With respect to consumption, it’s pretty efficient vs older traditional servers, though I know workloads like that aren’t completely fungible. Nonetheless it bears keeping in mind that a single GB200 NVL72 rack provides 1.4 ExaFLOPS of AI compute (at FP4 precision, ideal circumstances, but this is envelope math all around). So it’s power efficient, for what it is.

This article is setting up a bit of a moving target. Legal vs legitimate is at least only a single vague question to be defined but then the target changes to “socially legitimate” defined only indirectly by way of example, like aggressive tax avoidance as “antisocial”— and while I tend to agree with that characterization my agreement is predicated on a layering of other principals.

The fundamental problem is that once you take something outside the realm of law and rule of law in its many facets as the legitimizing principal, you have to go a whole lot further to be coherent and consistent.

You can’t just leave things floating in a few ambiguous things you don’t like and feel “off” to you in some way- not if you’re trying to bring some clarity to your own thoughts, much less others. You don’t have to land on a conclusion either. By all means chew over things, but once you try to settle, things fall apart if you haven’t done the harder work of replacing the framework of law with that of another conceptual structure.

You need to at least be asking “to what ends? What purpose is served by the rule?” Otherwise you’re stuck in things where half the time you end up arguing backwards in ways that put purpose serving rules, the maintenance of the rule with justifications ever further afield pulled in when the rule is questioned and edge cases reached. If you’re asking, essentially, “is the spirit of the rule still there?” You’ve got to stop and fill in what that spirit is or you or people that want to control you or have an agenda will sweep in with their own language and fill the void to their own ends.

Audiobooks are a good way to not feel alone in your head.

I’m not counting only soldiers. I didn’t pull these estimates out of thin air they’re not hard to find so I’m not going to take my time.

I’ll say this: the difference isn’t small around this general question, hospitals don’t get bombed every day, and if you’re going to disagree with something that would be commonly known among knowledge among people familiar with a topic if you pause for a moment to reflect then the habit of checking to see if your instinct or sense of a thing is actually correct is a useful habit. Analysis is both a profession for me as well as a habit so I’ll stipulate I could be wrong and would welcome discussion of anything I’ve missed.

That said: things like bombing a hospital is now possible yes but destroying them has ever been so, or simply slaughtering their residents as you march through, and there were far fewer norms against that sort of thing. Much worse things done more often. Deliberate slaughter of non combatants isn’t new. Prohibitions against it arose for a good reason and strong precedent of the practice from times where marching armies were more common and therefore systematic slaughter of this sort more convenient to those inclined. Accidentally or on purpose, giving smallpox via infected blankets to people forcibly removed from their land and marked across thousands of miles is just one variety. Cholera and other disease outbreaks are another.

These too are not unobvious things to if you consider possible modes of death by or adjacent to military campaigns and they too are also not hard to find estimates for.