Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

First time I ever hoped for a tornado to strike a specific location.

Hmmmm

Rocket artillery is surprisingly easy to make at home, if you have enough potassium nitrate and PVC pipe

That amount of millions can feed the crackheads for generations.

Gods I could do a lot with just like two of those machines.

don't let crackheads know about it

Yes ricko ,kaboum

Homeless don't earn the tech overlords money and they keep the general populace knowing where they could be. It's bullshit that we give these cunts rope rather than just hanging them ourselves.

USA spends more on healthcare than countries with socialised healthcare.

I really love this.

This is fairly common I think. In Belgium it's one of the back-up plans in case of power shortage. (article)

so much waste. why bother flying in your personal jet to burn the world down when you can just leave it idling on the ground?

It's pretty common for natural gas electric plants to use Brayton cycle turbines, which is the same thermodynamic cycle that the turbojet engines on airplanes use. But you can optimize the designs on the ground for efficiency (and zero thrust) instead of thrust-to-weight.

It's also common to use "combined cycle" technology which mashes the Brayton cycle engine together with an older-style steam loop for extra efficiency.

After reading the article, I think they're just saying they installed some miniaturized natural gas plants. I don't think they're literally running aircraft engines on the ground.

They are self igniting :)

Either way, I bet they are "cut-able" and have lots of expensive metals inside

Because he stole every idea and did so by stepping on many many toes.

Was thinking this too. They probably won't even relocate them as it's more efficient to put in the newest gear in their new facility

They rolled poorly on their "x thing in real life is like y dystopian art piece" dice

I suppose Mad Max was also about people living with a lack of government oversight, allowing the powerful to do as they please.

Need to make it sound apocalyptic somehow to draw the clicks.

Dystopian

meta is basically a naked guy running through a field.

I guess calling it „Agriculture in Spain“ didn‘t have the same ring to it but believe me it‘s almost as dystopian.

I have been, by focusing on enabling team members to use it exactly like how leadership wants. You want them to use more AI? Okay… they need Agentic harnesses that can do work for them locally. They need MacBook Pros to run the models. They need cloud keys to test different frontier models for different loads. They need governance, observability, repeatability, scheduling, human-in-the-loop…

I’m going to show them that anyone can build a bridge, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely works. On top of that, I’m going to show them that they’re wrong in believing they want a bridge. All it should take is seeing that they got exactly what they wanted without getting anything that they wanted.

Pure wishful thinking like this is just as useful as thoughts and prayers.

This is a overhyped technology just like the internet was before the dotcom bubble popped.

The best you can hope for is for the AI bubble to burst and then see what AI is like when it normalises.

Because to think this technology will just go away is going to end the same way as for the people who said the internet is just a temporary fad.

I've been cruising with the most expensive model at work for a while now. After github's pricing model change they finally asked us to be more conscious about which model we're using (which was hilarious after we were constantly asked to use more AI), but eh, it's easier to just leave it on Claude 4.8. I figure eventually the costs will catch up with the company.

It's not even necessary. It will come down on its own. Recent reportings in my company says we've increased our productivity by 10℅ while the number of defects rose by 40℅. And the cost increases with every month. It's unsustainable.

wouldn't it be easier to sabotage tents with data farms in them

Yeah, this seems more like what you see on the outskirts of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077; Mad Max people live in caves or rusted scrap structures and don't even have computers aside from really smart dwarves.

I also am a qualified expert on what does and doesn't look like mad max, and I concur.

I've seen Mad Max and I'm going to disagree. This looks LITERALLY EXACTLY LIKE MAD MAX to me and you can't diminish that, because it's entirely subjective. But also correct. The resemblance is uncanny.

By relying on most people being law abiding citizens who only act like badass rebels online.

right like hardware is extremely vulnerable to fires lmao

Probably not however when you are rich, you can do anything.

Might be the same structure, but Meta confirms they're doing exactly this:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially.

Yup, Tom's is the last of the originals still running (HardOCP, anandtech and sharkyexteme are all gone), but it's absolutely a garbage site now.

In Chrome, choose reading mode. Generally works to strip all the bs.

Works like a charm on mobile without javascript.

where is a tornado when you need one?

The products are addictive like gambling. That’s why they are loosing court cases now. People can’t stop even if they want to.

These fitted with machine guns bet you anything

Yes... and the ability to deal with super densely packed rack weight.

Like seriously, they can't use existing empty data center space because the floors aren't built to deal with ones that tightly packed of equipment.

That office space is in cities that won't let them steal all the water and power and then dump pollution into the water supply.

Not unusual in the slightest. They're often used as peaking plants that fire up when energy prices are driven high enough by demand. Can be setup to run on all sorts of different fuels.