Sid Ravikumar

@growing_daniel dawg im building a small lifestyle brand for scaling compute across the solar system hmu if you’re into casual shit like that

They did it with nuclear power & fracking. They’re doing it with wind power & housing construction & High Speed Rail. Now they’re starting with datacenters & solar. NIMBYism is an anti-human mind virus. Make no mistake: it’ll come for YOUR pet project, too. Give it no quarter.

my cofounder when he gets horny

The solar and batteries point is overstated. That is also similarly a tech issue and very solvable. I think people get too lost arguing about one energy source vs another. I think prizes and medals need to be given out to anyone building X megawatts per month or Y GW per year. Speed to deployment is key. And we’ll find out which type of energy is easy to build fast at scale. And I have a very strong hunch that it will be largely solar and batteries because of the economics.

Apply first principles and ask yourself if coal is inherently bad or if you’ve just been trained to accept that it’s bad. Coal exhaust can be filtered, captured and cleaned. The steel, plastic and manpower needed to deploy solar at scale will also use massive amounts of hydrocarbons. The West was powered by coal for centuries. Britain literally industrialized on it. Coal bad became a meme once oil and gas became dominant suppliers of power. Moden coal plants use scrubbers, electrostatic filters, SCR systems and other carbon capture tech to reduce sulfur, particulates and other exhaust. You can technologically solve the coal exhaust issue. But coal as an energy source when it’s available in your geography is far better than importing oil from thousands of kilometers. Deploying solar + batteries that need other raw materials to scale is a similar challenge. There’s no need to panic on coal. Pic related

in a parallel universe watchmakers might have designed computers with these mechanical logic gates and maybe even run ai with it. man, mechanical computers would be so fun. they'll never compete with nanometer scale transistors, but so fun!

i'm waiting for @djcows to poast about putting a turbine in there to generate power

they are resource intensive, but so is every other major economic activity (agriculture, oil and gas, coal, cement, etc.) and the resources needed aren't all that scarce, even on earth. lithium iron phosphate and sodium ion chemistries were already steps in that direction and we'll find even better chemistries and cell architectures that tap more abundant materials. but yes, in space you need way less energy storage because you have sunlight 100% of the time.

@sidravi_ Batteries are hard to scale cuz of how resource intensive they are, but space can solve this too. Space solar beamed power can get around storage needs on Earth entirely & is easier to manufacture from Lunar resources. Eventually the whole datacenter will be built in space, later

data center doomerism is totally nuts to me, but “you’d need ~dozens of terawatts for that” gives me pause. at current compute growth rates (0.5 OOM per year) this is ~6 years away? i don’t think that’s gonna happen so soon, but the incentive is there. so it’s not at all implausible that this happens within our lifetime. that’s a lot of waste heat being added to the atmosphere. earth can only radiate away so much heat at our current average temperatures. even if we manage to crack cheap scalable nuclear energy from fission/fusion, we’d need colossal radiators that radiate in a part of the IR spectrum that isn’t reflected back by greenhouses gases. this will be very land/surface area intensive. i think the way to grow compute on earth sustainably is to tap into sources of energy such as solar (sunlight, wind, wave), tidal, and geothermal. sources of energy that comfortably fit within earth’s radiative loss budget naturally.

@pham_alam indeed! every solar panel is a baby step toward a dyson swarm. my startup is building better baby steps here on earth :) beaming power is usually not worth it. better to do the compute where the power is and beam the data rather than the energy.

@sidravi_ Certainly, but technically our Dyson swarm started construction the moment the first solar power system was invented :) Placing solar beamed power satellites in Earth orbit is just setting up a locally dense Dyson swarm node 👍

@pham_alam But this is longer term. Short term, it’s with solar + batteries on earth.

@pham_alam The only straightforward way to scale compute by orders of magnitude is with a Dyson swarm.

I do have my own version of buildings that I think are demonic entities that are creating unbelievable misery and polluting water on the side

i love how chatgpt/codex will think for really long and get into excruciating detail just to end its answer with "the defensible version of your idea is not <retarded version of the idea that you never mentioned>. it's <the idea you mentioned but more vague and abstracted>"

dwarkesh is in the rage baiting hall of fame. first sutton, now jensen. bravo.

people have always had dumb ideas. we’ve just industrialized the p2p distribution of dumb ideas.

Chinese founders are usually: - engineers - party members - capitalists In that order. So when they build or acquire a company, maximizing shareholder value is not the first objective. The first objective is acquiring know-how and industrial capability. The mindset is: "we should know how to build this thing in China for the simple reason that my civilization needs to learn this sooner or later and i don't care about consequences or optics - if it looks like stealing IP so be it, I don't have to explain..." The only people judging you are in your local party HQ. If you’re a credible founder in China, you can go to a local party chief and say: "I need x engineers, land, and some starter funds to build this widget company" And if the state thinks the industry matters, you’ll get the best resources in the province, industrial land and enough support to get going. The rest is up to you. Many, many fail. Like most people think they would be successful with capital - go to China and see. You get everything - land, capital, people and even then the success ratio is like 1-5%... OG American founders were also engineer-first. Bill Hewlett and David Packard built HP as engineers. Same with a lot of old American industrial giants. But over time those founders exited and the boards got taken over by pure financial operators focused entirely on maximizing quarterly shareholder value. A single generation of this mentality hollowed out the entire American industry. Product-first founders like Elon Musk exist today because there was a generational demand for good engineering lead founders. Indian boomer founders meanwhile were always capitalist-first from day one. Not even saying that negatively. Many come from communities that are insanely optimized around capital survival and allocation. That’s a real skill developed over centuries. But the downside of that mindset is that they were rarely engineer-first or product-first EVEN if they were engineers by training. They were always capitalist first. And that's very reasonable. They're on their own. Nobody has their back. They need to perform or die. So when an Indian conglomerate acquires something like Jaguar, the instinct becomes: - optimize margins - reduce costs - extract shareholder value But if you don’t deeply understand first principles of car manufacturing, how much value can you really compound long term ? So companies get handed to hired professionals and MBA operators. The exact same class of people that helped hollow out American industry. Now America is slowly realizing pure financial capitalism can become self-destructive because eventually the spreadsheet people cannibalize the actual industrial base in pursuit of EPS. India already lives in that reality. Infosys is a good example. A company effectively consuming itself to maintain quarter-on-quarter performance without aggressively building the future. And as I said they’re not even wrong. Anyone would do the same unless the system is realigned for long term incentives. Who in India actually has your back if you miss numbers for 2-3 yrs while investing heavily into long-term capability ? Tesla survived because retail investors and the American public effectively backed Elon Musk through a decade of chaos and losses. Toyota delivers 6-7x of Tesla's profit EVERY QUARTER but Tesla wins because try posting and see Tesla retail investors explaining you the future of automobiles. Indian scarcity markets can't and won't tolerate that kind of long-duration industrial gamble. Its a 3k gdp/capita country nobody has time for long term nonsense plus who know who's grfiting vs being serious...people talk about nationalism then take your money and run. China solved this by - serve the party - align with state goals - stay below the radar and build the system will protect you while you build. In India you are on your own. - manage the regulators - manage capital - which is very expensive - manage your own power/infra - deal with corruption - manage untrained talent All of that becomes a massive tax on operations. Nobody has the time to do any long-term thinking. Any anyone who does that would be eaten alive by those who optimize for survival.

fear is the mind killer

My startup is building modular off-grid inference units powered by solar and batteries. We are doing it at nearly the same cost as regular utility scale solar + battery projects. Right now we are selling to customers in the west, but our dream is that subsistence farmers can adopt solar powered token farming. They can get far better economic productivity on their small scale land holdings without destroying soil quality and the water table. I think India can quickly ramp up its inference compute as quickly as it can ramp up solar. All without needing grid upgrades.

AI inference cost (which we pay in dollars) may rival our oil import bill and blow up our current account deficit. Great post on that below. What is the solution? I believe that high developer productivity can be achieved without the high AI inference bill. We have to invent our way out of trouble. Stay tuned.

@Andercot is this the techbro version of degrowth?

We need to engineer a tiny race of humans to drive this vehicle