We need more startups that are creating durable business that employ a lot of people. Unicorns mostly blow up, and the few that succeed typically are not big or stable employers. How about funding more “lifestyle” companies that aspire to be in business for the long haul, not hunting for the exit on day one.
Obviously this is one of many diverse factors at work - but potential YC founders: the comments section here suggests that there is a lot of great human talent available in the market today.
Serious question. Is there any technology to capture the excess thermal energy from data centers and run some of it back into the grid? Or drive some kind of desalination process? Or do anything else useful with this “surplus” heat energy?
Helsinki has many DCs connected to the district heating network, but it isn't realistic in places that don't have an existing network as creating one in the first place is a huge political/nimby issue. Amsterdam has been trying and failing for years.
Fundamentally, a limit on doing it at scale is that it for efficiency it requires the heat to be consumed near the production - and the bulk of large power intense data centres are not located in the midst of high density residential neighbourhoods with a demand for heat.
If you're going to be doing cogeneration on-site, it can be worth considering a Combined Heating, Cooling, and Power system - but the benefits tend to be fairly marginal.
In the future, there's a possibility of extending the "lights out datacentre" concept, and going fully automated. If you don't need to accommodate humans, you can run much higher temperature gradients.
With a gradient of around 200 K, for instance, you might expect to recover somewhere between 30-35% of your total energy input.
The UK actually ought to be a good choice for an experiment along those lines, given its long history with gas-cooled nuclear systems - sadly, the engineers involved have mostly all retired by now...
Yes, direct immersion cooling coupled with an organic rankine cycle could do this. But you won't recover much electricity because of the relatively low temperature of the heat source- 60 to 70 deg c dielectric fluid.
Not really, because you're pumping it against the thermal gradient to start with. Low temperature difference heat is one of the more worthless things in the universe.
The only way you could make this viable would be to change silicon processes to those capable of running at significantly over 100C. This incurs a big efficiency penalty, but then you can start boiling water directly off the die and letting the steam move itself, perhaps to some sort of Stirling engine condenser cycle, with a lot less pumping losses.
The budget is the policy, stripped of rhetoric. What any government spends money on IS a full and complete expression of its priorities. The rest is circus.
What increased and decreased in the most recent budget bill? That is the full and complete story.
If no $$ for open source or open weight model development, then that is not a policy priority, despite any nice words to the contrary.
That depends on the size of the effect you’re trying to measure. If cursor provides a 5x, 10x, or 100x productivity boost as many people are claiming, you’d expect to see that in a sample size of 16 unless there’s something seriously wrong with your sample selection.
If you are looking for a 0.1% increase in productivity, then 16 is too small.
Well it depends on the variance of the random variable itself. You're right that with big, obvious effects, a larger n is less "necessary". I could see individuals having very different "productivities", especially when the idea is flattened down to completion time.
“A quarter of the participants saw increased performance, 3/4 saw reduced performance.” So I think any conclusions drawn on these 16 people doesn’t signify much one way or the other. Cool paper but how is this anything other than a null finding?
They show a 95% CI excluding zero in Figure 1. By the usual standards of social science, that's not a null finding. They give their methodology in Appendix D.
For intuition on why it's insufficient to consider N alone, I assume e.g. that you'd greatly increase your belief that a coin was unfair long before 16 consecutive heads--as already noted, the size of the effect also matters. That relationship isn't intuitive in general, and attempts to replace the math with feelings tend to fail.
It’s like some Soviet-style retailer where everyone is supposed to shop for everything. It’s about as contrary to competitive capitalism as a company can be. I signed off two years ago and haven’t missed it for a minute - though you should make your own decisions, as with everything.
Obviously this is one of many diverse factors at work - but potential YC founders: the comments section here suggests that there is a lot of great human talent available in the market today.
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