Never mind AI, MRIs are more important.
At least we have the US Helium Res— dammit, Biden!
The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried
Dammit, Obama maybe - the act was passed by Congress in 2013.
Clinton was the one that started selling off the helium reserves. Obama signed something that changed shit about it, so he certainly didn't do anything to help the situation.
Ah, good catch.
Can the AI just talk in a lower voice? I don't see why this is that critical.
The media really can't get it can they I'm fine with AI having problems, I'm supposed to feel sorry for them upsetting some way but I just don't.
So THIS is how they hallucinate.
I'm reading all of these comments with the helium-voice in my head.
This is bad news that feels like good news. Like when your house burns down, but it kills your abusive parents, so you’re kind of happy about it because it means you didn’t have to go through with your plans, and it means you don’t have to become a murderer after all.
And you have all that money saved up, and you already got that scholarship to college, and you can just move on with your life without any of those chains tying you to them in your former life…
So, really, what’s the actual fucking problem here? no more birthday balloons? Boo fucking hoo. My shitty parents never threw me a birthday party anyway.
No more medical imaging.
No more fibre optics.
No more semiconductors.
No more laparoscopic or eye surgery.
No more hard drives.
No more titanium.
No more rockets.
I feel like you weren’t really listening to what I had to say
Tell me: when you read my post, what did you hear?
How did that translate in your head?
You asked:
So, really, what’s the actual fucking problem here?
That's what they heard.
They answered:
No more medical imaging.
No more fibre optics.
No more semiconductors.
No more laparoscopic or eye surgery.
No more hard drives.
No more titanium.
No more rockets.
That's what you didn't hear I guess.
You guessed wrong
What they didn’t hear is the problems of society that the blind pursuit of commercial mining of minerals causes society.
But when commercial profit is your only motive, fuck people, right? Who gives a shit about them?
While I agree that the blind pursuit of capital will ultimately be our downfall, helium shortages actually have real, tangible effects on the very people you seem to vouch for.
I feel you're lashing out for the mere sake of lashing out, regardless of who your target is. We're on the same side here.
I think your untreated trauma is negatively affecting how you treat the people around you.
We all have untreated trauma.
I think the carelessness with which corporations pursue commercial mining profits traumatically affects society.
Blaming me, an individual, just for pointing that out, is pretty ridiculous.
Ehrm excuse me sir or madame, are other pc parts also affected or is it just hard drives?
semiconductor manufacturing uses helium so that's a big 10-4
Helium is needed for MRIs.
That was a trip.
I’d like to think that I’m happy but it’s only partly true— the truth is that I’m simply relieved.
I suppose that the lesson here is… Everyone is damaged, and you never really know someone. You can’t. Everyone deserves a hug.
Yeah, like when your peice of shit abusive husband dies drunk driving do you don't have to worry about your search history or Netflix watch list.
And you weren't even really into true crime anyway but it was kind of nice seeing what mistakes other people made and your peice of shit husband thinks it's dumb so you can get some peace.
Anyway, yeah, feels like it should be good cuz fuck AI but it's gonna effect lots of other things too.
Knowing your abusive husband was a piece of shit just because you saw other people like him being called a piece of shit on some true crime show on Netflix gives you validation, but he was a piece of shit anyway, whether you saw that true crime show or not. And AI is evil, whether you read it on Reddit or not.
Truth doesn’t need to be validated for it to be true. It just makes you feel better about it. That wasn’t really my point.
I realize there are benefits to attacking Iran, but it's still wrong.
what do I laugh when I think about helium and choking
Let's fucking go! I'm so rooting for Iran.
you need helium for more than just AI. everything in whatever device you're using to read this depends on helium. AI just happens to also need helium, as it is also on devices much like the one you're using now.
but I don't know you, so maybe you are nostalgic for the times before the modern world, when people churned their own butter, and if you had been a hundred miles from where you were born, you were well traveled.
I know we need helium. But we need little don to lose even more.
Can I remind everyone that it is impossible to produce helium in a practical way?
It is literally only produced through a fusion reaction, and that happens in stars and in incredibly tiny quantities in fusion reactors.
Whenever it's released, it basically just floats away into space and is lost forever.
Jupiter contains lots and lots of Helium that just needs to scooped up from the atmosphere.
It’s also produced (slowly) through radioactive decay underground where it becomes trapped with other gasses. That’s the reserve we’ve been working with.
The one we can mine is drawn off together with natural gas, and was produced over geological timescales as product of alpha decay of uranium
Can I remind everyone that it is impossible to produce helium in a practical way?
Sun has been doing it for millions of years and it's a big dumb ball of energy.
Is it practical? No. Is it producing any Helium right now? No. Is it probably just a big investor scam? Sure. But still more practical than trying to conquer Iran.
So it's going to be rerouted from the MRIs I take it…
AI comes first alphabetically. Sorry!
Ah so google is behond this...
Unfortunately it's also critical for MRIs.
Yeah, what a crazy headline that AI was the thing mentioned and not 1 of the many other real life uses that offer greater solutions to us.
I need more happy birthday balloons.
i wanna do a silly voice
Maybe we'll get lucky, and by the time the helium supply is restored, we've done away with the shitty not-really-AI craze, saving more helium for things of use to humanity.
Okay, but do you really think we're going to prioritize the enormous loss-leading CSAM engines over lifesaving medical diagnostics machines?
It's not like its really used on AI inference, but it's used in high grade semiconductor manufacturing. so helium shortage will hit anything with a modern semiconductors in it. So it's not "whatever".
I'd guess that most industrial users of helium don't consume it and could theoretically recover it from whatever process it's involved in rather than just releasing it.
EDIT: Hard drives being an exception, as apparently some ship helium-filled; there, it's actually being consumed during the manufacture.
EDIT2: I'd also point out that in the long run, we probably do have to be more conservative with our helium supply. We get it from pockets in the earth. It's actually not all that common; it just happens, though, that we go to a lot of effort to extract natural gas, and that happens to sometimes also come up with helium, so we get that supply. But because it's not reactive, it doesn't bond to anything
it stays in gas form. When we let it go, it heads to near the top of our atmosphere and eventually gets lost to solar wind. Many users who today just release it
because why not, as the natural gas people will be providing more, and it's cheaper that way
probably will need to capture what they're using if we want helium to continue to be available.
The problem is that helium is notoriously hard to contain. It's transported and stored super-cooled, but it still gases off, and to release pressure they just have to release it into the atmosphere. It effectively has a shelf life and so it has to be constantly replenished.
What is it that keeps the underground pockets of helium in place, anyway? Just craptons of stone?
I'm not sure actually. I know it's usually found with methane and in massive quantities. Maybe just sealed in by rock and time?
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