China is investing billions in both renewable energy and non-renewable energy for data centers.
"As they are located mostly in the east of the country, the data centre electricity supply in China today is dominated by coal with a near 70% share, followed by renewables with nearly 20%, nuclear close to 10% and natural gas accounting for the remainder. Between 2024 and 2030 coal remains the largest source of additional electricity for data centres, with annual generation increasing by nearly 90 TWh. Renewables, mostly solar PV and wind, add nearly 90 TWh over the same period, supported by an increase in the share of renewables in the grid electricity mix, provincial co-location mandates and policies to prioritise the construction of data centres in renewables-rich western China. After 2030 the introduction of SMRs significantly boosts the nuclear share of the data centre electricity mix. Between 2030 and 2035 the rise in renewables and nuclear pushes coal into decline. By 2035 both sources together make up nearly 60% of the data centre electricity supply in China."
Energy and AI
World Energy Outlook Special Report
International Energy Agency (IEA)
True. But most are in the east? The most expensive land? Near the coast? I have a hard time believing that. I think most are in the west, where energy land water is cheap and the climate cool. I have seen the datacenters in Guizhou with my own eyes and its insane. Now they are expanding to Inner-Mongolia and also in (sub tropical!) Guangdong specifically for AI datacenters.
There are plenty of places in the east where land and water are cheap enough that people use it for rice farming. (I have seen rice fields in Shanghai with my own eyes. There's lots of room.) Meanwhile, basic infrastructure in the west is lacking, including the electrical grid. That's also why energy is cheap there: it's difficult to get it to places where people would be willing to pay more.
Guangdong is on the eastern coast. Inner Mongolia isn't, but the main data center hub of Ulanqab was no doubt chosen for being relatively close to Beijing. Guizhou is the one example that's actually somewhat remote, but it's a small share of the total so far. Farther west, Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet, Qinghai and Xinjiang don't really feature at all in the datacenter business.
Ultimately, the benefits of proximity seem to be more important.
Boron contamination of graphite also slowed the Manhattan Project:
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Fermi writes that "The results of this experiment was [sic] somewhat discouraging" presumably because of the absorption of neutrons by some unknown impurity. So, in December 1940 Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister at National Carbon to discuss the possible existence of impurities in graphite. During this conversation it became clear that minute quantities of boron impurities were the source of the problem.
"
This is why the German's used heavy water instead of graphite as a neutron moderator, which made it much harder to build a reactor. Their early reactors consisted of concentric spheres of heavy water and uranium powder. This was an unfortunate combination, as uranium powder ignites on contact with water. Leaks caused explosions on two separate occasions [0].
In contrast, the first allied nuclear reactor was a literal pile of uranium and graphite on a squash court.
[0] The Bastard Brigade (great book on all of this)
Sounds like a good time travel story: the mission is to go back in time and plant a single uranium cube, to be found ~80 years hence, to convince people that the German bomb project was doomed so that– ahh, but let's not spoil it! :)
This is where AI kinda has a role. Built on all the sci fi tropes of years past. You can give it a seed and an ending and get it to write the evening’s entertainment.
Germans had already surrendered and the Japanese were going to surrender as Russians now were able to move their force against Japan before the nuclear bombs were used. They were used to test the bombs and make sure no such war happens again specially the 2nd Bomb on Nagasaki that was used a few days after they bombed Hiroshima.
The Japanese were aware of the US atomic bomb program and had correctly deduced that the US would be able to create a bomb by summer of 1945. They believed the US could only produce one such weapon every 3 months, and decided that getting nuked at that frequency was tolerable for some period, and they could still hold out for more favorable terms as the US would not want the war to drag on too much longer, and the Japanese had hope the still neutral Soviet Union would mediate that peace. It is worth noting that while the atomic bombs were extremely powerful compared to one bomb, they had spent years suffering strategic bombing that destroyed cities; from a tactical perspective the bomb didn't make much difference, losing 5 or 6 more cities wouldn't move the needle. What they were unaware of was that the US was also producing plutonium for nuclear weapons (the Japanese nuclear program was unaware of plutonium in general). When the second bomb came in 3 days instead of 3 months, they knew the situation was very different than what they had anticipated. In a way the US was sort of bluffing - it could make bombs faster than the Japanese thought, but it could not nearly keep up with the 3 day cadence. Combined with the Soviet Union's entry into the war a few hours earlier, the Japanese government realized they had to surrender, but still were not prepared to fully accept the Potsdam Declaration. Truman gave the order to drop a third bomb as soon as it was ready (which would have been August 19th). The decision to surrender unconditionally was only made after consulting with Filed Marshal Hata, whose headquarters had been in Hiroshima, who told the Big Six that he had no confidence in defeating an invasion. Japan communicated its intent to surrender on August 14th. In his surrender speech, Hirohito specifically cited the atomic bomb and more specifically the threat of its continued use as the reason for the surrender.
It's also worth noting that forcing Japan's rapid surrender also limited the amount of territory that the Soviet Union could conquer after their entry into the war. Despite the Soviet Union continuing to fight into September, they were not in a position to occupy Hokaido as they had intended. WW2 would have certainly come to an end at some point without the atomic bombings, but there may have been a North and South Japan at the end of it.
They certainly killed less people than the bombing that had already occurred - the destruction of Tokyo alone likely killed more people than either atomic bomb.
There's no real consensus in the alternative history conjecture space, and no way to resolve the theories floated, Gar Alperovitz (for one example) made the argument that
* that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
* that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
* that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
* and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
This is alternative history, not real history. Remember, there was an attempted coup even after the first bomb to prolong the war. The Japanese leadership at the time were very zealous verging on religious zeal. One of the things that got them to eventually give up was a captured US fighter pilot that (under threat of death) told the Japanese that the US had 100s of atomic bombs. This was a lie but he didn't know that and just was trying to get the insane intelligence agent to not cut his head off (literally). There were other factors too. The USSR invading Manchuria for example. Also the US was in the process of ringing the home islands with 50 fleet carriers (the big ones, 50kt displacement) which would have been able to bomb Japan at will. Even with all of this, there was a significant faction of Japanese leadership who wanted to fight on.
These claims are more about politics than anything. Its an attempt to retcon history to vilify the US. The Japanese had never been invaded and that was a huge point of pride. They were training the civilians for a guerrilla war. Just because you can find a person in the Japanese government who wanted to surrender at that point (and there were) doesn't mean that's the decision that would have been taken.
PS That 3rd point is especially specious...if it were true, no 2nd bomb would have been used.
PPS Stuff like this is why historians don't like nor will engage with hypotheticals or the alternative history folks. Its clearly politically motivated, not a good faith attempt to understand history.
This exactly. I don't know why people are posting "alternative history conjecture" as if it's fact.
We should remember further that after the second bomb was dropped AND the Soviet entry into the war AND the emperor specifically ordering them to surrender the militarists in the Japanese government still attempted to carry out a coup to stop the surrender and continue the war.
The second bomb is the one whose use is questionable. If Truman were to be tried for war crimes it would be for that. A surrender was in play. Truman wanted no conditions. I think another week of people dying from radiation poisoning would have brought people around anyway.
This theories all fall flat when Japan refused to surrender after the first bomb. As the other comment mentioned there was an attempted coup to keep the war going.
It took two bombs to get Japan to surrender. “A surrender is in play” means zilch.
> Its an attempt to retcon history to vilify the US.
An attempt to vilify ... the side that eagerly deployed nuclear weapons on civilian targets? I'm from the US and I'm not someone who is blind to pragmatism but your argument here just seems completely absurd to me. We clearly committed an atrocity with somewhere between minimal to no legitimate justification.
Then again, after seeing the adjacent comment about avoiding soviet involvement it occurs to me that perhaps we inadvertently did them a favor in a roundabout way. Japan probably would have lost a lot more than the kuril islands otherwise.
Where did you get the idea that the USA was “eager” to deploy the atomic bomb?
>Stimson wrote in his diary afterwards that after his briefing, Truman felt “the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us here and himself.” [1]
[1] “Memorandum of Conference with the President, August 8, 1945 at 10:45am,” in Stimson diary (8 August 1945), Henry Lewis Stimson Papers (MS 465), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
For starters, how many days did it take before we dropped the second one again? I don't think it matters what any of the participants wrote or said given the events that we know to have transpired. There were clearly many other paths available to take.
Easy to say 80 years later, not having any of the personal experience, and handwaving away first person accounts.
You can certainly choose to believe that the decision makers were eager to use nukes and didn’t consider other paths, but you have to acknowledge that opinion is coming entirely from your own intuition and intentionally excludes all contrary evidence.
It's literally in Truman's diary. [1] I mean I suppose he doesn't "literally" say 'I'm anxious to nuke the Japs', but he comes pretty close:
"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
And on top of this, the Japanese had been negotiating their surrender with the ostensibly neutral USSR hoping to get more favorable conditions with their assistance. And the US had been secretly intercepting these cables and knew all about it. [2] And on top of this the US had also already created another secret agreement with the USSR such that they would declare war on Japan on August 8th, which would end any hope at all for Japan. We nuked them on August 6th, and then again on the 9th.
Not quite. The main negotiator they were using in the Soviet Union was fully aware of the reality of what was happening, long before the nukes and Soviet declaration of war. He was suggesting unconditional surrender except with the promise of the continuity of the Emperor, which is exactly what they ended up going for.
The problem is that he did not, independently, have the authority to make such an offer. And in the mainland things were also confused. The Emperor was treated as a borderline divine figure, but that also meant he was mostly hands off except as a lost resort. He was pushing for surrender behind the scenes, but the war council was the one making the decisions of what would be offered, and they were completely divided. Half wanted to fight, and half wanted peace.
This division continued even after the nukes and Soviet invasion. What changed is they chose to allow the Emperor to make the final call, and he chose to surrender as he had been angling for for quite some time already. The nukes played little role in this decision. The pro-war Japanese correctly believed that we couldn't have many such weapons and were, in any case, prepared to fight to the last Japanese because they thought it'd be glorious. The thing that did change their mind was the Soviets entering the war meaning they not only no longer had any intermediary with with which to hope for more favorable terms, but also were now facing a massive invasion from the north as well.
The diary is full of revealing quotes like "Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
For some timeline the US had secretly arranged for Russia to declare war on Japan on August 8th. We nuked them first on August 6th, and then again on the 9th. The goal was to get them to surrender to the US before the Soviets made significant inroads in Japan.
Do you think what they reveal is the truth? Was the diary meant to be published and become "a source"? Was Truman informed about everything important going on in the US? About the reality (the truth) of the Manhattan Project? Did he even need to know? Wasn't it preferable for him to simply believe in order to play his role?
Just some questions to ponder as to the quality of this source and what can be deduced from it.
> the side that eagerly deployed nuclear weapons on civilian targets
No one was eager. This sort of lie destroys discussion. This site is only about discussion, so please don't keep trying to destroy the only thing the site is about.
This is so profoundly and comprehensively ignorant about pretty much everything about the pacific theater of WWII that it's hard to know where to even start. I would suggest you start reading about the conduct of the Imperial Japanese Army in China, Korea, Philippines, and pretty much everywhere else they invaded and occupied, much of it before the US even started to consider entering the war.
Such a convenient narrative. "Yeah, a shit ton of civilians who weren't vaporized died slow, agonizing deaths from radiation exposure, but believe you me, it's more humane than the alternative! They should be thankful!"
There is nothing humane in bombing with conventional explosives, or bombing with napalm, thermobaric weapons or nuclear bombing. Or biological or chemical weapons.
This is the kind of thing people say when they've never seen someone die over several days from burn injuries.
Plenty of the survivors of the nuclear bombings and the fire bombings writings went on to be published. You can read them yourselves but generally speaking the fire bombings were way, way, worse.
It's convenient, yes, but it's also true. The deaths in Japan had an invasion and ground conquest been necessary would have dwarfed anything they had yet seen. Just their deaths from starvation would have been horrific.
It was more humane, whether you like it or not. What if we had waited to learn our lesson until the Korean war, when the yield of the first atomic bomb dropped on people would have been measured in hundreds of kilotons instead of tens, and with a few hundred more bombs where that one came from?
Also, people who are ready to surrender don't need to be nuked twice.
“The question arose: what about the women and children? I decided to find a perfectly clear solution to this too. I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men — that is, to kill them or have them killed — while letting avengers in the shape of their children grow up for our sons and grandchildren.”
- Heinrich Himmler
“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.”
- Oliver Cromwell
“It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab.”
> people who are ready to surrender don't need to be nuked twice.
The question remains whether in fact Japan "needed" to be nuked even once - it's unknown whether the ongoing city by city destruction would have resolved WWII.
Further, did they "need" to be nuked a second time so quickly (within three days)? That second nuke was not to force a surrender (just as the first wasn't) - the two bombings were two live tests of two separate weapon designs untested in the field of war.
Sometime the profit made by the companies for inserting backdoors can be quantified:
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In 2013, The New York Times reported that documents in their possession but never released to the public "appear to confirm" that the backdoor was real, and had been deliberately inserted by the NSA as part of its Bullrun decryption program. In December 2013, a Reuters news article alleged that in 2004, before NIST standardized Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA paid RSA Security $10 million in a secret deal to use Dual_EC_DRBG as the default in the RSA BSAFE cryptography library, which resulted in RSA Security becoming the most important distributor of the insecure algorithm.
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People seem to be fine with it as long as their own team seems to be profiting from it - but for those of us who are not subject citizens of the NSA's government, it is a truly heinous state of affairs.
Even Peter Scholz is not always sure of correctness of extremely complicated mathematical statements and welcomes computer assistance in verification of his results.
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I spent much of 2019 obsessed with the proof of this theorem, almost getting crazy over it. In the end, we were able to get an argument pinned down on paper, but I think nobody else has dared to look at the details of this, and so I still have some small lingering doubts.
"
In a sense, mathematics is not very different from software engineering.
He is also a member of the association of human mathematicians.
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1. Members commit to not working with commercial AI companies by providing technical labor, mathematical knowledge, consultation, or publicity.
2. Members commit to not publishing mathematical texts (including papers, reviews, referee reports, lecture notes, teaching materials, and books) generated by AI models. Members only publish their own writing, as opposed to outputs of AI tools. We affirm that mathematical writing should have human authorship.
“
Are they publishing cryptographic proof they never used AI? They should request the AI companies that their IP addresses, etc blacklisted and hard banned from AI services and present some kind of verifiable cryptographic proof they submitted to such a ban.
Or, maybe, they assume their peers within the organization are operating in good faith because they're not drawn from morally bankrupt communities like Silicon Valley.
How would you know? Its easy to also accidentally use AI. They are mathematicians, they know mathematics demands proofs. If they pledge they shall not use AI, they should provide cryptographic proof otherwise the statement is considered untrue.
Why do you use cryptography then? Why don't you trust your friends to be what they are? Why do you require records of your bank account, why can't you trust both sides to just keep their word?
I hate liars and hypocrites. If someone says they won't use AI, then they should be able to mathematically proved they didn't use AI. Otherwise they are a plain liar.
Just like small numbers appear in almost all places in mathematics. Small numbers are limited. Sometimes these may appear as coincidences. Similarly small elegant explanations are limited in numbers. As mathematical universe expands, only way to explain these additional results will be to have complex explanations.
That is true in theory, in practice the space of proofs that fit in thirty pages or so is so vast that I find it unlikely that we’ll exhaust it for the foreseeable future.
The biggest improvement in Windows 11 is increased locking of small users into Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft cloud services.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
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Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement.
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Don't forget having to shove all the "recommendation" and "suggestion" systems into it, too, so they could add random sponsored apps to your Start menu primed and ready to install as soon as you clicked on them at the same time they push more notifications at you to use more OneDrive.
> The biggest improvement in Windows 11 is increased locking of small users into Microsoft ecosystem and Microsoft cloud services.
It is true that it was a major scam by Microsoft against its users when they forced them to sign into an online Microsoft account during the Windows 11 installation. Especially the stubbornness and determination with which they patch all the loopholes in the installation process (just to make it impossible to install Windows without an online account) is remarkable.
But in all fairness:
* Microsoft practically stopped charging users for upgrades since Windows 10. Windows 10 could be installed for free from older Windows, and Windows 11 is again a free upgrade from Windows 10.
* How many macOS users actually press "Setup later" when setting up a new Mac and use macOS without an Apple account? I think there will be very few of them.
We probably should have done it earlier, but this move is what forced my company to setup an MDT and do things proper instead of setting up windows and re-keying the license key to ours on each new laptop we got
> There are a lot of good points being made in this thread. I have had a theory that it is in part related to the funding available for lab equipment and computers. During the latter half of the 20th century, in Russia you were very lucky to get access to a “real” computer.
Lets not forget that, selling computers (among other products) to Soviet Union and the whole East block was subject to Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) established in 1949.
No ... Russia's communist government rejected access to computers and their own version of the internet for fear of dissent ...
If you were working in military research, you got access to western computers. Academics, generally no. Companies, never. Even party members couldn't get access.
So no this is yet another victim of the priorities of communism: priority #1 is preventing dissent. And I hope you do at least understand why that means "no computers, and certainly no networks".
Not sure what you mean by "their own version of internet", but access to any means of trans-border communication was indeed restricted.
As to computers - it's not like you could walk into a store and buy one, they simply didn't produce them in quantity (central planning economy took a while to recognize that need). But if you could find one, access was not particularly restricted. You could also build a simple home computer yourself if you were into electronics. Schematics were published in hobby magazines and it was a cool thing to do, not something frowned upon by authorities.
Regarding computers, yes and no. I don't think fear of dissent played any role, but rather the availability of western equipment.
For example, SM-4 and SM-1420 machines were quite common in the academic institutions in mid-80s. These were clones of pdp-11/45, which means about 10 years gap in computer tech.
That's complete nonsense detached from reality. For the reference, I was a kid during the Soviet personal computing boom in the 80s, and it was the reason I got interested in electronics and computers at all. There was a huge push since the 60s, and computers were everywhere in the 80s, just not readily available to private owners due to the incapability of producing enough (you needed connections, not just money) and being expensive as hell.
"computers were everywhere in the 80s, just not readily available to private owners"
Agreed on that, and access to a computer system, e.g ES mainframe or SM family was not a problem for people who wanted it. I was in high school in mid-80s. I found a fortran book in the library, and it took me very little time to get access to the university-owned SM-1420, RSX-11, and a fortran compiler. That same lab ran free programming classes in the evening with faculty volunteers.
"But by the early 1970s the idea of transcending the status quo was abandoned by the Soviet leadership, who felt the system threatened Party control of the economy."
And that was that, for the idea of connecting Soviet computer networks or directly connecting people in the Soviet union (without party-controlled channels in between).
The article deals with the failed OGAS network, which is interesting, but I am not sure how this is related to what I said about individual access to computing facilities.
They literally gave western computers (up to 486s) to people who were involved in weapons research, even managers who had no use for them. It really was policy to not have computers for individuals, except for training and (mostly military) research.
It wasn't my experience really, and I think the cost was the main issue for individuals. Some families who had no relation to the military had computers at home, that's where I spent quite a lot of evenings. But I was in high school and didn't know much. Access to large computers in educational institutions was not a problem at all.
> let's go wind and beat nuclear and solar by a crazy margin
During the last decade Europe went for wind and solar, but wind is quite expensive to build. Solar was expensive but is now a lot cheaper, mostly because it's mass produced in China using cheap, still quite coal heavy, electricity.
Still solar and wind are weather dependent and need to by supplemented by fossil electricity production in Europe in the winter months, which is why we see these days market electricity prices around 300 Euro/MWh in Europe. (The plan, decade ago, was to use cheap Russian gas to supplemented solar and wind. Things didn't go according to the plan).
Thank you for confirming my point that technology fixes technological problems and not human problems.
The Middle ages had effectively more technology than the Romans (all the stuff that was invented til the Romans, plus the stuff that was invented later), yet they fared worse, mostly because of religion and feudal lords sabotaging what the Romans managed to achieve.
Lot of important Roman technology, that affect quality of human life, was lost in dark times of Middle ages. For example sanitation systems:
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There is little record of other sanitation systems (apart from sanitation in ancient Rome) in most of Europe until the High Middle Ages. Unsanitary conditions and overcrowding were widespread throughout Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages. This resulted in pandemics such as the Plague of Justinian (541–542) and the Black Death (1347–1351), which killed tens of millions of people. Very high infant and child mortality prevailed in Europe throughout medieval times, due partly to deficiencies in sanitation.
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Even today countries without technology for clean and safe drinking water and sanitation have big problems.
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Without better infrastructure and management, millions of people will continue to die each year from preventable, water-related diseases like malaria and diarrhea.
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"As they are located mostly in the east of the country, the data centre electricity supply in China today is dominated by coal with a near 70% share, followed by renewables with nearly 20%, nuclear close to 10% and natural gas accounting for the remainder. Between 2024 and 2030 coal remains the largest source of additional electricity for data centres, with annual generation increasing by nearly 90 TWh. Renewables, mostly solar PV and wind, add nearly 90 TWh over the same period, supported by an increase in the share of renewables in the grid electricity mix, provincial co-location mandates and policies to prioritise the construction of data centres in renewables-rich western China. After 2030 the introduction of SMRs significantly boosts the nuclear share of the data centre electricity mix. Between 2030 and 2035 the rise in renewables and nuclear pushes coal into decline. By 2035 both sources together make up nearly 60% of the data centre electricity supply in China."
Energy and AI World Energy Outlook Special Report International Energy Agency (IEA)
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...
https://www.iea.org/files/de9dea13-b07d-42c5-a398-d1b3ae17d8...
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