Posts by BOFH in Training 436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 May 2020
Assuming the initial start up cost to get the AI accelerators / GPUs / servers / racks / buildings / etc are all the same, which is the biggest ongoing running cost?
Is it man power? power? something else?
Depending on what it is, we can probably figure out which place has the lowest cost to run such DCs.
As they say, follow the money.
Am surprised companies like MikroTik (which also has manufacturing in europe) isn't whitelisted.
According to the BBC, the router companies will also have to submit a plan to bring manufacturing to the US to be whitelisted.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74787w149zo
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Any new router made outside the US will now need to be approved by the FCC before it can be imported, marketed, or sold in the country.
In order to get that approval, companies manufacturing routers outside the US must apply for conditional approval in a process that will require the disclosure of the firm's foreign investors or influence, as well as a plan to bring the manufacturing of the routers to the US.
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I guess that means there is a very good chance that many brands will just "disappear" from sale, if they need to spend a bunch of money to at least act like they are setting up a factory for the next 2.5 years.
I was working in a large computer lab with about 200 people and probably double the number of PCs / servers many years ago.
When codered/nimda happened, there was a lockdown on all sorts of activities that can be done from those systems.
Since I was one of the more technical people around, I was asked for ideas on how to monitor / control online access. I suggested squid proxy and everything was directed thru that, with weekly logs being checked by managment, with certain highly acessed entertainment related sites blocked.
Everyone was informed prior to the proxy being put up and I dont recall any porn related sites being visited during the proxy days.
I did find a folder of porn during some work related scans of the company network, which the higher ups resolved (in whatever means they did - I don't know who was running the PC that was found with the open share of porn).
Lets just say that there were interesting things going on those days.
I got a nice NAS and other resources within my LAN, so I benefit alot whenever I upgrade my LAN.
The average person does not have LAN resources (skill set to maintain, expense, etc). Actually in my circle, there is only 1 other person with even a NAS, and he got it after seeing mine (although he got something with lesser capability, but suits him fine).
From what I have seen, most people have nothing on their LAN which is not a desktop, laptop or a mobile device. A few depend on cloud storage(with bottleneck at the WAN connection, most dont use wired LAN at all - WIFI not being an issue since the WAN is alot slower then whatever wifi connection they are getting), even fewer have a removal drive as a backup device.
I think the average person will probably benefit from a faster WAN connection, considering they are more likely to use cloud stuff, and wifi is usually not the issue for them. 5Ghz connections probably help since they dont leak out enough to interfere much with others.
Wifi has stopped being a bottleneck to the internet for many people since 802.11n (around year 2009) was out. I think 802.11n is supposedly capable of about 500mbps.
I know many people who are barely on 100mbps net connection (even that is asymmetric). I know many people who are behind CGNAT, with not even an IPV6 as a public IP.
I think the slowest I have seen recently during my travels is 10mbps (on a good day).
Not everyone has access to decent 5G(or even 4G) to use that for home internet access.
So if anyone mentions computing resources / storage / anything that needs a decent connection to the internet, I assume they are clueless. Not everyone has a cheap 1gbps or 10 gbps connection (am lucky in that sense), but I think majority are not.
" everyone will have massive amounts of compute and storage available to them over the network" ?
So, does that mean that internet speed will get an upgrade?
What's the use of everyone getting "massive compute / storage" over the network when your connection to the internet which holds those resources is limited?
Unless he is thinking everyone has that in the local LAN?
On another note, I am on 1gbps symmetric fibre connection, and it costs me less than USD 35 to get a 10gbps symmetric connection (just that I don't feel the need to spend an extra 10 bucks a month when the 1gbps works fine for me to push many TB a month). If the average person can't access such speeds cheaply, it kind of defeats the purpose of WAN based resources.
Just a few months ago, there was over 100% tariffs on China, and China basically told trump to get lost.
I dont think he threatening 200% tariffs is going to rattle China all that much. And as I understand, when the high tariffs were imposed on China, it actually united China population somewhat in telling US to get lost.
China holds all the strong cards and they know it.
Trump just said some new stuff about India and Russia :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/07/31/trump-lashes-out-at-india-and-russias-dead-economies-and--responds-to-medvedevs-war-threat/
“I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”
And there are sanctions on some India companies cos of oil trade with Iran.
Sounds like negotiations are over and Trump wants India to join Russia (and China, even if India has problems with China).
Use that offer letter as a selling point when you create a startup.
If Mark is valuing him//her at 10m a year, whatever the startup is creating must be worth alot more. Or at least tell that to investors.
And you will be owning / running a unicorn in a year or two. Sell your share for lots of money, retire, do whatever you want.
lol
The problem is, did Trump's statement means that the government is cancelling the contracts or is it considered a "joke" as some of his statements have been explained away.
If it's considered as the leader of the executive branch issueing a cancellation, SpaceX is presumably in the clear.
Elon may not be able to take SpaceX out of the country, but you can bet that he has alot of sensitive info on SpaceX, from tech specs to manufacturing to pretty much everything else.
Am sure alot of other nations will be happy to have him "migrate over' and create a SpaceX 2.0 - maybe even fund him. Even if thats just China or Russia.
With the statement from TACO king about cancelling Elons government contract and Elon's response about shutting down Dragon spacecraft, who needs who more now?
I assume one can afford a lose of a few billions in revenue.
Can the country afford the lose of it's only crewed space transport?
Some of the sanctions on China are due to political reasons (so that they don't catch up with Western companies in terms of tech / dont take market share from western companies).
Only way to get those sanctions removed is if China agrees to never compete aggressively in whatever field that the US decides that China should not compete in.
Doubt China will agree to that. And if it's a matter of not respecting US IP, etc - don't forget that in the older days, US did not respect European IP, so they used to just do whatever they needed to do to catch up with European powers.
Sounds like China is just following US playbook.
As title says, US is pushing China to innovate by putting various restrictions on them.
There is a decent chance that with all the engineering resources they have over there, they may figure out a better way of doing AI/chips/whatever else they are being restricted on.
In whatever thing they innovate, they will presumably have first mover advantage.
Nvidia is also selling TSMC produced products and is making huge profits.
AMD is also selling TSMC produced products and is making nice profits.
Only difference : Different types of chips for different purposes from whatever intel is selling (Nvidia GPUs vs Intel CPUs) or better designs (AMD CPUs vs Intel CPUs).
I know there is some overlap with both Nvidia / AMD and Intel doing GPUs as well, but Intel is such a small player that I don't think I should count it.
OS may be the best option, cos if someone buys Chrome, they need to make money from it. That means paying for Chrome / updates / everything.
Of cos if going OS, there is always Firefox ..... no idea if Mozilla can combine both browsers together into the one.
Google and MS and whoever can always customise the OS Chrome. Or create their own plugins to the OS Chrome.
Apple, AMD, NVidia, TI, etc will be looking for the cheapest options which meet their quality / legal requirements.
That means I doubt they will be lining up to be big customers in a US based fab, unless they are forced to use US based fabs. Maybe US defence industry will use them due to legal requirements. Can't think of many other companies which has that as a requirement.
I have seen that happen with a small client some years ago. I was on site when another contractor came to do some pest control.
His invoice said X if paid within 30 days, and X - I think 3% if paid immediately. That client immediately paid in cash. And this is a client who has a history of holding invoices unpaid for as long as possible before payment.
Not sure if the original invoices are inflated, but it was something interesting to observe.
I recall reading something years ago about Palantir doing something like that - thru a mobile app.
Someone demo'ed something where they take a pic of a random person and got all sort of details within seconds.
At least that was what I recall reading. If they could do it years ago, as a company, it will not take much for a couple of people to do something similar - with all the other services you can use to connect everything together.
Advantage of FOSS is that, if you are not paying / paying much less licence fees, you can always pay for a couple of devs to make whatever changes / features / updates you need. And if you are a large org, you will probably come out ahead financially.
I think the value to society has dropped as well.
After all there are possibly millions of people from the above mentioned society who are concerned if their computers have a degraded CPU.
Oh yeah, society also includes the 1000s of Intel staff who were laid off. Even if the share price went up after a head count reduction (as it happens in some companies - but not in this case), it will probably be a net negative to society, since there will be 1000s of newly unemployed people due to Intel. Some will get new jobs. Some will have savings. And some will collect unemployment benefits (which are paid for by society via taxes and other means).
Still, I have to give Cloudflare credit for finding a way to ride the AI hype train without all the hassle of building/ training models etc. Full marks for crafty thinking, maybe next time do it without stealing visitor data. ------ they claim to be using AI to detect these AI scrappers. So presumably they have build models and trained them.
Indonesia is hardly a super power when it comes to war fighting abilities.
Not to mention even US can't seem to do much when they get caught with ransomware troubles from bad actors linked to other governments.
And most of the nations linked to such bad actors are Russia (which has nukes although a crap conventional warfare capability), China (which also has nukes and unknown conventional fighting abilities) and North Korea (which also has nukes and does not seem to give a damn about what others think), who hardly fear Indonesia in the first place.
