For what its worth, Anthropic posted this in their corporate blog. So if its a joke, its coming out of vetted corporate PR.

Given its current state, this is a singularly bad idea.

By customer is easy: they’re each renting specific resources. A fractional cloud instance (excepting the sma burst able ones) is tied to specific CPUs and GPUs. And there are records of who rented which one when being kept already.

You might not be able to break out specific individual queries, but computing averages is completely straightforward

You can produce a remarkably good estimate by looking at CPU and GPU utilization out of procfs and profiling a handful of similar machines power use with similar utilization and workloads.

Network is less than 5% of power use for non-GPU loads; probably less for GPU.

Data center demand has created huge backlog of gas turbine orders. They’re not planning on renewables for the next big expansion

They know exactly what the power consumption of that hardware is though. This isnt tough to figure out just because you use a cloud provider

I’m guessing that there are security guards.

They also burn methane gas, not gasoline, which means that sugar probably isn’t an effective sabotage technique.

They mass imprisonment and cultural destruction is a more recent phenomenon. China first spent several decades bringing in colonists and executing those who complained too loudly.

Meanwhile, in the real world

The New York Times has been covering Uyghur issues since 2001.

Context for those who dont know it:

The absence of sparrows, which traditionally kept locust populations in check, allowed swarms to ravage fields of grain and rice. The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962. The death toll from starvation during this period reached 20 to 30 million people

A large part of what they do is research. Taking away a couple billion a year that the government spends on that at Harvard is a big deal, even if the institution can ultimately survive it

Only when they can performatively blow smoke in people’s faces. You can’t do that with a hot water heater.

All you have to do is click through to the lawsuit they link

STATE OF NEW YORK; COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS; STATE OF ARIZONA; STATE OF CALIFORNIA; STATE OF COLORADO; STATE OF CONNECTICUT; STATE OF DELAWARE; DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA; STATE OF ILLINOIS; STATE OF MAINE; STATE OF MARYLAND; THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN; STATE OF MINNESOTA; STATE OF NEW JERSEY; STATE OF NEW MEXICO; STATE OF OREGON; STATE OF RHODE ISLAND; and STATE OF WASHINGTON

In short, most of the ones with a Democrat as Attorney General

The concerns are big enough that Waltz is being shunted off to the UN instead of being allowed to stay where he is.

Signal makes it believable by providing source code and reproducible builds. It doesn’t rule out the possibility that they’ve done something clever with the random number generator, or have the app store you use give you a compromised app, or provide any protection against endpoint compromise, but it’s about as good as you can get.

Third party apps derived from theirs, which explicitly promise to log all your messages to a server somewhere, like TeleMessage, are, for obvious reasons, far less trustworthy.

It looks like a planned gradual turnup

I’m pointing to an old one because the causes are well known, there isn’t any current propaganda campaign to confuse people about it, and its a wide-area unanticipated failure.

That kind of facility tends to have its own backup power, often with a week or so of fuel stockpiled on-site.

Back when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a period where the only building with power was a datacenter. The lights prompted soldiers to break in, and the system admin wound up having to pretend that they’d discovered evidence of somebody nefarious forcing the door, so they’d clear the building and leave.

I think that one is coming from the UK Daily Mail which is generally unreliable.