This is something, but it is not enough. I live in Virginia. Virginia has been increasingly importing more and more electricity from West Virginia (coal) and Pennsylvania (natural gas) to power new data centers. Between 2019 and 2023, imports grew 61% [1]. Even though Virginia has been building out solar and offshore wind, between 2023 and 2025 low carbon electricity (renewables + nuclear) actually decreased as a % of the energy mix (28% to 26%) [2]. Virginia won’t commit to building the clean energy generation needed to power the data centers and it won’t build fossil fuel powered generation (which is on paper something I agree with). So it imports the electricity that is both dirty and expensive, and we pay for it. It’s the coward’s way out.
The post says the purpose of exploring this space (which is a fun one) wasn't speed, but representation. The speed gain was an added value.
I'm not saying SQLite's varint implementation is ideal for every application. It's just an implementation that is one of the most used implementations, if not the most (I'd bet it is by a large margin though). It just seemed like a missed opportunity to compare it with the implementation they landed on.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, thanks for sharing that link. Interesting!
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, it makes me furious to receive my electricity bill and see that even though I used less electricity than the same month last year, I am paying significantly more. And this happens every year.
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
This echoes some of my biggest gripes about data centers:
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
So true. A legislator in Virginia finally pitched ending the tax credit that brought all the data centers to VA in the first place, and I hope it passes (I know it won’t). But seeing the upcoming rate increases already on the books and the number of data centers they are planning to build is pushing me to consider solar again. The payback time is getting shorter and shorter :)
Putting aside the fact that no company should have direct access to anyone's brain, how cool would it be to be building toward VISOR (from TNG) instead of this. If we could translate sensor signals to the neural circuitry of the brain directly, we wouldn't even need an LLM in the mix. But to have it as an overlay, as supplementary data! With the ability to turn it off of course. (Would a person even be able to turn it off? In the same sense as whether someone can "turn off" social media?) If only we had meaningful human rights and institutions that really protected them... I still can't fully give up the techno-optimism that made me love tech in the first place (and TNG for that matter).
And if you look very closely, you can see just the tiniest bit of backbone growing in the backs of the Democratic congresspeople. If they continue to nurture this growth, they may even be able to sit up straight. That would be a marked improvement over their current situation of lying on the floor and letting the GOP walk all over them.
Hopefully this time it lasts - over the past 10+ years I've witnessed them occasionally find it, only to lose it again relatively quickly. Now the stakes are too high to repeat this pattern.
It's better than caving, but it's the least conceivable quantum of backbone. We're talking Cambrian Explosion levels of backbone, and I expect any further growth will proceed at about the same pace.
I switched from caffeine (coffee) to theacrine (pills) and I like it so much more. I feel alert and focused without added anxiety. It doesn’t seem to affect my sleep at all. I really didn’t like how hard it was to quit coffee.
I don’t like that it’s a pill. I tried making my own theacrine drinks, but theacrine is so bitter that I never found one that I liked. I am still haunted by the chicory + theacrine drink I made…
As someone who lives in Northern Virginia, there are definitely ongoing jobs, but in this area they are mostly filled with H1B workers. The real money is in development
I agree with you. People are far too optimistic. On a practical level, though, how much of these increasing issues can be temporarily ameliorated by better ventilated houses, schools, offices, etc.? In other words, does reducing the average exposure of CO2 help or is it really about the outdoor level? I could see the average mattering, but I could also see how spending time in an environment that is <400ppm CO2 (basically never happens now) could cause our bodies to rapidly expel CO2 and "reset" our internal levels.
My dire warning is in fact secondary to the climate changes, which are much worse and are already causing regional famines and human migration in the Levant and East African.
People do not appreciate how fragile modern life that we've become accustomed to can be. A few famines, a few supply chain breakdowns, the wrong conflict escalations - together at the wrong time could effectively end homo sapiens as an advanced intelligent species. Our big break was easily accessibly surface hydrocarbons, which we have mostly burned through. That enabled advanced materials science, electrical engineering, metallurgy that all build upon each other. As the species has gotten larger, it allowed greater specialization. If we have a massive drawdown in population as the result of a self-inflicted climate crisis, there is a nontrivial possibility we we never recover to current levels of advancement.
[1] https://cardinalnews.org/2025/01/21/virginia-now-imports-mor...
[2] https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Virginia
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