- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Canals and trains are still the two of the most important parts of the goods transport network. It’s not a good analogy, cities who finished the canals and trains did better.
So, not finishing much-hyped projects is a species thing and not just a personal flaw of mine?
Good to know, I think?
We did finish the railways. We just ripped them out when we built the interstates
It’s a bit like here in the UK. There used to be a lot more rail tracks but got removed, presumably when cars because common and lorries were capable of carrying large amounts of goods.
It’s a huge shame because a lot of places which were connected no longer are. I would love to be able to hop on a train and get to smaller rural areas rather than large towns and cities on a route which heads to London and back.
There is some success though, if anybody is interested then look at Swanage railway. They managed to get everything undone and reconnect to the national network and is now a hotspot for old steam engines.
Well you Britishers gave us Indians a huge ass railway network and we have been expanding it ever since. Only if our politicians and bureaucrats were decent, we would have added higher speed trains and bullets trains to it as well instead of having shitty airlines and dangerous bus rides.
Yeah, we also fail on large projects like HS rail too.
Totally random and fun fact- Chinatown (the hard boiled detective movie) had a sequel written with the troubled detective investigating a dirty judge who was paid off by the car companies to allow them to buy up and tear out the trolly system in LA in favor of their highway designs. The judge had his own possy who acted as enforcers for the car company as they pushed their scheme to force the colored section of town to sell their land and make way for the highways.
The sequel didn’t happen, but the script was rewritten into what we now know as Who Framed Rodger Rabbit?. If you go back and rewatch it knowing that, it all makes so much more sense. The cartoon facade is just the face for the dirty truth of what happened in America in the 1950’s, but add in the happy ending of stopping the dirty judge and saving the ‘colored’ toon town.
I just saw a YouTube video talking about how Who Framed Roger Rabbit and toon Town was an analogy of colored areas. Man, it is fucked how racist we are that we couldn’t even talk openly about it less than a lifetime ago.
I really should do something with that esp32.
I live right near a canal that was completed in 1832, and it was essential and a massive success.
Many people know the story of Canada (or Britain and its North American colonists) burning down the White House. It wasn’t just the White House though, it was a bunch of public buildings in Washington including the White House, the Capitol and the Washington Navy Yard. What people don’t know is that this was in retaliation for the Americans burning and looting York (today’s Toronto), which was at that point a small town and the capital of the province of Upper Canada. The Americans broke the laws of war when they did that, so there was a temptation to do the same to them in Washington, but cooler heads prevailed and only the public buildings were burned.
After the war of 1812 ended, the British realized how vulnerable Canada was to the Americans. In particular, the only way to ship things from Montreal to the strategically important towns to the west (Kingston, York, etc.) was down the Saint Lawrence seaway, and the Americans controlled the lower bank of that route. As a result, the British decided to build the Rideau Canal, so goods could be shipped from Montreal to Kingston (and then from there onto the Great Lakes) while avoiding the choke points on the St. Lawrence.
The Canal was finished in 1832 and it was a huge success. Not only did it protect Canadian shipping from a possible US attack, it also avoided all the rapids, etc. on the St. Lawrence. For a few decades it was the main way to move goods and people west, allowing for areas to the west of Montreal to be settled. Canada’s capital, Ottawa, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Rideau Canal. Kingston, at the mouth of the Canal gained a lot of economic significance because of the Canal and was a unified Canada’s capital from 1841 to 1844. And Toronto was settled by people moving through the Canal, it nearly doubled in size between 1832 and 1834.
By the late 1850s, a railway was built between Bytowne / Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, and this railway was used instead of the canal. But, the demand might not have existed for the railway if people hadn’t been able to move west thanks to the canal.
It may be that people saw the success of that canal, and of other important canals, and that there was an overbuilding as a result of that. And, that when the railways came there was a more effective way of doing some of the same things. But, canals were incredibly important for a few decades and shape the world we live in now. So, how dare you compare them to AI datacentres, you jerk.
And despite the canal not being heavily used for shipping anymore, it can provide lots of community value for water sports and winter skating. I don’t know that obsolete data centres will bring us this degree of recreation
Surgeon General RFK suggests kids get a minimum of 5 hours a day climbing on old server racks in abandoned facilities
My closest city is actually filled with 100+ year old buildings that have old pictures of the building in various points in history. Someone went through a lot of trouble about a decade ago to get everyone on board with displaying historical stuff.
There’s a road that follows one of the old canals, and a tunnel still technically accessible beneath the main downtown road where deliveries were hauled in order to keep the road up top for PEOPLE to walk on, and carriages were rare until the 1900s.
Then everything changed in the early-mid 1900s and no hint of canals even exists today in the city, other than one road named “canal” and one named “water”. But without knowing the history, they’re just names.
cumberland md?
Moving Goods by water is the most economical way to move them, trains are next, trucks are last, I mean after like wagons and shit. We do things the inefficient way because vested interests make money doing it that way. Good luck trying to be more efficient. It’s not going to fucking happen. Not with these fucking clowns in charge. Or the previous clowns that are supposed to be our clowns.
Existing water*
Diging canals is dangerous and expensive.
Depends if there’s malaria.
We have tech that can solve most of the dangers, except malaria.
We have drugs and plants that can be taken as a prophalactic against Malaria.
In fact, the colonists never could penetrate the tropic and subtropics well until they found out about quinine from the peruvian natives. They took it all the time to ward off the parasite.
Malaria can be treated with those same drugs an plants as well. Artemisia and Mexican Prickly Poppy both work.
Yeah, I meant we don’t have a vaccine.
And those prophylactics have a lot of negative side effect’s. We’re certainly better than before, but Malaria still kills a lot of people today
I know quinine has some side effects, not sure about mexican prickly poppy or artemisia, could look it up.
There is a malaria vaccine, it just isn’t that effective, I think there are more than one. 30% effective if I recall, and even then it might just have lessened the effects and not prevented the infection. I want to say Sanofi but I don’t recall.
As to the deaths, it really matters what strain of malaria, there are a lot, and also what they use to treat it. Because using drugs, the parasite gets immune to it, especially when they don’t use them in combination with another antimalarial to prevent resistance forming, which I believe is one reason some parts of Africa have up to half of kids with brain damage from this fucking parasite, (it breaks from liver into bloodstream and colonizes the brain and the body lights us with fever over 106 degrees, which is brain damage.)
But the plants that treat it, they produce several related drugs around 10% of alkaloids or active ingredient, then a dozen or more at 1% or so, 80% being the main compound. Ie quinine bark the main one is chloroquinine or whatever. Anyway, prevents resistance from forming like with just the isolated chloroquinine, of which malaria is mostly immune to now.
expensive
Never have I seen so many ships carrying goods in my life than on the ChangJiang, when I lived in Wuhan.
Absolutely mind-blowing. A line of ships going both ways all the way to the horizon, all day, every day. I can’t even fathom the quantities being carried.We use trucks because of the “last mile” problem. Ships are the most efficient. But you ain’t pulling up a container ship to your front door. Same with trains. Both are great at moving a lot of stuff from one major point to another. But not good at all for local delivery.
Nor are they good for fast delivery of smaller amounts. And y’all want your Amazon shit delivered as fast as possible to your door. Or the arugula and potatoes you will buy at your local grocery for supper tonight. I’m not pumping up trucks, but they make that possible.
Logistics is tiered and integrated every last inch of the way.
But you ain’t pulling up a container ship to your front door
Not with that attitude
Yeah, the USPS won’t deliver my mail to my home, no rural free delivery for me. It cost me $160 a year to rent a mailbox in town plus the gas to get there and home again. And you expect a container ship to show up out here? UPS and FedEx only deliver here. God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.
When the internet dot com boom happened telecom infrastructure providers were putting more lines into the ground than there was demand for it since they predicted that growth would accelerate. But then the bubble burst and the overcapacity was not used for years aka dark fiber. But then growth picked up again and since there were already lines in the ground the growth on demand wasn’t putting pressure on supply and thus companies could buy bandwidth very cheaply. This will probably happen with all these datacenters when the bubble bursts. The big tech companies will retreat, scale down investments and leave these datacenters underutilized. Either they will sell their assets or rent it out cheaply and thus startups and smaller companies can use the overcapacity at a low cost.
The difference between dark fiber and datacenters is that datacenters need a company with enough revenue to maintain the structure. Most data centers are built like big box stores: super cheaply and not meant to last more than a couple of decades while in active use for their intended purpose. You know that Shopko or K-mart that shut down 5 years ago and is still empty? You see how quickly that building has started falling apart with no company large enough to own the space and maintain it? That’s what empty datacenters are going to be like.
Fiber on the other hand is just strands of glass with some material covering it to prevent light leaks and provide strength. As long as that glass is unbroken there is zero maintenance required whether the fiber is in use or not. Fiber also has theoretically infinite bandwidth (they’re currently working towards releasing 1.2 terrabit transceivers) and usually when fiber is run they run a big fat cable with dozens of not hundreds of strands of fiber so there’s dozens if not hundreds of times the amount of bandwidth of a single pair of strands (and lots of spare strands should a few be broken). Sure old fiber won’t be made with the tight tolerances that we have for fiber made today, so you might only get a few gigabit out of a single pair, but that’s still a ton of basically free bandwidth just sitting there as dark fiber that you can use to get off the ground then start running your own once you have some cashflow
That and most of the cost of the data centers revolve around the servers and support for those servers ie. Cooling, power racks ect. I’ve heard it can be cheaper to build a whole new building than bringing one, even currently operating one, up to new specs.
This is also extremely true!
Those AI servers are probably a discounted cost of around 3-5k per U (I’m probably low in this estimate but I have a really hard time believing they’re actually paying $20k+ per GPU), probably about 40U per rack is actually loaded with servers, so if we round the footprint of a server rack to 4 square feet (because I don’t feel like actually calculating it out right now) that’s about $30,000-50,000 per square foot.
I have a hard time imagining any kind of structure costing anywhere near 1 order of magnitude less than the cost per square foot of the servers
Those AI servers are probably a discounted cost of around 3-5k per U (I’m probably low in this estimate but I have a really hard time believing they’re actually paying $20k+ per GPU),
They’re arranging 72 Blackwell GPUs into each server rack, at around a price of $3 million, in a cabinet that is 2236mm x 600 mm x 1068mm. That’s approximately a 7 square foot footprint, so about $430,000 per square foot of server. There’s obviously a need for spacing between servers, but you’re basically underestimating by an order of magnitude.
Yeah my assumption is that the actual price paid for compute is a lot lower than what Nvidia puts in their press releases. It’s like Dell telling you your bog stand R760 will cost $30k on their website then you talk a rep and they mark it down to 5-10k in the first round of negotiations and if you buy enough of them they’ll knock a couple thousand more off the price.
I did however forget to factor in the cost of the server, but they’re so often just Supermicro white boxes in these datacenters and I’m just throwing out vague numbers based purely on my knowledge of roughly what things generally cost normally
I feel connectivity and efficiency was the aim initially rather than speed
Fiber is a super special case as just about the only infrastructure material that can sit in the ground for 20 years unmaintained, and then get connected to state of the art endpoints and work at modern standards.
You mean as long as I don’t get laid off and stay in good health for the next few years I won’t have to choose between food and RAM anymore? Sounds too good to be true.
choose between food and RAM
chips are chips
Interesting. Let me try one.
Step 1, atomic bomb is very powerful
Step 2, everyone rushes to build atomic bombs
Step 3, ???
Step 4, everyone can use cheap nuclear powerThe difference between dot-com boom and AI boom is that dot-com caused massive hiring at the beginning at ridiculous salaries, and dropped back to normal demand. It didn’t cause massive layoffs and force remaining workers to overwork.
Both managements are stupid. The dot-com management only lost their own money, but AI management made people leave their own country penniless in the worst case.
I mean, they’ll be great places to provide free housing to the homeless.
Err, no. ICE will probably just hollow them out and turn them into concentration camps.
Guess it depends which way the pendulum swings.
Oh, that’s great! Because when the DATA centres grind to a halt, you can send all the contruction workers and civil engineers to finish up your canal projects!
I mean those would be great for the sail boats we need to fix the climate crisis
In the 1800s canal boats were pulled by horses and people, sailing is pretty impractical for a straight narrow waterway
Honestly it’s kind of insane to hear that america doesn’t have many canals. European countries are full of canals which we absolutely needed in the 1800s-1900s to lug everything around the country. And they’re great, really classy.
Canals were really the technology of the 18th century. In 1827 the Baltimore and Ohio was opened as the first passenger and freight railroad and railroads started popping up extrenely rapidly, initially chartered by basically every city to be built along existing roads, then later built with their own right of way.
West of Appalachia, the land is relatively flat and the existing permanent native American settlements were sparse since their population had collapsed from disease brought by colonists centuries earlier. Railroads engaged in real estate speculation platting out and selling land in cities every 10-20 miles (because the early steam locomotives needed water every 10-20 miles, so might as well have them take on passengers/freight too!) and the federal government was practically paying railroads to take land to better establish the United States’ claim to the land. This rail building boom peaked around the 1860s around which point consolidation started reducing the quantity of rails as railroads consolidated and began building more focused trunks out of their existing right of way.
In fact, because of how the land grants were written most railroads built a single track in a straight line as fast as possible between their start and end, then once they’d secured the grant for connecting the two points by the extremely aggressive deadline, only then would they start actually rebuilding the track so that it would actually be usable for real rail service.
So in short, it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities, land grants by a new government trying to secure its land claims that it believed were it’s manifest destiny, plus innovations in steam engines to make steam locomotives truly viable right at the time when the flegling nation had its feet under it and was ready to start investing heavily into itself.
TL;DR Right place, right time, right legal environment and right technology
Also should acknowledge that the Great Lakes and Mississippi River (and major tributaries) made for efficient water shipping to a lot of the major cities of 19th century America. Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee all have ports.
And yeah, as you say, there just weren’t major settlements of European Americans anywhere else yet except in the plantation south. California wound up aggressively settled before transcontinental rail, but even there was largely along the coasts. Our national population remains pretty coastal alongside density in the great lakes and major tributaries of the Mississippi.
Hilariously I forgot about the natural waterways like the Mississippi despite working directly next to the Mississippi and spending my lunches at a park by it for a full year (and that was in a French colonial city from the 17th century)
it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities
Wait - did native Americans have cities of their own, within the territory of modern USA? Or do you just mean settlements in general
Native Americans did in fact have permanent cities, like notably Cahokia in what’s now Illinois. There were also some earlier colonial settlements along major waterways like the Mississippi. It’s likely there were quite a few permanent cities that were lost to time because they weren’t built with materials that would last centuries of abandonment. Notably there are thousands of effigy mounds dotted across the landscape of basically the entire Midwest, which is a very permanent sign of long term habitation or at least locations returned to frequently enough to be worth creating such a monument
The US has so many large natural waterways and so much coastal land that canals were largely unnecessary and only really dug where it would be beneficial to avoid detours and dangerous areas like rapids or shoals. Plus much of the early US economy (in the colonial era, at least) was focused on the export of exotic goods to Europe, so colonies that became major cities like NYC were often built at the mouth of a river where river barges could unload valuable goods like beaver pelts right next to boats getting ready to make their way across the Atlantic.
The Mississippi River, the second largest river in the US, is over 3,765 km long, stretching almost from Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Why build a canal when nature has already done the work for you?
Oh yes that’s true isn’t it, i remember hearing it several times before. That is the best case scenario anyway, probably less of a strain on environment or water supplies - and canals here go from one city to the next, which isn’t as feasible on a continental scale.
I wonder how the local climate would change with a national canal network… All that water evaporating will change some things.
Usually the canals use a rivers water and run alongside the river, so if a lot of them are at the point of evaporating we’re in much bigger trouble than you presuppose and the Earth will be in it’s death throes.
But also, i think more evaporation of water leads to more rain and then flooding, so it all balances out ultimately. Just not in a aay that benefits humans at all
I grew up on the Wabash/Erie canal. It was finished and brought a load of commerce to the region. This is not a post about data centers.
Also some nice bike paths today along the canals in NY
irony: its posted on threads :o
I’m just waiting for the cheap GPUs
Can’t happen soon enough
The GPUs from these data centers are virtually useless for end users. Even worse than the bitcoin ones, because at least a lot of bitcoin GPUs were consumer cards with a custom BIOS that could be reflashed. The ones in data centers are more dedicated l solutions as the companys building these data centers are much bigger.
The big question will be if Nvidia and AMD will survive the bubble burst.
You’re telling me their canals won’t help my swimming pool at home? But they both use water
Really curious how it’ll impact crypto mining
They’re at the bottom of the canals, obviously.
Man has an AI pfp though… Is he anti or pro?
or playing both sides
You can’t both sides this shit
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
So too, it seems, are those who don’t get more votes than those who do not learn from history
Interesting analogy. I’ve been pointing out the first synthesizer, built in 1897, which was so big that it took up the entire city block basement of a building. It worked, but it was so enormous that it was essentially useless. After a few decades of progress, the same instrument could be put into a suitcase, and carried around.
That how I see Data Centers. They are like that 1897 synthesizer - Sure, they work, but at what cost? They’re huge, resource guzzling, pollution spewing monstrosities. Perhaps in a few decades, all those problems will be solved, and we can have data centers that aren’t more destructive than productive.
Yeah, maybe some day they’ll figure out how to shrink artificial intelligence down to something the size of, say, a human brain.
They won’t, but it’s nice to dream.
And especially the ai for self-driving vehicles: that will never fit into something the size of a human brain
You are correct. That’s why self-driving vehicles, especially Tesla’s, but not only, are such utter shit at driving.
Shit Metro Vancouver has an amazing long deep river we only use a fraction of our waterfront of commerical use, it’s a joke.
