I got hauled into a data center today because Claude was used to spec it and screwed up badly. At least 2,500 GPUs were in an impossible upside down and backwards plan.
😱
I had to pause the call because I couldn't stop laughing. AI had sabotaged the AI datacenter spec for building more AI.
H: so we have nine B300
Me: you have 89, add the rows.
H: we do? and is there a bottleneck?
Me: 64 GPUs of capacity for your 712 GPU? yeah, more like a bottle without a neck.
H: oh. so what do data centers usually do?
🤣
H: Claude spec's air-cooled endrow
Me: Middle
H: Claude says end
Me:
H: Not end? Claude wrong?
Me: Claude is thinking 100m of Cat6. Did you tell it 800G and just 3m?
H: Oh, middle cabinet. But why, again?
:swearing:
@flyingpenguin
At work, sales has had to roll out a new "we'll review your site for you" service, because apparently so many customers have been buying our iron, taking delivery, racking and stacking it, then realizing they can't actually turn it on because they don't have the electricity infrastructure to run it.
Like literally, 8 and 9-digit dollar values of servers purchased with no way for the customer to run them.
@lackthereof @flyingpenguin unrelated to AI (I assume) but our electronics lab at our brand new office building isn't keeping up with climate control (which is not killing anything or anyone yet but it is mildly uncomfortable after awhile and sweating into the electronics while soldering isn't ideal).
But the reason is that apparently the electricity capacity for the additional cooling isn't there yet and some other essential sounding thing will need to be taken offline which. WHAT. You built a brand new office and didn't fully spec power???
@Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I suspect this is quite common 😬
Oct 23, 2026, 3:32 AM@sindarina @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin The university I went to, rumour was that when they built the library they didn't take into account the weight of all the books.
They also made Central Hall to be a concert venue, but discovered it wasn't safe for students to jump up and down to rock music in.
And there was a water tower you could neither take the water out of, nor put more in. (This was dismantled while I was there. RIP Chemistry Mushroom, gone but not forgotten.)
@Rhube @sindarina @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I've heard of multiple cases of libraries that didn't account for the weight of the books in the design. Meanwhile in my apartment I'm like "how could the designers possibly know how much weight an individual tenant will load with their belongings?"
@Lunaphied Larger buildings such as offices generally have a pretty standard average load rating per square metre, around 500 kg or so IIRC?
Which is fine for regular usage, but not for heavier loads, like libraries, or server racks.
I reckon it’s less of an issue for apartments, since the unsupported span is generally much shorter.
But yes, I have also wondered 😂
Oct 23, 2026, 6:56 AM@sindarina @Lunaphied @Rhube @lackthereof @flyingpenguin human designers typically overspec by a wide margin, especially when lives, or other valuable things are on the line. In my experience when someone's whipping out a pencil, notebook and calculator the majority just refuse to fire up their brains. The percentage of people willing to think is lower than the percentage of people willing to try, which has scared the shit out of me more than once . A bad human design looks bad at first sight, usually. AI design looks polished. So humans, on average, are not fit to check an AI design.
Btw, it is theoretically possible to take appartment buildings down by establishing cast iron collections in them. But I've yet to see a rent contract that explicitly forbids that. As the world is getting stupider, I worry about such things 🤣
@Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I mean this is very common for folks who dont understand the power demands of IT and T&M gear.
When I air conditioned the garage that turned into my lab the contractor tried to spec like a 5K BTU/hr window unit or equivalent. I very rapidly talked them out of that stupidity showing my calculations for expected thermal loading and we put in a 18K BTU/hr minisplit.
Which has been struggling to keep up some summers.
Oct 22, 2026, 10:50 PM@azonenberg @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I was part of a startup back in 2008. We were initially running out of one suite in a small office building. Over the summer we installed a rack of servers for QA runs. The QA folks sweat like mad for a week or two in their crowded room. Finally I went to take a look out of curiosity. I stared at the thermostat for a minute, and then I flipped it from "heat" to "cool" which, hilariously, solved the problem.
@blp @azonenberg @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin Hope you got a raise out of that rather than a job title change.
@flyingpenguin at this point I think I’m viewing AI as very much the computer industry’s enthusiastic failson — just like real failsons they’re extremely expensive, unwarrantedly confident in their abilities, and do a lot of stuff that looks like work but isn’t and that requires more work to fix than just having someone competent do the work right in the first place.
AI doing AI to build more places for AI reminds me of the old days of photocopies. the more times you photocopied, the worse it got.
Oct 22, 2026, 8:42 PM@paul_ipv6 @flyingpenguin the unattended recursion explains so much