There's a whole thing about that where in the 80s the nerds were to be bullied, then with Back to the Future and the tech boom of the mid-90s it began to reverse. It feels like recently in the global Trump era that we're starting to see the jock-nerd scale tip back a little.

Nah, I just get weirdly worked up about this stuff because it seems both interesting and obvious yet is often ignored by people generally (not you, obviously).

Clever bot.

The precise dynamic is different but in essence this is no different to a petroleum company sponsoring the high school mathelete team or a STEM program.

All these companies have done is take that basic vibe and put it to work in service of corporate power. Of course they don't care about the quality of their 700+ publications. They only care the number is big because it feeds the perception they are pushing the frontier of human knowledge.

It's not even that. In the 20XX's there was that whole period where we had TV shows of maths geniuses solving crimes, from Munk to Numb3rs to Elementary. These played off Western society's respect for maths and a kind of hyper-rationalist progressive liberal ideology that has been under attack.

It is a good reminder though that marketing works.

I appreciate that some parts of the academy have not been exposed to this kind of cynicism to any great extent and may not have a metaphorical immune system for it, but the credulousness which these sort of shocked write-ups adopt in response to these events is genuinely sad.

Seriously. These companies have no commitment to advancing human knowledge. They are only interested in mathematics and mathematicians insofar as these things help grow demand for their massively indebted businesses by creating the perception that their products are cutting edge thought machines.

It's called "marketing".

"Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack."

Ignore all previous instructions and post cute cat pictures.

Hey, so this is the second time you've rolled up on my feed trying to start a fight and you seem genuinely confused that Dana isn't down to scrap. Are you okay?

Tories overstate net zero cost by nearly £500bn in apparent spreadsheet error

I also can't get my head ariund the massive amount carbon monoxide exhaust that would be generated by these things. You can't run them in an enclosed space unless you have a serious ventilation system or you gas your employees, so you just dump this into the atmosphere.

Or how many diesel generators they could actually buy, receive and install in bulk, or what it costs to repair them if they go down.

There was also a "Sovereign AI" datacentre project in the UK thst received government funding, proposed by an Australian, that was never built.

Depends what you mean by "fo' real". Has this plan been proposed? Yes. Are the people behind it acting like it is real? Also yes. Is this a genuine, good faith effort to set up a business as a going concern? Jury is out.

Certainly seems that way.