This is a major reason I think SpaceX’s space DCs aren’t insane, this is a pretty clear trend. These things don’t bring durable employment, they concentrate costs on infrastructure locally, and their benefits go to the world, so the only way I’ve seen the calculus work for a local community are if they levy property tax on the contents of the DC, use it to subsidize your local property taxes/infrastructure, and then foist the cost due to increased power demand on the wider region. My understanding is this is what Loudon County, VA does with its many DCs, taking the benefits and spreading the costs across the entire PJM region. You effectively have poor Baltimoreans subsidizing the highest median income county in the US via increases in their heating bills. Of course, the rest of the PJM region is annoyed about this and starting to try to obstruct that.
The world is large. There is still infinite room left on earth closer than space.
The reason the DC want to be placed in proximity to people is to get access to the infrastructure, electricity grid and roads. I think the next natural step is to just put the DC further away from existing infrastructure and pay for the connect, not move to space.
The concern isn't at all about physical space, DCs are compact, it's about limitations of the infrastructure you're talking about. Turbines currently have a multi-year backlog. The interconnection queue for new generation is an even longer backlog in many grid regions. And there's a general populist backlash against them.
Eh, working on rebuilding a Montessori school for a couple years showed me that kids are very intrinsically motivated to learn, just not always what the person who’s there to teach them wants them to learn that day. But if you enable that self drive, and gently steer by exposing them to new things at the right level, they can learn a tremendous amount.
I'll probably open source and Show HN the AI tutor I've been working on for my kids at some point, but working on it has given me a little insight into the problem.
The biggest thing is motivation. First off, if Khanmigo requires them to type and read everything, that's going to get tiring fast for most kids. But I don't know how you could do voice in a school setting - mine uses STT/TTS, but with 20 kids in a room, it'd be chaos - STT accuracy and diarization with 2 is already really challenging.
Motivation is helped a bit by following their interest, but it seems like KA is having trouble guiding the kids when they prompt it that way. That was a pretty big issue with mine early on - the kids would talk to it for an hour about whatever topic they were interested in at the time, but it would never branch into something new.
The tutor I'm working on solves it by having a concept graph that covers a lot of learning, from the basics like math, dinosaurs, etc to other developmental topics like 6 year old boundary-pushing humor, and two LLM threads - one that handles the conversational turns, and another one in the background that strategizes and steers the conversational thread by looking at the concept graph connections and considering how ready they are for each, and then injecting steering notes into the conversational thread. Basically system 1 and system 2 thinking. And after sessions, it'll make a basic plan of where to start next time, and what might be interesting to offer up.
I mentioned this in another comment, but I've been really pleasantly surprised at the quality of the tutoring, especially when it bridges into new topics - one of my sons is really into slay the spire, and at different times it’s used that as a launching-off point into probabilities, decision trees, python code of the algorithms he thinks about as he's facing different enemies, and general strategies on different facets, and my other son was really into sharks, which it has bridged into extinct sharks like megalodon, how scientists derive how it looks given cartilage's lower propensity to fossilize, bridging to dinosaurs and their fossils, the K-PG extinction event, how food scarcity filtered for smaller animals like the ancestors of birds, and our small mammalian ancestors. And a whole bunch of other topics.
It's been pretty great in that way, but my biggest open question at the moment is how to get them to engage with it on their own on a more regular basis - they go to it occasionally for random questions, but to get good coverage of that huge knowledge graph would take much more. And fundamentally, I think that human engagement still just has a number of important aspects to it that it's lacking, and I'm not sure if it's possible to replace those well enough.
Which explains the poor engagement you observed. To me it seems like a _technique_ I'd expect a skilled educator to deploy, sparingly in narrow use-cases, when it's nescessary to probe a students interest.
Ha yeah, maybe so. But the main thing is actually Socratic more than just going down rabbit holes, I was summarizing a few extended sessions there. But being Socratic, it also demands thinking, and they’re not always up for that.
Hi Eric, would like to understand how you approach that steering. It's a problem statement I've been working on as well, would like to compare notes. Couldn't find your contact - mine is in my profile.
Yeah, that's weird. I've actually been working on an AI tutor for my kids that I'm thinking about open sourcing, but it drives the conversation in new directions using a concept graph that it can poll via tool use, and find the knowledge frontier for that learner.
It's been fascinating to watch - my kids are really into Slay the Spire, and it had a discussion about a decision tree they use when fighting one of the enemies, and then it used that to bridge to writing some python code and walking them through it. Another time, with dinosaurs, it went with them through the k-pg extinction event, and what really killed the dinosaurs - the kids thought the explosion - it walked them towards the sun dimming, and why food getting more scarce filtered for small mammals, our ancestors, and smaller dinosaurs.
on one hand I wish I would be smart enough to build something like that.
on the other hand, I was playing a lot Slay the Spire few years back and I would love to talk about with my kids while they play. Going from that it is not job of the parent to explain why dinosaurs are extinct?
Ha I love talking with them about it, too, but my 7 yo’s stamina for talking about it is a lot higher than mine. But yeah, not trying to abdicate my parenting role here, just looking to get a little supplemental help, and cover things I forget to sometimes. Also a nice launching point for me to delve deeper into things with them.
It’s still pretty hard to get a contractor to show up and do a good job for less than a king’s ransom. Not that everyone can be a contractor, but there are lots of industries where there aren’t enough workers.
We also need to rebuild our manufacturing supply chains, and there’s a huge amount to be done there.
Guessing some used swamp coolers to save electricity on chillers, and some motivated people decided to make a big stink about it? Now everyone seems to think that DCs inherently use up tons of fresh water.
They are definitely driving up electric costs for residential customers, though (along with EVs and heat pumps) which is a major problem.
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