Power is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime cost; especially these days when you're filling them with several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an important consideration of course, but not the only one.
I don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed) the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or more.
In fairness your calculation looks at the most expensive element of the DC but ignores all of the associated parts required to utilize the H100: CPU, memory, cooling, etc. No to say that that flips the calculation (I don't have the answer), but it does leave a lot of power out.
Let's be generous and pretend the rest of the hardware is free but double the energy budget of the H100 to account for all of it along with cooling. You're still at only $1k/yr; $10k over 10 years, or 25% of the TCO (ignoring all other costs).
I agree that this triggered my AI writing senses. Points in favor:
- "It’s not an accident — it’s driven by the same physics." The classic "it's not x, it's y", with an em-dash thrown in for good measure
- "Typhon brings these into the component storage model — not as bolted-on workarounds, but as first-class citizens." More "not x, but y", this time with a leading clause joined by an emdash
- "Blittable, unmanaged, fixed-size, stored contiguously per type — that’s the ECS side." Short, punchy list of examples, emdash'd to a stinger, again typical of LLM writing
- "Schema in code, not SQL. Components are C# structs with attributes, not DDL statements. Natural for game developers, unfamiliar territory for database administrators. If your team thinks in SQL, this is a paradigm shift." This whole mini-paragraph is the x/y style, combined with the triplet / rule-of-three, just at the sentence scale. And then of course, the stinger at the end.
Definitive, no, but it certainly has a particular flavor that reads as LLM output to me.
I occasionally read a geopolitics blog that is one of the top search results on Google. I honestly couldn't do it anymore. Every other subheading was something along the lines of, "The experts are saying about Ukraine--Without the Fluff".
I'm not really seeing it tbh. I mean, maybe they used a chatbot to help them write it but I don't immediately feel like I'm reading padded slop without actual content, it's fairly to the point. I just clicked around on the blog to see if anything else feels like it, but it's mainly just very "prefab". That did teach me that the author apparently also worked on DOTS previously for Unity, so they at least have actual hands-on experience with game engines.
If anything, this confirms it for me. On his about page, there's this:
"Hi there, I am Loïc Baumann, I’m from Paris area, France
I develop, since early 90s, first assembly, then C++ and nowadays mostly .net.
My area of interest are 3D programming, low-latency/highly-scalable/performant solutions and many other things."
Compare that style to what's in this most recent blog - mildly ungrammatical constructions typical of an ESL writer, straightforward and plain style vs breathless, feed-optimized "not x, but y", triplet/rule of three constructions, perfect native speaker grammar but an oddly hollow tone. Or look at this post from 2018: https://nockawa.github.io/microservice-or-not-microservice/ It's just radically different (at a concrete syntactic level, no emdashes). I'm sure he has technical chops and it's cool that he worked on DOTS, but I would bet a very large amount of money he wrote the bullet points describing this project and then prompted GPT 5.3 to expand them to a blog post to "save time".
That HN was a neat community fifteen years ago, but like all things cool made by early adopters, it will eventually attract a following hoping to be somewhere, to exist among people doing things, but the tragedy of such followings is that they bring with them their toxicity, their immunity to their own poison, and drown out what they depend on until the early adopters early adopt away.
The real slop is all this lazy concern farming from an ant mill that is powerless to do anything except validate its own hand wringing.
Yeah that was my second thought. ECS' favoring of structs-of-arrays over traditional arrays-of-structs for game entities boils down to the same motivations and resulting physical layout as column-stores vs row-stores.
Why would column-oriented databases be mentioned? My understanding is that these are typically used for OLAP, but the article seems to talk only about OLTP.
Modern database engines tend to use PAX-style storage layouts, which are column structured, regardless of use case. There is a new type of row-oriented analytic storage layout that would be even better for OLTP but it is not widely known yet so I wouldn't expect to see it mentioned.
This is one of the main problems I have with LLMs. It finds patterns in words but not content. I see this in code reviews and eventually outages. Something looks reasonable at the micro scale but clearly didn’t understand something important (because they don’t understand) and it causes a major issue.
> How about we legalize construction of new power sources and let the market figure it out?
Who's going to pay for the new plants, that's the issue, nothing else.
"The market" can't figure that out and gets it wrong without additional regulation. If all ratepayers pay for new capacity used only by a few corporations, for their new power needs and their own profits, these corporations get to socialize their capital expenditures while privatizing their profits - that's a form of theft, without any exaggeration.
"You" probably don't, but it's not just "you". There's also the counterparty who's asking to see that report. Maybe they're doing it for paper-pushing purposes of their own, but ultimately, somewhere up the chain, there's someone thinking "I can't personally audit all my suppliers, and I can't be sure they're doing the right thing, so I'm going to ask them to get an independent audit".
Of course, this shows that the entire system is a bit of a charade, but the point is that someone cares and they're gonna be annoyed when they find out that the audit appears to be a sham.
Whether they have a good alternative is a separate question. But here's another way to look at it: if we show blatant disregard for self-regulation, the government is eventually going to show up and come up with more onerous rules.
Is it true, though? Or has everyone just been psyched into asking for that certification out of a vague fear of "consequences" or of being left behind?
It's not either-or. Companies care about security because of the consequences. If you're a big company contracting a small one, you don't want to get owned through that vendor because you know you'll be the one holding the bag (data loss, reputational damage, regulatory scrutiny, lawsuits).
Small vendors will tell you what you want to hear because they're desperate for your business. Independent auditing is, in theory, a way to get closer to the ground truth. Well, in theory.
Probably not, in fact your auditors not being terribly thorough might be a selling point. But your clients, who are the ones asking for the box to be checked, might.
In my experience, clients don't dig deeply into the report or the auditor, they just want to see that you 1) have the report 2) it doesn’t have any egregious exceptions. Perhaps if this makes big enough news, that’ll change.
As the company? No. In fact, it's likely better for you if they do a bad job. You potentially get shielded from blame, but don't actually have to put in the work.
As a user/customer/potential victim? Yeah, you do.
My point is that model providers are just a compute service, and should have no say in what sends the data, or displays the data. Especially when they only bill based on the quantity of data.
They have an API for exactly that. You can use it.
They offer a separate plan with discounts for use with their tools. You can also choose to take advantage of those discounts with the monthly fee, within the domain where that applies. You cannot, however, expect to demand that discount to apply to anything you want.
You can argue about what you want it to be all day long, but when you go to the subscription page and choose what to purchase it's very clear what you're getting.
> They are basically a utility
Utilities like my electric company also have different plans for different uses. I cannot, for example, sign up for a residential plan and then try to connect it to my commercial business, even though I'm consuming power from them either way.
Utilities do not work like that. They do have contractual agreements about how you can use the resources provided.
By adding a simple birthdate field to your account info and a system API of some sort for retrieving the account owner's age range, same as everyone else.
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