Earth Day fortnight, and the datacenter-energy question is now the AI buildout’s binding public negotiation. Grid-interconnection queues are still the limiting reagent, three years running. This year’s addition is utility-rate politics: “are residential bills subsidizing hyperscale load” is the recurring local-news investigation, and rate shocks write regulation the same way incidents do. Nuclear’s renaissance proceeds from announcement era to construction era at nuclear’s eternal cadence — the physics is sound, the timelines are the product, and the bridge decade belongs to efficiency and storage. The counter-ledger, because both hands: inference efficiency keeps improving faster than the discourse tracks, so the net is still growing but the composition is shifting the way every infrastructure boom shifts. The boom builds overcapacity, the overcapacity gets priced, the efficiency inherits it.
The fortnight’s real file is a conference talk. The review-first curriculum’s first cohort completed its arc this month — the 2024 juniors are 2026 seniors, two of them now mentor the current cohort, one authored our guardrail-metrics practice. And one gave their first conference talk last week: “What Two Years of Reviewing Machine Output Taught Me About Engineering Judgment.” Forty minutes, full room, and one slide quoting an anonymized proverb I recognized instantly, because I wrote it. The terrified junior who once shook through three slides now watches his own curriculum’s graduates teach the industry. The ladder question was never going to be answered by principals; it’s being answered by the people it was asked about. Proverbs entry 349, logged with attribution: “The tools draft; the judgment ships.”
The calendar: the Champions League knockouts open with PSG’s title defense as the central question — I pre-write nothing and enjoy everything. The World Cup widget ticks under 50 days, and the viewing-room booking war was resolved by a scheduling script someone vibe-coded in an afternoon. Reviewed before deployment, naturally. The era’s tools, solving the era’s problems. Sometimes the calm is just spring.
TIL: PUE has successors. Data-center-era “facility overhead per compute watt” is giving way to work-per-watt-per-query metrics that track efficiency where it actually lives. It’s a rare benevolent Goodhart: the metric is improving faster than anyone can game it. Entry #008 of this blog measured a disk. This one measures a civilization’s thermodynamics. Same discipline: instrument, baseline, drill, grade.