But the US not being allowed to use the bases it pays and maintains for Spain makes it questionable why it does so in the first place. Iran is in fact a threat relevant to NATO considering most of it is/was within ballistic missile range. It's also a simple fact that Iran's manufacturing base has been supporting Russia's war machine, which has been a key contributing factor in the Ukrainian stalemate. There is some genuine strategic overlap.

Restricting air space on top of that, makes me, originally a more sympathetic American NATO supporter, question the dynamics here. Why should the US help Spain when it's in need in a future conflict?

I don't want Isreal dragging us into wars for it's personal benefit. But this whole conflict has really got me realizing I don't want Europe dragging us into any wars either. The only transactional benefit to those air bases is that they power American global logistics. If this becomes a pattern then I think NATO will likely become nothing more than a nuclear umbrella, even after Trump leaves office. And only as a hedge against nuclear proliferation.

People take for granted that Biden was technically the most Pro-NATO president we have ever had, and likely ever will.

"Who does Spain need defending from?" Nobody, because of the security architecture my tax dollars built. That's not evidence the bases are a favor to us. That's evidence they worked. You're welcome. And if they can't be used when it matters, I won't lose any sleep if they get closed.

France? Portugal? Andorra??

The bases are a remnant of American imperialism, they serve no purpose but to further American interest. Any pretension they do anything else can only be explained as late imperial delusion of grandeur.

The fact the Spanish don't let you use them to engage in your unforced act of historic self harm can be seen as yet another favor.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. There's only one war in Europe right now and it's between two neighbors.

Y'all bombing brown people again is not a war or a threat to us, it's just something we'd rather not be part of.

Why lie like this? I linked the agreement; the US doesn't maintain everything.

"Each Party shall bear the costs of operation and maintenance of services and installations, or parts thereof, referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article which it uses exclusively, as well as the identifiable direct costs for its use of jointly used installations and general services of the base."

"The bases listed in Annex 2 of this Agreement shall be under Spanish command... Consistent with the provisions of Article Sixteen, the security of each base shall be the responsibility of the Commander of the each base... The functioning and maintenance of general services and installations of the base, and the management of provisioning for these services and installations shall be the responsibility of the Commander of the base, who shall assure to the United States forces the availability-of these services and installations under conditions which guarantee the operations of United States units. To discharge this responsibility and promptly and effectively resolve any contingency, the Commander of the base will seek the collaboration of the United States forces. The general services and installations of a base are those which characterize it as such and are essential to the operability of the units."

> Restricting air space on top of that, makes me, originally a more sympathetic American NATO supporter, question the dynamics here. Why should the US help Spain when it's in need in a future conflict?

The Iran War is one of aggression, and Spain justifiably wants to be left out of it. https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/coll...

NATO is a defensive alliance, and specific to... the North Atlantic in theory. (In fact, Hawaii isn't even covered under the NATO setup. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/29/us/nato-treaty-hawaii-intl-hn...)

The only country in history to invoke Article 5 was the US after 9/11. Spain stepped up, as expected of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan...

The coalition for Afghanistan was voluntary. This isn't even that, it's just flying our planes over Spain's airspace.

Even as a joint contributor I see no reason for the US to pay for bases it's never going to be allowed to use.

> After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Allies invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the collective-defense clause, for the first time in NATO's history.

No LLM needed, nor used. Direct from the US State Department!

> Even as a joint contributor I see no reason for the US to pay for bases it's never going to be allowed to use.

It continues to be able to use them. It has never been allowed to use them for things Spain finds objectionable.

I'm not clear on how a semantic quibble that amounts to "Spain and the rest of Europe proactively affirmed their Article 5 obligations to the US" helps your case here. You have, if anything, effectively demonstrated Spain's commitment to the agreement.

> The United States has never activated article 5

The US didn't activate it. It was:

> The decision to invoke NATO's collective self-defense provisions was undertaken at NATO's own initiative, without a request by the United States

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_NATO_Article_5_contingenc...

Regardless, article 5 was activated _on behalf_ of the US, if not at the US's request.

Which isn't the situation being imposed by Spain. They're being told they can't use the airspace for one specific military action. They maintain use of their bases in other ways (training, presumably ship refueling, maintenance, etc). They may be able to use the airspace for _other_ military actions in the future.

Still, I feel like they were pretty rude to this guy for no real reason. I don't think I'd want to work with them.

As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.

In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.

Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.

Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.

We're already seeing people use AI to express themselves in several contexts, but it doesn't lead to an increased range of styles. It leads to one style, the now-ubiquitous upbeat LinkedIn tone.

Theoretically we could see diversification here, with different tools prompting towards different voices, but at the moment the trend is the opposite.

Guttural vocalizations accompanied by frantic gesturing towards a mobile device, or just silence and showing of LLM output to others?

That said, if most people turn into hermits and start living in pods around this period, then I think you would be in the right direction.

While sometimes I do dump a bunch of scratch work and ask for it to be transformed into organized though, more often I find that I use LLM output the opposite way.

Give a prompt. Save the text. Reroll. Save the text. Change the prompt, reroll. Then going through the heap of vomit to find the diamonds. Sort of a modern version of "write drunk, edit sober" with the LLM being the alcohol in the drunk half of me. It can work as a brainstorming step to turn fragments of though into a bunch of drafts of thought, then to be edited down into elegant thought. Asking the LLM to synthesize its drafts usually discards the best nuggets for lesser variants.

I've see some argue that a hypothetically buggy router would somehow be less likely to fail if NAT was used but really, that could be equally said about bad port formatting defaults, which have in fact happened. Complexity is what increases the likelihood of bugs at the end of the day.

NAT is just an addressing hack, a weirdly complex way of indirectly routing to local addresses. It only influences what is written on the envelope, not how that envelope is processed at the post office.

This trips up a lot of people, and I think it's because NAT was probably their first real exposure to networking. When that happens, you end up building all your mental models around NAT as the baseline, even though NAT itself is really just a workaround for address space limitations.

What's interesting is that someone with no networking background who thinks of it like a postal system (packets are letters that get forwarded through various routing centers from source to destination) would actually have a more accurate mental model of how IP networking fundamentally works. The NAT-centric view we all learned first can actually make the basics harder to understand, not easier.

So they're sitting on real estate with access to massive amounts of water, electricity, and high bandwidth network connections. Seems like that combination of resources could be useful for a lot of other things beyond just data centers.

Like you could probably run desalination plants, large scale hydroponic farms, semiconductor manufacturing, or chemical processing facilities. Anything that needs the trifecta of heavy power, water infrastructure, and fiber connectivity could slot right in.

Depending on where, and (more importantly) when you last read about this, there's been some developments. The original book that started this had a unit conversion error, and the reported numbers were off by about 4500x what the true numbers are (author claimed 1000 times more water than an entire city consumption, while in reality it was estimated at ~22% of that usage).

The problem is that we're living in the era of rage reporting, and corrections rarely get the same coverage as the initial shock claim.

On top of this, DCs don't make water "disappear", in the same way farming doesn't make it disappear. It re-enters the cycle via evaporation. (also, on the topic of farming, don't look up how much water it takes to grow nuts or avocados. That's an unpopular topic, apparently)

And thirdly, DCs use evaporative cooling because it's more efficient. They could, if push came to shove, not use that. And they do, when placed in areas without adequate water supply, use regular cooling.

Still, I do feel there must be some difference between farming and cooling use by evaporation. As at least part of water is run off back to rivers and then seep back to ground water. These again depend largely on location.

My point is simple: the utility infrastructure is the hard part. The silicon sitting on raised floors is disposable and will be obsolete in a few years. But the power substations, fiber connections, and water infrastructure? That takes years to permit and build, and that's where the real value is.

Building that infrastructure (trenches for water lines, electrical substations, laying fiber) is the actual constraint and where the long term value lies. Whether they're running GPUs or something else entirely, industries will pay for access to that utility infrastructure long after today's AI hardware is obselete.

You're lecturing me about evaporative cooling efficiency while completely missing the point.

(I recommend this video by Hank Green on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc . Water usage of data centers is a complex and quite localized concern, not something that's going to be a constant across every deployment)

I don't see any reasonable path moving forward for these datacenters for the amount of money that they have invested.

And all other industries also don't really seem to me to have any overlap with the datacenter industry as much aside from having water access and land and electricity but like I doubt that they would get used enough to be justified their costs, especially the costs of the overpriced GPU's and ram and other components

In my opinion, These large datacenters are usually a lost cause if the AI bubble bursts since they were created with such a strong focus of GPU's and other things and their whole model of demand is related to AI

If the bubble bursts, I think that auctioning server hardware might happen but I doubt how much of that would be non-gpu / pure compute related servers or perhaps gpu but good for the average consumer.

Groq is more of a hardware focused company.