Because I can run Qwen 3.6 or DeepSeek V4 until the end of time if I want to? The model is on HuggingFace; anyone can download it. I have Qwen and Gemma on my laptop right now if I want to use them, even if I decide to go be a hermit who never interacts with the outside world again.
That's highly dependent on the area it's in. Where I live, golf courses use no more water than anyone else and aren't irrigated.
The proper answer would be to simply charge appropriate prices for large scale uses of water from the water utility, or else this is a discussion about riparian rights and law and possible changes needed to that.
I'm saying that if you don't like how a golf course is being used, then attend an auction of one, because they are rapidly going out of business and the assets being auctioned off.
America is not suffering from too many golf courses being constructed. They are, rather, going extinct, and I don't really think the mass loss of green spaces and third spaces is necessarily a good thing, even though I'm not someone who enjoys playing golf and don't really spend any time at golf courses.
I don't think I'm smarter than everyone else, but instead attribute this to organisational dysfunction. The problem (that went on for weeks) of the default MDM deployed software making some computers unusable was one everyone who got afflicted by it just found workarounds for, and in particular, our incentives were to get our jobs done, not to make sure we continued to allow the MDM deployed stuff to do whatever it wanted that was actively harmful to the company's best interests.
Considering the MDM was not implemented properly (particularly in an environment where one hires cybersecurity professionals, who are more likely than most to be able to figure out workarounds to it), it would actually be much more prudent to hire trustworthy staff who can be trusted not to steal company assets, trade secrets, and so on versus thinking you can conduct a zoom call on said company asset and then fire off a command via the MDM to wipe the laptop when the call is over.
I actually think the director was pretty smart, since he managed to avoid having an extended conversation about the lack of working MDM and ability to follow the procedure in front of the other person on the zoom call. Sometimes it's very important to be able to read between the lines of what someone is telling you.
Relying on remote wipes to secure company data is not a particularly strong plan, either (as this Apple saga should make clear); a determined person would simply be either constantly exfiltrating data, disconnect a machine from the network before it can be wiped, or other various plans (and do so without detection). I should know, since my job duties there were to advise customers on how to move towards a zero trust environment.
As far as "valuable", the golf course is private property that the owners presumably bought and can do with as they see fit. If you want to develop it into something else, make an offer to them?
The golf courses are a business like any other (although we do have some publicly-owned golf courses around here too). The cost to play 9 holes on a weekday is $10 at one of them. I'm not really sure what you're asking for here.
An obvious question is if the cheap power is going to stay cheap after a large power-user comes in who has a proven track record of trying to make everything cheap for themselves with no regard for anyone else.
Or another question to ask is - how does this data centre benefit the people who live there? If it doesn't, there's no reason they should want one to be built. Rubbish tips are necessary. I still don't want one built next to my house and would fight such a thing tooth and nail.
I once worked at a cybersecurity firm and they had a particularly botched rollout of MDM to Macs (which would regularly put the machine into an undesirable mode of 100% CPU usage plus max out upload bandwidth repeatedly trying and failing to backup the machine to some online backup service). I had work to do, so I simply disabled the MDM profile for the machine, installed an OS to my liking, and restored the apps I wanted to use, and went about things.
A year or so later the company hit hard times and we had a large layoff that affected me, and at the end of the video call, the directory of my department mentioned that they needed to wipe my laptops but it "wasn't showing up in MDM". I said I'd be glad to jump on a call with IT to fix that, but then he mentioned the IT staff were laid off too.
I then suggested I did get hired for my cybersecurity expertise, that I do take my obligations seriously, and he could just ask me to do whatever they were planning to do from the MDM console, and it would get done. He insisted that wouldn't be necessary since in his worldview the MDM was unbreakable and he just needed to reconnect to Wi-Fi or something.
Very amusing worldview. In the real world, where I live, I would assume a highly competent employee could exfiltrate trade secrets without me being able to catch them via standard / automated means. This particular Apple former employee got caught because he bragged about it, not because of technical means to catch him. As I've pointed out to a number of people, the very best DLP solution can be completely obviated by someone aiming a camera at their company-issue workstation's monitor.
I attended an auction of a golf course a few years ago. It went for a few thousand an acre. You could have shown up and bid on it.
The winner ended up just choosing to keep the current employees and keep operating it. Nobody, I mean nobody, wanted the land for development. It was in an era with basically no zoning either.
Nobody wants their electric rates to go up, the local water utility to have to raise rates to build a bigger plant, all in exchange for also losing good white collar jobs. That’s currently what AI data centre builders are selling.
This may sound crazy, but I’m glad the data centre being built near me (the new us-east-3) is being built by Amazon who pays lip service to local government and the community, as opposed to cartoon villain levels of saving a few pennies by forcing noise pollution on everyone else and everything else undesirable the other builders are doing.
Most golf courses around me are open and anyone can go play for a cheap greens fee. The clubhouse has normal low end restaurant prices for a hot dog or a burger.
Russia and China aren’t the ones constantly telling us AI will put us all out of a job, here’s why that’s a good thing, and why the government should dedicate billions of dollars to incumbent AI providers.
Their game? Sell me tokens instead of me buying them from an American lab for a higher price.
Publishing open weights gives me more confidence in the model, and ironically makes me less anxious about making sure I can replace the cloud usage with a local alternative. Whereas I’m very nervous right now with relying on 5.6-Sol - what if they triple the price, nerf it, etc.?
It's worth trying out OpenCode, then oh-my-pi, and also the commercial harnesses like Codex. (I haven't yet bothered to try Antigravity and have no interest in Gemini-cli now that it's not available except on expensive plans.)
pi is also worth tinkering with, particularly if you have an eye towards automating some things.