How do you figure that? And if it exceeds what we can generate, a very big number is as unsatisfiable as infinity

Dyson spheres are science fiction. Science fiction is fiction.

That’s all fine as long as the market covers all externalities. It doesn’t

Building data centers sounds like a good bet to make some money in the next decade or so.

That’s not the same as conceding that “everyone should get as much compute as they demand”.

There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)

Training is quite expensive and it does look likely that the American providers have been doing that at a loss.

In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in, and 140W is not exactly a huge amount of power (roughly 50¢ per day if you run it 24/7 at 100% load, which it is very unlikely you will).

I get what you're saying, but I'm guessing that people asking how to pee is a drop in the bucket compared to the agentic loops being called to rename some variables across a project.

The fact is, you wouldn’t be okay with the real prices as well. All indications point to opus not being subsidised but having huge margins.

GLM 5.2 is not subsidised - it is an Opus tier model that costs a small fraction. I doubt you would be okay and all problems would suddenly vanish.

That triples the cost of the data centre per unit of compute.

... Do you understand feedback loops? Yes? Interconnected climate systems where one system hits a threshold and accelerates change in one direction which causes another system to hit a threshold faster causing a cascade of systems to fall over until all the thresholds have been reached? Why are you showing me a document about the economic impact of "current" carbon levels applied linearly as if this system grows predicably and linearly and the economy and future technology grow as some linear function of those inputs? Do you not even understand the basic premise that the people you're criticizing operate from? If not, why are you talking about this like you know anything about it?

https://iiasa.ac.at/news/feb-2026/course-correction-needed-q...

Oh I wasn't talking about humans. I should probably have pointed that out. There's some scenarios like catastrophic crop failure and so on that might lead to that, but frankly I doubt it.

I was referring more to everything else. Corals, certain insects, polar bears, salamanders and so on. With some quick googling it appears that the "Bramble Cay Melomys" is the first species so far to be declared extinct because of climate change, but the number that seems to be thrown around is that an average of 18% of terrestrial life will be critically endangered by 2100 in a scenario with 2 degrees warming. I can't be bothered with figuring out what degree of academic consensus there is around that number, but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's at least some kind of consensus about "more than 1%".

Fair point! I meant "vastly more painful change than already is happening".

Yes.

And while the populist right love importing incompatible cultures en mass, that will have to stop.

I think I'm much more compatible with my colleagues from the said countries, who are actually nice people, than I am with the rabid fascists having this kind of a take.

Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.

> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.

The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.

> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is

We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.

Air conditioning is increasingly necessary in Europe.

> What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before?

It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues.

What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.

Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.

These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.

> Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?

I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.

The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.

The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.

I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.

The queue is no longer a year long here once they started charging those study fees.