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Gotta hand it to the fossil fuels industry, they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked.
And now Americans have a janky grid, slower / more expensive transportation, and bigger power bills.
At least we are free*
*Terms and conditions apply
- Be rich
- Be white
- Be male
- Be "Christian"
- Be straight
- just kidding be rich
The last ones the one that matters most but their supporters can’t read a list that long in one sitting.
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"free" is the sound that natural gas makes as it is released from its underground prison ...
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Capitalism doesn't solve for society, it solves for capital.
There is no profit in making the world a better place.
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Turns out stubborn contrarianism and anti-science bias are not viable philosophical foundations for progress; what a surprise.
But for a few fleeting moments we did create a lot of value for the shareholders. Totally worth it to flush it all down the drain.
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renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, [Rui Ma]
Is the person they’re talking about who is “stunned” at how super double awesome China is at powering AI.
Ffffffffffffffuck this.
I like how Americans propaganda themselves - china doesnt even have to anything as Americans will gladly put them on a pedestal to spite themselves.
Crazy how apparent this is on TikTok especially. People with LGTBQ flags are salivating about China while their flags are literally censored there
Anything's possible when you make shit up kiddo
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The race to have the magic box that tells you lies that you want to hear while also consuming incredible amounts of resources...why is this a race again?
I really don't understand this perspective. I truly don't.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Like. Do you honestly think this is the one technology that researchers are just going to say "it's fine as-is, let's just stop improving it"?
You don't understand the first thing about how it works but people like you are SO certain that the way it is now is how it will always be, and that because there are flaws developing it further is pointless.
I just don't get it.
I've actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I've built RAG architecture backends for self hosted FOSS LLMs, i've fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I've even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research). I also enjoy TTS and STT use cases and have FOSS models for those on most of my devices.
I'll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It's like saying you study medicine, it's a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it's being marketed for to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.
This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more or less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between proprietary and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.
There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.
The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that's cool. But we don't need AI to make improvements to them right now.
I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.
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Right. You don't get it. You hear people talk about a new technology but actually they haven't talked about anything, they are trying to sell you snake oil, but you convince yourself that you understand what they mean, and that it's somehow meaningful.
We could talk about the history of AI in software development, you know it goes back decades, and there are legitimate areas of research. But the bubble that people are riding right now, they are throwing LLMs at the general public and pretending those LLMs are good enough to replace large swaths of the current workforce, but that's not going to happen because it won't work, because that's not how those models are designed. And then the snake oil salesman, they do classic bait and switch, and they start talking about expert systems and minor improvements to them, as if that is something new.
But even if my prediction is wrong, what that actually means is that people shouldn't need to work full-time jobs anymore.
To be fair, if your argument is that some day AI research will be legitimate and no longer snake oil, then you could easily be right. But there's no good reason to think that day is going to be in the next few years, rather than the next few decades or even the next few centuries.
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Conservatism is collapsing into irrelevance as a long term commitment.
Close. Conservatism is collapsing the United States of America into irrelevance.
I don't really give a shit about the AI race and I genuinely hope that we lose it, because I feel like being a winner in that "industry" is inherently unsustainable.
The AI hype is so infuriatingly frustrating.
Further, fear mongering about China's data center/powergrid infrastructure superiority is also the PERFECT excuse techbros need to rationalize building data centers in parts of the US that are in desperate shortage of water for human beings and with precarious electrical grids that are ready to fail in the middle of the next heatwave.
The US is essentially in a second Civil War and this will be one of the main methods in which people are killed, i.e. purposefully setting up the conditions for people to die in a heat wave and have no water so they are desperate... and the only way people in the US are going to stomach it is if they have been truly convinced they have to accept these brutal conditions "because we are hopelessly behind China and we can't afford to stop building data centers!!".
I just want anyone else to win. All the things. I want US Hegemony to end. At any cost. If that's AI then good.
I hate this country the way Saw Gerrera hates the empire.
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AI is not the panacea they're making it out to be. This article is attempting to influence readers to support American AI business models to 'complete' with China. Except that AI doesn't make my job easier and is very bad for the environment.
In my case, AI assistants are even confusing and annoying, but since they cannot be turned off, in my case I have to endure it.
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The first country to adopt LLMs for everything is the one that will collapse first. This is a race where the winners never start and at best stop before they reach the end.
Don’t worry. They’ll just ask AI about the grid and it will tell them how great it is.
Edit: or it’ll say FEED ME MORE!
"good catch! That's a very astute observation. Here's a bunch of paragraphs explaining (incorrectly) how you're wrong!"
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That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids
Yeah, capitalism will resolve everything by being greedy. Electricity is not and will never be a merchandise. It's a basic human need and a natural state monopoly.
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can't use power to make everyone use electric cars need power for "AI"
Nice job you jabroonies you did it you lost everything. This is the slow descent of America and it the boomers fault.
My father in law is convinced theres some guy in a garage that's gonna invent the next big invention, but hey guess what it takes MONEY that regular joe schmoes dont have!!
Anyone who is working on the next big project in his garage is just signing his own death certificate. That’s the truth about the American energy industry and capitalism’s free markets make “healthy competition economy” myth. Traditional American capitalism is long dead.
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So, a few months ago China launched Deepseek and the narrative on US media was all "the fact they didn't have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper".
Now the US is getting behind on "AI wars" because China has more energy for huge data centers?
How about the US get creative and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?
china has also been investing in solar for decades since the us gave up on it and became the leader
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enough talk already i wish the us empire would just hurry up and actually collapse.
I am very skeptical of any article that boldly claims that China is on the rise and the US is in decline. We've been hearing about this decades. People underestimate just how corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent the Chinese system is under the CCP. People think the US is worse only because the US is an open country. China's isolation give it the illusion that it's better, but in reality, it's even worse. Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more, all come with big asterisks attached that make them much more questionable.
Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing lead is real. You don't need to believe any propaganda, just travel and observe.
The asterisks are not about their usecase but political.
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China leads the world in scientific publication, even when only taking into account reputable journals and high-impact publications. There's no doubt in my mind the US will decline further with the current attacks on science and education, and anti-intellectualism in general.
Brother it sounds like you underestimate what industrializing the largest population on earth looks like. It's not just happening, it's kinda inevitable.
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I guess burning coal as fast as possible means energy is a "solved problem" for China?
Reading the article helps to see that they are going full renewable.
Even if AI demand in China grows so quickly renewable projects can’t keep pace, Fishman said, the country can tap idle coal plants to bridge the gap while building more sustainable sources.
China is far from full renewable.
Did I say "are full renewable"? No. I wrote something else with a different meaning.
You said it was their trajectory. It's not. Renewables are a part of their plan, sure, but that coal graph isn't turning around.
Add data from this year.
From several sources, they passed peak carbon last year, and expect coal to peak this year or next and start declining.
Also consider during the time in those charts they went from a developing country to mostly developed with much higher standard of living. They achieved a century of economic progress in a couple decades while simultaneously rolling out renewable energy faster than anyone else
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AFAIK in USA it is pretty common to build the power infra structure as part of the AI data-centers that need it.
This has already been pretty common for normal data-centers for years.
USA never really had good public service infra structure for it. While for instance in Denmark many companies build data-centers because Denmark both has good infrastructure, and also can supply data-centers with relatively cheap energy from renewable sources, without the company having to foot a giant bill to invest in that too.
The American model is of course inferior, but it's not like it doesn't work at all, it just makes it more expensive.
On the other hand, in USA they can bribe White House, and do almost whatever the fuck they want. That is NOT an option in China, where it can result in a literal death penalty for the CEO if tried!
For some. But Alabama power has raised rates AGAIN to build another 2 gas plants because of data centers. My power bill has increased by 50% in the last 6 years.
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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