That's fair, I wasn't aiming that at you specifically but at the general atmosphere of All data centres are bad and must be stopped, as is visible in the headline image of the article and the other comments in this thread.

We should not extend them any trust beyond what we have ironclad control over.

I agree, but that shouldn't imply building none. I don't want us to be reliant on using data centres in the USA or China who can then use the prospect of cutting that off as leverage. I have no idea how much is reasonable but I am confident it is more than 0 and less than 9GW.

As the article points out, most of that is companies trying it on with no real intention of following through. the current total data centre capacity in the UK is ~2GW with another 0.8GW under construction. There's no realistic prospect of 9GW of them being built in Scotland.

Also the argument that "too much of them would be bad" applies to almost everything, and isn't a reason to allow none of them, regulation exists and should be used!

I agree that the ideal usage of renewable energy is to decarbonise existing things, however we are already at the point where renewable energy companies are being paid to stop producing energy as it has nowhere to go. Millions of pounds are spent doing this most months.

Now the best use of public money is in making sure that energy goes into decarbonisation projects and grid upgrades, no argument there. But if private industry wants to invest in using renewable energy that would otherwise go to waste and result in the government hading out money to other private investors to not create energy then I think that's a good thing.

The point about empty space is that it is easy to put the data centre's away from where people live, their land usage footprint is tiny. The UK could build data centres for the entire world and the amount of land used would be less than the grouse shooting estates, we should focus on those and grazing land to rewild.

Scotland has an abundance of renewable energy and empty space though, we have so much that the grid often is overcapacity to send it south where it is needed. As long as there is sufficient regulation making sure that they use that renewable power and don't start building gas turbines or dump them 20m from where people live it seems like they would be a benefit, especially if they are taxed appropriately.

I think a sensible place for this would be the base models, those are the ones that are trained on the entire internet in order to get a good working model that "understands" things. Then leave the fine tunes on those base model commons as available for companies and organisations to bring their own value to.

“Children are controllable because of the practice of keeping them unproductive and out of the economic mainstream of society.”

— Farson, Birthrights, ch. 10 (adapted)

Cool, I too think that under market utilization of child labour is a major holdback on their liberty. Not like working people had to fight tooth and nail to end child labour and win universal schooling or anything.

The problem with that is that the person who slops out 50 broken shitty games is not going to disclose that they used AI, and the one man band who put genuine craft into their game but used a little bit of AI in the coding or textures will disclose it, so you have the opposite of what you want from the AI filter.

random person says thing on twitter is not worthy of a post

99 times out of 100 a well used open source program written in any language is going to be more secure than something vibe coded in rust. Sure you wont get memory bugs (probably, if you're just vibing it how do you know its not using unsafe rust?), but it is vastly more likely to just contain regular logic bugs.

I dont understand the reasoning behind people seem to think prices for components will climb for ever and ever without generating more supply. if RAM becomes obscenely profitable for long enough others will get in on the act and produce their own to get some of those profits. The only reason people arent yet is that everyone thinks there is a bubble pop coming down the pipe (me included).

so the two options are:

• Bubble pops-demand from hyperscalers vanishes, prices collapse

• Bubble doesn't pop, more supply comes online due to pent up demand, prices stabilize then come down over time

Neither involve cyberpunk dystopias of cackling supervillians monopolizing PCs

The only bit that seems controversial is the praising of the Confucian institutes, that is suspect. But "Brexit was a hindrance", "win-win trade is good" and "Chinese students in the UK is good actually" are hardly controversial points for anyone who isn't an outright nutter.