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 The design load for a dwelling is set by building regs, so they're all designed to the same value.
Oct 23, 2026, 6:19 AM@Rhube @sindarina @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin My university had a hall of residence with a swimming pool in the basement. Except they calculated the depth of foundations without the weight of the water in the pool.
Somebody noticed after the swimming pool had been built but before the upper storeys had been built. So it stopped just above ground level. Basically a giant slab with pipes sticking out the top with a swimming pool below.
@sjjh @Rhube @sindarina @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I feel this is getting Monty python, but my uni's main building ( now grade 2 listed I believe) was designed with a swimming pool on the top floor. Until someone calculated then weight. In the end it became a sports/exam hall with an unusually high window placement and balcony.
Oct 23, 2026, 8:58 AM@rgammans @sjjh @sindarina @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I never knew so many universities had just as many engineering disasters as my own! 🤣
@Rhube @rgammans @flyingpenguin @lackthereof @sjjh @sindarina LOL this is like those people that setup pools on their roofs without realising it will collapse the roof (something so common that it was fucking parodied by SpongeBob). The worst though is apartment owners setting them up in the balcony
@Rhube I do know of a duck pond in a park that had no means to be emptied for cleaning, and a [don't remember] converted to a club, that architecture students refused to step one foot into @sindarina @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin
@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, 10:23 PM@azonenberg @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin "Inadequately ventilated server closet" has been a problem at least once for every single job I've ever had over the past 30 years.
@flyingpenguin @azonenberg @zwol @lackthereof see in Colorado this was understood. I think the natural inclination of not having AC here in the Netherlands misleads people about the specing. Previous office's AC was struggling hard too but we didn't have a separate lab space. In fact it struggled so bad it kept cutting out causing people to wander over to the thermostat on a support pole (directly behind my desk) and poke it to get it to kick back on
@azonenberg @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin I feel like the requirements would be clearer if they used kW instead of kBTU/hr
@artemist @azonenberg @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin with those numbers this was no doubt more a home and small business installer, BTUs is what that tends to run on - but when he showed them power consumption in kW they would have understood they misunderstood what was being specced for.
@hatter @artemist @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin yeah showing them multiple kW of 24/7 load is what finally got them to realize lol
@hatter @artemist @Lunaphied @lackthereof @flyingpenguin that minisplit is going to get ripped out hopefully soon though because i really want to put in a commercial VRF system to heat the house with waste lab heat in the winter
@azonenberg what on earth are you doing in your garage that eats kW continuously?
@fivetonsflax @azonenberg I can’t speak for the OP, but here’s what’s going on in my garage.
@flyingpenguin @azonenberg @lackthereof I do wonder just how much the heat output of my non/server but decently chonky desktop factors into things. Need to start measuring power consumption but considering it's just a fancy heating element I'd be surprised if the number wasn't "fuck you"
@Lunaphied @flyingpenguin @lackthereof Yeah i've been gradually rolling out increasingly thorough power metering around my lab and it's definitely been eye opening where the energy is *actually* going. I've already had some surprises
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.
@azonenberg T&M?