freaking bank uses, and deploying “trust based” systems (kind of like your bank asking you the prove your identity to withdraw money from it). So.. the ones using the original concept are all cons, and the ones trying to come of with a solution are… becoming banks, just without government regulation, or guarantee of assets. Its all quite.. insane.
One Bitcoin is worth A$99,137.27 as I write this.
Its ledger began on 3 January 2009. 15 years ago.
(Quite the long-lasting Ponzi scheme, no?)
—
In passing, https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-launch-international-payments-crypto-before-end-2024-2024-07-30/
Basically Russia has tanked its own coinage, and the sanctions are biting.
So they are gonna try to adopt Bitcoin and other crypto.
Hadn’t been hearing about the ones trying to ditch the blockchain. Well, at least they’re solving one problem that was already solved. Wonder what other existing solutions they’ll reinvent.
Well, they are still kind of planning to use the blockchain part, just ditching the super heavy, insane, crypto part. So, kind of a misstatement there on my part. But, this was a while back that I heard discussion on it, so maybe since then the crazies have decided that they can somehow, kind of like with the AI craze, “magically fix the problems, once we have enough computing power”. lol