> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
The new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture
For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.
The city of Kajaani's district heating (northern Finland) is already completely covered by datacenter waste heat from CSC datacenters (and maybe some other ones).
Microsoft's data centre in Espoo is used for district heating.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
> The rolodexes came from the now dispersed collection of former lab employee Ed Grothus, who operated a salvage company of lab cast-offs known as The Black Hole.
Many of my childhood science fair projects started at the black hole. You could always find something weird or interesting, and occasionally hot, while browsing through the place
Somewhere around 2004 I had an experience at the black hole that still amuses me.
I was digging through the store when I found a full pallet of computer punch cards. As a computer science undergrad, I thought, “ how cool, I want a bunch to use as bookmarks, or whatever”.
I went to haggle with Ed, and he outright refused to sell me any. He said he wouldn’t break up the pallet. I had to buy all or none…
That place is (was) a complete madhouse, in all the best possible ways. Piles and piles of crazy electronic bits, many custom builds, many of inscrutable purpose. It was like the prop room for 50s/60s pulp sci-fi movies.
> the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
100% agreed. Small, cheap, and hosted models. Luna (and open weight models and others) is ridiculously cheap @ $0.2/$1.2, easily accessible, and more than good enough for basic use cases (e.g. summarization, simple tool calling, etc.).
I just set up Tailscale as I've been hosting more personal apps off a small Hetzner VM and wanted a really simple personal networking solution. Works great, would recommend.
It's really excellent. I've been using Tailscale for a number of years, just for my home network and with a single user, and the service is excellent, and the free tier is incredibly generous.
I'm hoping that my Mullvad subscription (through Tailscale) contributes a little bit at least. Two excellent companies.
I like that there is Headscale as an open-source offering too. I don't use it, but the fact that it exists makes me a lot more comfortable (similar to Bitwarden etc).
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic here. I don't think the slop-acalypse is held back by taste or an appreciation for "thickness". I think there's already very successful slop media in the world (e.g. see microdramas). In other words, it is happening, but like anything else, it's happening in a non-evenly distributed way.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
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