So THIS is how they hallucinate.
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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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.
Ah, good catch.
I realize there are benefits to attacking Iran, but it's still wrong.
what do I laugh when I think about helium and choking
Critical for AI
It's critical for lithography, the process that makes all of the magical chips that make the modern world function.
"Let's get out of here before one of those things kills Guy!"
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.
Also MRIs
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.
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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.
So it's going to be rerouted from the MRIs I take it…
AI comes first alphabetically. Sorry!
This sounds like good news.
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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