Comment by 9rx

Comment by 9rx 15 hours ago

> Yep, we are (unfortunately) still running on railroad infrastructure built a century ago.

That which survived, at least. A whole lot of rail infrastructure was not viable and soon became waste of its own. There was, at one time, ten rail lines around my parts, operated by six different railway companies. Only one of them remains fully intact to this day. One other line retained a short section that is still standing, which is now being used for car storage, but was mostly dismantled. The rest are completely gone.

When we look back in 100 years, the total amortization cost for the "winner" won't look so bad. The “picks and axes” (i.e. H100s) that soon wore down, but were needed to build the grander vision won't even be a second thought in hindsight.

palmotea 15 hours ago

> That which survived, at least. A whole lot of rail infrastructure was not viable and soon became waste of its own. There was, at one time, ten rail lines around my parts, operated by six different railway companies. Only one of them remains fully intact to this day. One other line retained a short section that is still standing, which is now being used for car storage, but was mostly dismantled. The rest are completely gone.

How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable? If they lasted (say) 50 years instead of 100, because that much rail capacity was (say) obsoleted by the advent of cars and trucks, that's still pretty good.

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9rx 14 hours ago

> How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable?
Records from the time are few and far between, but, from what I can tell, it looks like they likely weren't ever actually viable.
The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.
Imagine where the LLM businesses would be if the government paid for all the R&D and training costs!

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- Spooky23 13 hours ago
  
  Railroads were pretty profitable for a long time. The western long haul routes were capitalized by land transfers.
  What killed them was the same thing that killed marine shipping — the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.
  
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  9rx 12 hours ago
  
  > the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.
  The age of postwar suburb growth would be more commonly attributed to WWII, but the records show these railroads were already losing money hand over fist by the WWI era. The final death knell, if there ever was one, was almost certainly the Great Depression.
  But profitable and viable are not one and the same, especially given the immense subsidies at play. You can make anything profitable when someone else is covering the cost.
  
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- jcranmer 10 hours ago
  
  > The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.
  Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads. (Some state governments did provide some of the initial capital for the earliest railroads). Most of federal largess to the railroads came in the form of land grants, but even the land grant system for the railroads was remarkably limited in scope. Only about 7-8% of the railroad mileage attracted land grants.
  
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  9rx 8 hours ago
  
  > Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads.
  Did I, uh, miss a big news announcement today or something? Yesterday "around my parts" wasn't located in the US. It most definitely wasn't located in the US when said rail lines were built. Which you even picked up on when you recognized that the story about those lines couldn't have reasonably been about somewhere in the US. You ended on a pretty fun story so I guess there is that, but the segue into it wins the strangest thing ever posted to HN award. Congrats?
  
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lesuorac 15 hours ago

If 1/10 investment lasts 100 years that seems pretty good to me. Plus I'd bet a lot of the 9/10 of that investment had a lot of the material cost re-coup'd when scrapping the steel. I don't think you're going to recoup a lot of money from the H100s.

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9rx 14 hours ago

Much like LLMs. There are approximately 10 reasonable players giving it a go, and, unless this whole AI thing goes away, never to be seen again, it is likely that one of them will still be around in 100 years.
H100s are effectively consumables used in the construction of the metaphorical rail. The actual rail lines had their own fare share of necessary tools that retained little to no residual value after use as well. This isn't anything unique.

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- munk-a 14 hours ago
  
  H100s being thought of as consumables is keen - it much better to analogize the H100s to coal and chip manufacturer the mine owner - than to think of them as rails. They are impermanent and need constant upkeep and replacement - they are not one time costs that you build as infra and forget about.
  
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