Finland has only existed since 1917
You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis.
For Finland, it counts their invasion of what is now Finland during the Anglo-Russian War (1807–1812).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Portuguese_Alliance#Disruption_and_renewal
(The English Armada invaded on behalf of the deposed monarchy.)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26015783
source: https://www.statista.com/chart/3441/countries-never-invaded-by-britain/
source's source: https://archive.org/details/allcountriesweve0000layc/mode/2up
Something that people need to understand is that AI companies (let’s talk about them instead of “AIs” that have no agency) are on a race to use less energy and less water per request for a very simple and selfish reason: it costs money.
I agree here; left to their own devices, money is generally what matters to for-profit companies. Which is why they are mostly continuing to build datacenters (including those that are primarily for "AI") where they do, which is almost entirely in places where they are competing with others for scarce water: because the alternatives are even more expensive.
That's a neat idea, and maybe will be widespread one day.
However that particular experimental project from Microsoft was conceived of in 2013, deployed in 2018, and concluded in 2020. Microsoft is not currently operating or planning to operate any more underwater datacenters: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/
Among things they're doing instead (specifically for AI) is restarting a decommissioned nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a state with (like most states) a long history of conflict related to water scarcity and privatization.
This appears to be the only currently-operating (though the most recent news about it I can find is from 2023) underwater datacenter project, and it is in a certain country where it is somewhat easier for long-term environmental concerns to supersede capitalism's profit motive. It would be great if they can make it an economically viable model which becomes commonplace, but until they do... datacenters today are still extremely thirsty.
when/where are the "built for LLM inference" (😂) datacenters being built where water consumption is not an issue?
Did you even read the second part of my comment before getting mad?
yeah, i did. you wrote:
So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water
if you think it should be easy enough, what is your explanation for why datacenters are continuing to be built in locations where they're competing with agriculture, other industries, and/or residential demand for scarce water resources (as you can read about in the links in my previous comment)?
Fuck I hate it when anything uses “water consumed” as a bad thing.
[...]
This water is not lost in any way, it’s just warmed up and evaporated. Which then falls as rain again.
oh, wow, yeah, evaporated water does fall again as rain 🤔
why didn't anyone think of this before? so many wars could have been avoided!
finally, a hydrology understander has logged on to explain why water usage isn't even a problem. thank you for clearing this up!
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/
While USAID definitely funds/funded many ridiculous things (such as this) they also provide much-needed food and medicine to a lot of people - for cynical politically-motivated soft-power reasons, but still. It seems very likely that abruptly cutting off those programs will cause some people to die. I really hope someone (the PRC seems likely) will step in and replace some of those programs!
i don't usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)
You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis.
Here is the section on Poland
Poland is a country that has seen so much war that when you consider everywhere else we have invaded, you feel vaguely confident that British forces must have seen a lot of action on Polish land or sea. Poland has had endless foreign military units moving through it, but very few of them have been ours, although we have had some conducting operations here.We fought and lost a war against the Hanseatic League in 1470–74 with the Hanseatic port of Danzig (now in present-day Poland) taking a leading role in actions against us.
During the Thirty Years War assorted British troops fighting for foreign rulers roamed parts of what is today Poland. Many of these reached high positions, with the Scot, Major General Sir David Drummond, being made governor of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).
During the Napoleonic Wars, we took part in several operations linked to Danzig, then Prussian. In 1807, we sent ships to assist in the defence of Danzig against the French. The British sloop Falcon tried to help reinforcements get into the besieged city and the eighteen-gun Dauntless, dauntlessly tried to get 150 barrels of gunpowder into it, only, rather unfortunately, to run aground, and even more unfortunately, to do so next to an enemy battery, which not surprisingly shelled the ship until French grenadiers could capture her. Then in 1812, with Danzig occupied by the French, we tried something even more ambitious. Admiral Martin loaded a bunch of soldiers onto British and Russian ships and landed them near Danzig, behind French lines, in a daring manoeuvre.
After the end of the First World War, the Royal Navy was back in Danzig again, while the British Army got involved in its only major operations on Polish soil. Along with units from other Allied nations, our soldiers had the unenviable task of policing assorted plebiscites organised to decide the post-war frontier between Germany and Poland – unenviable because these were regions with mixed German and Polish populations where emotions could run extremely high about which side of the border people would finally be on.
The two major areas where we were involved were Upper Silesia and East Prussia. In East Prussia two British officers found themselves, under an atmosphere of pressure from both sides, in command of the local police. A battalion from the Royal Irish Regiment was also sent to help. When the plebiscite took place on 11 July 1920, most voters opted to be Prussian and the majority of the disputed territory went to Germany.
In Upper Silesia, the situation was even more tense. After a Polish uprising in the area against German control in 1919, an Allied commission including British representatives was sent to the area and a plebiscite took place on 20 March 1920. But the results were mixed and there was disagreement in the Allied camp over how to proceed. In the chaos and confusion, a second Polish uprising took place in August 1920 and a third in 1921. British troops were among the units struggling to bring peace and order to the area, which they eventually achieved. The Allies, however, could still not agree on how to divide the territory, but eventually agreed to hand the decision over to the League of Nations, which decided to hand the majority of Upper Silesia’s industrial heartland to Poland.
It’s one of the ironies of history that everybody could have saved themselves the effort since the disputed areas were generally going to end up as Polish or Soviet territory after the Second World War anyway.
In the Second World War, the SOE conducted assorted operations in Poland and the RAF flew heroic missions to drop supplies to the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising before the city was crushed by the Germans.