Haha steelmanning has been a popular term on HN for a while, pretty sure that's where I picked it up. Not a big podcast listener, except for my wife's clean-energy-related podcasts, since she's in that field. Maybe there's some overlap between Jigar Shah and that crew and the ones you're talking about, since besides his service with the US Dept of Energy, he's also been a VC.
*shrug* bitflips are the most common issue afaik, thats why I mentioned them. I looked into the damaging higher energy cosmic rays when the Google paper came out, but it didn't seem like it was as big a problem as I initially assumed, because they're very infrequent for a given die-sized area. Is that what you're talking about?
My point with that post was just that the other post was completely riddled with errors, so people shouldn't use it to inform their opinion. The temp scaling thing was admittedly minor, since it's 4th power in kelvin, not centigrade, so there's not going to be any doubling of the temp, but just another example of how he hadn't thought very deeply about it if he's using ISS figures for a maintaining a habitable environment to spec out what's going to happen with hardware, that's all. It was just super sloppy, but full of confidence.
Heh I don't love how LLMs have become all-consuming, either, ML was a lot more fun when it was just nerds doing stuff like you're talking about and publishing actual papers, before everyone jumped in with an opinion. But it's undeniably useful, and it's been great writing lots of throwaway code for stuff that I wouldn't have bothered spending the time on before.
Haha thanks, we'll see what happens in the upcoming midterms... But fundamentally, we're gridlocked into status quo on a lot of levels, NIMBYs are super powerful and super active at the local levels, and that's what makes this kinda make sense. Pretty sure only China's been growing their electrical generation nearly quickly enough to do significant AI buildouts. Maybe that'll change, I hope it does because it needs to for decarbonization.