Can the AI just talk in a lower voice? I don’t see why this is that critical.
The media really can’t get it can they I’m fine with AI having problems, I’m supposed to feel sorry for them upsetting some way but I just don’t.
I’m reading all of these comments with the helium-voice in my head.
So THIS is how they hallucinate.
Never mind AI, MRIs are more important.
At least we have the US Helium Res— dammit, Biden!
The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile. Here’s why the medical world is worried
Dammit, Obama maybe - the act was passed by Congress in 2013.
Clinton was the one that started selling off the helium reserves. Obama signed something that changed shit about it, so he certainly didn’t do anything to help the situation.
Ah, good catch.
Right!? MRI machines need them way more.
Critical for AI
It’s critical for lithography, the process that makes all of the magical chips that make the modern world function.
But because “AI” sells newspapers, they lead with that.
Oh yeah, 100% agree that this is why they do it.
WSJ is corporatist slop, so it’s no surprise they decided to lead with “ai”. Gotta keep pumping the market.
Isn’t WSJ directly own by Bezos himself, or am I confusing them for something else?
That’s The Washington Post. WSJ is Murdoch.
Ah, close enough. Both are owned by billionaires who have everything to gain from distorting the truth
Also MRIs
“Let’s get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!”
I realize there are benefits to attacking Iran, but it’s still wrong.
Can I remind everyone that it is impossible to produce helium in a practical way?
It is literally only produced through a fusion reaction, and that happens in stars and in incredibly tiny quantities in fusion reactors.
Whenever it’s released, it basically just floats away into space and is lost forever.
It’s also produced (slowly) through radioactive decay underground where it becomes trapped with other gasses. That’s the reserve we’ve been working with.
Jupiter contains lots and lots of Helium that just needs to scooped up from the atmosphere.
The one we can mine is drawn off together with natural gas, and was produced over geological timescales as product of alpha decay of uranium
Can I remind everyone that it is impossible to produce helium in a practical way?
Sun has been doing it for millions of years and it’s a big dumb ball of energy.
Is it practical? No. Is it producing any Helium right now? No. Is it probably just a big investor scam? Sure. But still more practical than trying to conquer Iran.
That doesn’t actually sound like they intend on producing usable helium though. That sounds like they intend on doing a really difficult and expensive fusion reaction to produce helium 3, which they will then use in a cheaper and easier to do fusion reaction, and the end result of all of that should be electricity and no net new helium since it’s expensive and rare AF and they need it all to make the whole process remotely plausibly profitable.
So we just need to get rid of all helium and all billionaires will be gone?
If you get rid of all the helium you don’t have computers or medical imaging anymore.
But I could become a billionaire when my old computers become worth a fortune since there are no new computers!
So it’s going to be rerouted from the MRIs I take it…
AI comes first alphabetically. Sorry!
Ah so google is behond this…
Unfortunately it’s also critical for MRIs.
Yeah, what a crazy headline that AI was the thing mentioned and not 1 of the many other real life uses that offer greater solutions to us.
If only I could believe that’s because MRIs are more important so their supply isn’t in jeopardy.
Because clickbaiting the ‘AI bad’ people is worth more advertising money than actually examining the effects of a helium shortage.
I need more happy birthday balloons.
i wanna do a silly voice
And making your voice sound funny
Sulfur hexafluoride does the opposite:
IIRC it’s also one of the worst greenhouse gasses in existence, unfortunately.
Edit: the worst greenhouse gas. Why are cool things always secretly terrible?
Can you stand upside down to get dense gasses out of your lungs? Asking for a friend
I assume so. Here’s a video of someone floating a boat (apparently in air) in it, and then sinking it by pouring cups of sulfur hexafluoride over it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2NaYRnRGo
If it avoids diffusing into air to the degree that you can scoop it up and pour it, I’d imagine that it’d pour out of one’s lungs the same way.
But if you just want to get most of it out of your lungs — like, you’ve been breathing it and don’t want to asphyxiate — I imagine that exhaling all the air you can and inhaling air and doing that a few times would probably do a pretty good job, the way the Mythbusters video above did with the helium.
Maybe we’ll get lucky, and by the time the helium supply is restored, we’ve done away with the shitty not-really-AI craze, saving more helium for things of use to humanity.
Maybe this is why they’re now ramping up going back to the moon? Gonna start fuckin the moon up for all that sweet Helium 3.
We could be at war with Iran for a century, sending strike teams in to siphon helium out of the ground and smuggle it back to the US in stealth jets and submarines, and it would still be significantly cheaper than trying to mine the moon.
I sure hope not. I saw how that went in the Time Machine remake!
They were blasting to build luxury condos iirc
Okay, but do you really think we’re going to prioritize the enormous loss-leading CSAM engines over lifesaving medical diagnostics machines?
I trust our leaders to make the right decisions. Just a small bump in the road or two lately, that’s all.
Thanks for reminding me of the date
Oh, I’ll be damned. Didn’t even dawn on me.
Yes, yes we are.
My understanding is that MRIs don’t consume helium, in the same way air conditioning units don’t consume refrigerant, so helium is only needed for making new MRI machines.
New ones, and not all if them, work this way, as in there’s tiny helium condensing unit. Older ones just let it go and require topping up every couple months (guessing by how often helium in NMR is topped up). Also every emergency shutdown invariably blows off all of helium inside
It’s not like its really used on AI inference, but it’s used in high grade semiconductor manufacturing. so helium shortage will hit anything with a modern semiconductors in it. So it’s not “whatever”.
Have you missed what all the fucking semiconductors are being bought up for the past year or so?
Yeah and they will keep begin bought by AI companies, even if the production sags. If the prices were unaffordable now they will be even more so if there is a real production choke. They can keep tossing few extra billions to keep the bubble going, you and I cannot compete with that.
That is, by no means, all of the semiconductors being produced.
It’s not “whatever”, it’s “anyway” /jk
This is bad news that feels like good news. Like when your house burns down, but it kills your abusive parents, so you’re kind of happy about it because it means you didn’t have to go through with your plans, and it means you don’t have to become a murderer after all.
And you have all that money saved up, and you already got that scholarship to college, and you can just move on with your life without any of those chains tying you to them in your former life…
So, really, what’s the actual fucking problem here? no more birthday balloons? Boo fucking hoo. My shitty parents never threw me a birthday party anyway.
Helium is needed for MRIs.
No more medical imaging.
No more fibre optics.
No more semiconductors.
No more laparoscopic or eye surgery.
No more hard drives.
No more titanium.
No more rockets.Ehrm excuse me sir or madame, are other pc parts also affected or is it just hard drives?
semiconductor manufacturing uses helium so that’s a big 10-4
I feel like you weren’t really listening to what I had to say
Tell me: when you read my post, what did you hear?
How did that translate in your head?
You asked:
So, really, what’s the actual fucking problem here?
That’s what they heard.
They answered:
No more medical imaging.
No more fibre optics.
No more semiconductors.
No more laparoscopic or eye surgery.
No more hard drives.
No more titanium.
No more rockets.That’s what you didn’t hear I guess.
You guessed wrong
What they didn’t hear is the problems of society that the blind pursuit of commercial mining of minerals causes society.
But when commercial profit is your only motive, fuck people, right? Who gives a shit about them?
While I agree that the blind pursuit of capital will ultimately be our downfall, but helium shortages actually have real, tangible effects on the very people you seem to vouch for.
I feel you’re lashing out for the mere sake of lashing out, regardless of who your target is. We’re on the side here.
I think your untreated trauma is negatively affecting how you treat the people around you.
We all have untreated trauma.
I think the carelessness with which corporations pursue commercial mining profits traumatically affects society.
Blaming me, an individual, just for pointing that out, is pretty ridiculous.
That was a trip.
I’d like to think that I’m happy but it’s only partly true— the truth is that I’m simply relieved.
I suppose that the lesson here is… Everyone is damaged, and you never really know someone. You can’t. Everyone deserves a hug.
Yeah, like when your peice of shit abusive husband dies drunk driving do you don’t have to worry about your search history or Netflix watch list.
And you weren’t even really into true crime anyway but it was kind of nice seeing what mistakes other people made and your peice of shit husband thinks it’s dumb so you can get some peace.
Anyway, yeah, feels like it should be good cuz fuck AI but it’s gonna effect lots of other things too.
Knowing your abusive husband was a piece of shit just because you saw other people like him being called a piece of shit on some true crime show on Netflix gives you validation, but he was a piece of shit anyway, whether you saw that true crime show or not. And AI is evil, whether you read it on Reddit or not.
Truth doesn’t need to be validated for it to be true. It just makes you feel better about it. That wasn’t really my point.
what do I laugh when I think about helium and choking
At least some positive news! Fuck AI
If you read the article, it isn’t about AI.
It’s used to cool lithography machines which produce all CPUs, GPUs, RAM, etc. The entire world of electronics is built on the output of these lithography machines.
The headline may as well say “Iran War Chokes Off Helium Supply Critical for Skibidi Toilet memes” Helium isn’t used in AI datacenters, it has nothing to do with AI outside of the fact that every processor is made using lithography.
What a dishonest headline…
It wasn’t technically wrong, but it was deliberately misleading…
Also, I’m so glad I bought my hardware when I did…
I’d guess that most industrial users of helium don’t consume it and could theoretically recover it from whatever process it’s involved in rather than just releasing it.
EDIT: Hard drives being an exception, as apparently some ship helium-filled; there, it’s actually being consumed during the manufacture.
EDIT2: I’d also point out that in the long run, we probably do have to be more conservative with our helium supply. We get it from pockets in the earth. It’s actually not all that common; it just happens, though, that we go to a lot of effort to extract natural gas, and that happens to sometimes also come up with helium, so we get that supply. But because it’s not reactive, it doesn’t bond to anything — it stays in gas form. When we let it go, it heads to near the top of our atmosphere and eventually gets lost to solar wind. Many users who today just release it — because why not, as the natural gas people will be providing more, and it’s cheaper that way — probably will need to capture what they’re using if we want helium to continue to be available.
The problem is that helium is notoriously hard to contain. It’s transported and stored super-cooled, but it still gases off, and to release pressure they just have to release it into the atmosphere. It effectively has a shelf life and so it has to be constantly replenished.
What is it that keeps the underground pockets of helium in place, anyway? Just craptons of stone?
I’m not sure actually. I know it’s usually found with methane and in massive quantities. Maybe just sealed in by rock and time?
This sounds like good news.
It’s not just AI, it’s integrated electronics in general.
