longer.blue

Chad Loder on bluesky
I've made the mistake of listening to a lot of Peter Thiel interviews recently to try to understand his worldview. The guy is an absolute third-rate thinker who contradicts himself every 30 seconds and nobody pushes him on it. "The problem today is we have 'Big Science' and anything we make big becomes stagnant." (30 seconds later) "We could never do the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program today" My guy what the fuck are you talking about. "We declared a War On Cancer in the 1970s and we have not made significant progress on treating cancer despite ever-increasing funding. It's a welfare program for academic labs" Bro what the FUCK are you talking about. The survival statistics do not bear this out even at first glance. Also anyone who studies cancer from a public health perspective would immediately make the point that cancer survival stats are dominated by access-to-care equities. Scientific advances will not affect population level statistics without a fucking delivery mechanism. Absolute smoothbrains. Oh now Thiel is talking about the "reproducibility crisis" in science, amazing. Wait these guys are all myna birds, aren't they. They hear a few words said by someone else and they just grab them and repeat them without understanding. Now I see why they love LLMs so much. So all of these "heterodox thinkers" are just myna birds, aren't they? They're just making sounds they heard somewhere else and stringing them together like memes and this apparently imparts some kind of meaning to people who share a certain worldview? As long as you don't stop to think at all. So much of the pathological behavior and deranged worldviews of these oligarchs can be explained by terror management theory and a basic over-salience of mortality. I'm convinced that if we carefully orchestrated a bot farm we could incept them to take suicidal risks out of desperate fear.
replies: He's a keyword thinker. He just throws out the right combination of keywords and it lures in fellow keyword thinkers. The order of the keywords or their meanings are irrelevant. Sadly, a large percentage of humans have devolved into keyword thinking. It's going to get worse as LLM usage increases. (Buzzword bingo, small language models) It's like that friend who skimmed Gödel Escher Bach and now everything is "quantum" but not even that fun because at least your Gödel Escher Bach friend had shrooms to share

Chad Loder on BlueSky
replied to this post; "just in anthropis ceo says ai companies need hundreds of billions in revenue or they'll go bankrupt"
Chad: 
The plan: forever warp the job market through taxpayer-funded subsidies of unsustainable AI businesses just long enough for all other companies to lay off millions of workers and reorient their work processes around proprietary technology and then once this is accomplished, raise inference prices. Their business model for the last 600 years is bribe politicians, steal our resources, enclose the commons and then rent-seek and charge a toll for the privilege of using the value we created to begin with. I, too, need hundreds of billions of dollars of your money or I will go bankrupt. No, my business model is perfectly sound from a cash flow perspective. I promise this is not a scam. Fork over your pension immediately otherwise the Chinese Communist Party will take over 

"Who do they think they're going to sell all this stuff to if they put everyone out of work?" Ah you see, please see the difference between productive and extractive economies. Where will they get their wealth? Africa. The answer is always Africa. Who will they sell to? The military. "Your business can't succeed if you don't have customers and other businesses and a thriving middle class of consumers to sell to" Baby boy. They're controlling food, water and arable land. Unless you think the wealth concentrated in Natchez, MS in the 1850s was made possible by the middle class.

Question for the class: what was the most valuable asset class in the world in the 1850s? Hint: They considered it a renewable resource so valuable they it was financialized and bundled into the very core of global capital liquidity. Hint: They were willing to do a civil war to preserve it.

Also I remain convinced that datacenters are just a play for private ownership of drinking water

ReplierA: "New data centers are closed loop cooling. No real water use. All the new Nvidia AI stuff is closed loop too. Water use is mostly a thing at legacy datacenters, and kind of a red herring. Wait till you hear about golf courses..."
CHAD:Yeah and the "closed loop" refers only to in-the-rack. That's not where most datacenter water consumption happens. These are large construction projects with long tail effects.
On the Texas ERCOT grid (still ~40-45% gas, ~10% coal), the upstream water cost is real and partially offsets on-site savings. The ThirstyFLOPS (SC '25) and WaterWise (PPoPP '25) benchmarks both model this trade-off explicitly. See CACM 2025 Making AI Less Thirsty; arXiv 2304.03271 Mar 2025 update
"No real water use" is demonstrably untrue. Hyperscaler water consumption continues to go up YoY -- Google fleet-wide water use @ 6.1 billion gal for fiscal year 2024 versus 4.3 billion gal for FY 2021. And more importantly water is a **locally** stressed resource. It's not fungible.

Consumption vs. withdrawal: Withdrawal = total water drawn from local hydrology, consumption = withdrawal minus what's returned (e.g., as discharge or treated effluent). Consumption = water moves out of local watershed permanently. Google 2024 withdrawal was 7.8 B gal; consumption was 6.1 b gal

"Golf courses are worse", true at national-aggregate scale, false at stressed-watershed scale. This is hyper-local. Don't get me wrong, golf is BAD. But we're not in the midst of a new golf course construction boom. We're in a datacenter boom and that's the marginal lever for community protection.

What do I mean by this? It's that many communities are on the absolute verge of drought crisis already, and they are rightly looking at large-order levers that spell the difference between "drought EMERGENCY" on a stressed aquifer and "carefully managed drought crisis". New datacenter permits, man.

Datacenter evaporative cooling and golf-course irrigation are the same kind of water use from a watershed perspective: both run at ~70-90% consumption ratio because both rely on evaporation as the primary removal mechanism (cooling-tower phase change for DC; turf ET for golf). They're both terrible 
"golf uses way more water" thing is a red herring anyway. US golf has been declining steadily for > 20 years. US golf build rate peaked in 2000 at ~400 new course builds/year. Net negative since 2006, ~1,500 courses have closed. And in the arid west new golf has been net zero for ~15 years.

"Golf courses are worse" frames the comparison as stock vs stock (existing footprint vs existing footprint), where golf does dominate at ~30× scale. The actual policy decision in front of regulators TODAY isn't stock vs stock, it's flow vs flow (new permits to add vs new permits to add).