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Goodguy  22hr ago (text post)   Edited 19hr ago   6407 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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Less splashy but possibly important:

Apparently, of 75 municipalities that had a data center ban or moratorium on the ballot, all 75 passed. This is a bipartisan 80/20 issue. Support for data centers is political suicide now. I expect a lot more bans.

Lots of ways this could go.

  1. Obvious take: The future is Chinese.

  2. Nothing ever happens take: We don't need new centers when chips/software get 10x faster each year.

  3. Elon take: Data centers in space doesn't seem so crazy now

  4. Pollyannaish take: Maybe China follows suit and we can pace the frontier

On one hand: Datacenters are obviously good.

On the other: I'm not happy about the RAM and GPU shortage.

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