mindcandy

I find what people want from the data center build-out is pretty reasonable:

1. Don't build loud machines across the street from someone's house. 2. Don't drive up water/electricity bills by pulling from the municipal grid. 3. Don't burn the earth with CO2. 4. Don't facilitate techno-fascist surveillance. 5. Pay a lot of taxes.

But, when I see people complain about data centers, I usually see a spiral of rage-bait based on mis-framing, conjecture and repeating stuff others simply made up to get everyone mad. The online discussion tone is reaching a shrieking pink-froth level.

What I'm finding in my lazy research on the subject is that recent and planned datacenters

1. Are exceedingly rarely built where anyone can hear them. But, occasionally are. Thus ragebait articles. 2. Pull from muni grids for small scale centers. But, the hyperscalers are independent. 3. Hyperscalers are burning way too much natural gas. That's bad. But, not using nearly as much water as people think. That's good. 4. Techno-fascist surveillance doesn't need 1000s of datacenters. Just a handful off in the corner is plenty. 5. Datacenters usually are paying a lot of taxes. I think this drives the majority of the push from politicians. And, there's a minority from corruption.

Frankly, the biggest issue folks should be pushing for is to require hyperscalers build out solar power instead of natural gas. That will be a hard fight because it requires more up-front time and investment. From there, ensuring small scale centers don't affect people's bills is a good fight. But, passing laws to ban datacenters seems performative compared to passing laws to regulate their power and water impact.

Good points all around.

Hey! Thanks for the fun, good-faith argument! Such a rarity these days that most folks seem unaware are that arguments even can be collaborative.

I must disagree.

One could argue that a human body with a mostly-functional brain that will never again be conscious is human but not a person. And, simultaneously argue that a few million human stem cells, none of which are neurons yet, is a personified human. But, that would be a clearly inconsistent stance.

And, I’d argue that consensus literally means that a significant population agrees.

Formally and objectively it could be argued that even shortly post-birth, barely-conscious infants lack the required characteristics of an individual person. But, obviously it would require an unacceptable degree of callousness to terminate an infant. Certainly not a practice we agree should be encoded into law in this modern era.

In general, I find the pro-choice consensus to be reasonably conservative regarding the rights of an embryo vs. the rights of a fully-realized mid-life person. Strongly weighted towards the mother before 24 weeks and strongly weighted towards the embryo afterwards. But, if it comes down to the life of the fully-realized person vs. the life of the potential person, the choice goes to the mother. Or, if the potential is clearly a life of suffering and early death, the ethical choice is to reduce suffering via difficult actions.

Generally, I find that the pro-life arguments are largely based on a lack of consideration. I.e. “Life begins at the instant of insemination.” with literally zero further consideration. Or, on knowingly false propaganda: “Evil baby-killers are celebrating killing babies minutes before birth.”

To my knowledge, neither of those stances were in the mainstream before American politicians accepted that the Civil Rights Movement was not going away.

Before that, The Church saw its role in the abortion issue as charitably offering grief counseling to women who had experienced that difficult choice. After the political situation changed, the role of The Church changed to the demonization of unfortunate women for the purpose of manufacturing single-issue voters for the benefit of specific politicians.

A human is born, lives a life, ingests the wrong chemical and becomes brain-dead. Now you have a human that is alive, but the person who was that human is permanently gone. To avoid murder, are we obliged to keep the body alive as long as possible by all available means? I don’t expect you would think so. I expect you’d agree terminating the life of the human body is the preferable and not a great ethical quandary.

I would agree that at conception we have a human life. But, not that we have a human person. There are no thoughts, emotions, memories, hopes, dreams. There is a very strong potential for a person. But, at conception what makes a person is not there yet.

At some point in time between the human existing a single living cell and the human voting in elections and joining the military, a person develops. But, it’s not a definite transition point in time. It’s a gradient.

Unfortunately, for practical reasons, the law must pick a definite point in time. The consensus seems to be “around the time that the fetus can be kept alive and continue developing independent from the mother using current technology.” A practical choice, for sure.

One might argue that the official transition point should be a bit earlier. But, that’s not the core of the disagreement.

The core seems to be that some living people do not appear to take into consideration the difference between being alive vs. being a person.

With datacenters there is a huge amount of ragebait in the news and social media. People are anxious about jobs and reporters and influencers are cashing in on that anxiety by running headlines that imply doom. Datacenters are hugely problematic. But, everywhere I go I see media and commenters exaggerating, implying, assuming, or just making up outrageous claims. But, it's the hot topic right now and outrage drives the clicks that pays the bills. So, ragebait it is.

We solar, it's clear to me that Exon and friends have been funding anti-green-energy politicians and propaganda for decades. They knew full well that greenhouse gases would wreck the world. And, they new they could have transitioned to actually being "Beyond Petroleum". But, the profit margins would not have been as high. So, instead they are spending billions to convince everyone to let them keep wrecking the world for a few more decades.

A moratorium seems excessive when the requirements to make a majority of people happy are pretty clear.

The easy ones are:

1. Use energy and water independent of the municipal grid. 2. Don't build so close to homes that they hear the fans.

A lot of people are rightly concerned about water. That was a big problem with older evaporative cooling systems. But, the newer closed-loops systems being built now are much less worrying.

Water usage concerns can be addressed by doing what https://www.boxelderstratos.com/ did. That's an extremely controversial site because it's 40,000 acres. How could it be so huge? Because that's how much land they had to buy to be a net reduction in water table use compared to the previous owners. It's not a warehouse the size of San Francisco!

A lot of people are rightly concerned about their electricity bill. But, what I'm seeing is that new large datacenters are opting to generate energy on-site using huge amounts of natural gas. That's obviously also very bad because of CO2. But, it doesn't affect your electricity bill nearly as much.

Using the Stratos project as the example again, there's a lot of outrage about how it will "Use 9GW! That's more than double Utah grid capacity all by itself!" But, it's not on the grid. It's starting with 1.5GW of natural gas from a pre-existing pipeline. That's still hugely problematic. Just not in the way the ragebait implies. They claim they are going to build up a mix of gas and solar after launch. But, we'll see how that goes...

If there was regulation requiring them to build up with green energy, regulation with teeth, Stratos would not be nearly so controversial. The water is covered, the energy is off the grid, it's far from any residents, the only concern left is the tremendous amounts of CO2 to be produced. To be clear, Utah already has had several non-datacenter sites producing that much CO2 for a long time now. But, it's not great to add another one.

My point is that if New York put in place a list of reasonable requirements for building and actually enforced them, then a supermajority of residents would be OK with datacenter build-outs. Of course, a minority of folks are so enraged that they want to see all datacenters burned down. But, you can't please everyone.

Lots of folks in here calling out the "billion scans a month" and skipping over the "capable of" part.

They're not claiming they'll perform a billion scans. They're trying to build enough machines that if absolutely all of them were run at 100.00% capacity it would be theoretically possible to do a billion scans a month.

AFAICT, the "Rising layoffs year after year" news lately has been an intentional misreporting of "Layoff rates slowly returning to normal after the hiring spree during COVID stimulation"

https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/

But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks.

I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

AI takes in all the input, whether the original authors have consented or not, and do some "learning"

What would it mean for authors who publish content publicly to the web, without access restrictions, to provide consent for learning from it?

"EULA: Most people are allowed to learn from this text. If you work in an AI-related field, even though you can clearly see this page because you are reading this text right now, you are not permitted to learn anything from it. Bob Stanton, you are an a-hole. I do not consent to you learning from this web page. Dave Simmons, you are annoying. But, I'll give you a pass. For now... Also: plumbers. I do not like plumbers for reasons I will not elaborate. No plumbers may learn from my writing in an way."

The DoW is engaging in simple crybullying. In my time as an online moderator I see it all the time.

“You are impinging on my freedom to force you to participate in activities you have expressly indicated it is against your will to engage in! You bully! I am such a victim!”

https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20

This is endemic of the entire current administration. It is as disappointing as it is unsurprising.

I would very much like to see us return to something resembling the original copyright terms. Like: Manually file for 22 years of enforcement. Then manually file 20 years later for 22 more.

You could create some great masterpiece at 18 and live off of it until you are 62 and starting to take social security payments.

My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public.

The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.

So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.

Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.

especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.

Is the content of the comment productive to the conversation? Upvote it.

Is the content of the comment counter-productive? Downvote it.

I could see cases where large walls of text that are generally useless should be downvoted or even removed. AI or not. But, the first example

faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?

to be frank, is a service to all HN readers. Yes it is possible that a few of us would benefit from sitting down with a nice cup of coffee, putting on some ambient music and taking in 74 pages of... whatever this is. But, faced with far more interesting and useful content than I could possibly consume all day every day, having a summary to inform my time investment is of great value to me. Even If It Is Imperfect

“About half of all food deliveries globally are shorter than 2 and a half miles, which basically means that all of our cities are filled with burrito taxis”

There is a future where a city's burrito taxis are replaced with drones rolling on the sidewalk or flying to the rooftops. And, the large majority of the remaining city drivers are replaced by robotaxis with multi-sensor 360 tracking. Where there are nearly zero parked cars. So, the parking spaces have been replaced with bike lanes of bikers and scooters with every robotaxi on the street planning around their motion.

Far less fuel consumption. Far less street crowding. Far fewer accidents.

And, of course everyone hates the idea.

in fact they can start doing so today

In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.

There are at least two reasons to buy Bitcoin:

1. You need it for use as a collateral asset for smart contracts. There are no crypto cops or crypto courts. Only collateral gives contracts teeth. There are many options here. Just like there are many options for collateral assets in traditional finance. But, BTC is the top dog for the role and the first choice of individuals and institutions trying to lay down the foundations of decentralized finance.

2. You are speculating that the growth of BTC's growth in value as a collateral asset will outpace the growth of other assets. This as played out well over the past decade.

At a logical level, Bitcoin should be decorrelated from stocks. The fundamentals of Bitcoin network adoption and utilization are largely separate and independent.

But, at an emotional level, Bitcoin is considered a high-risk asset. So, whenever fear gets heavy in the fear/greed equation, Bitcoin is one of the first places people pull money out of as they flee to safety. It's also the "High Risk-High Return" spot for folks to plunk their "spare change" when they are feeling safe. So, in practice short term moves in Bitcoin are highly correlated to short term moves in equities.

Meanwhile, if you actually run the numbers, Bitcoin has out performed the SP500 (or even the SP10) by a large multiple over the past decade while having a volatility usually around the median of the SP500-top-10 that everyone is currently betting heavily into. People just have a hard time getting out of linear thinking and so they look at the big dips as short-term linear disasters while on a long-term, logarithmic view they have been rather boring. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...

would prefer to pay all their employees $0 and have all diners/customers/etc pay 100% of the wages out of guilt.

It is my understanding that this is literally the origin of tipping.

After the abolition of slavery, there were many black people newly looking for work. And, there were employers looking for workers, but unwilling to pay money to black people.

So, someone got the idea to promote that tipping was something fancy European aristocrats did. And, you can be fancy like they were by tipping my workers (that I refuse to pay).

Tipping was previously seen as un-Americanly classist. And, most states tried to ban it when it started to pick up steam. But, it was too late. So many employers were enjoying unpaid labor that the bans were repealed.

Later, when Minimum Wage was established, workers who lived on tips alone were almost all black. So, unsurprisingly, tipped workers were excluded from the wage regulation. And, today they are only acknowledged as fractional minimum laborers.

One of the greatest problems in argumentation over the internet is that people gravitate towards acting as if every statement is intended to define a universal truth so they can argue against that strawman.

This means if you ask it one question every two minutes, you're using about as much energy as a 10W LED lightbulb.

Meanwhile your idle desktop PC and monitor are pulling 20-100W each.

People tend to forget that doing the work the old fashioned way uses energy too. Presumably for a longer time for equivalent results.

Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.

https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a...

I find it a dumb idea what whether or not people can get credit to start/expand businesses would be dependent of solving math problems.

That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.

You can buy a pizza from me with Bitcoin now.

I’m not a vendor or even a chef. But, anything is negotiable.

Maybe they should work on fixing that

It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.

I still remember from over 20 years ago I was sitting in the kitchen talking to my grandmother. She was smoking and had some Fox News talking head on in the background. Maybe Hannity?

What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.

I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.

That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.

Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.

We're getting warmer.

Back in the days of king and country, people went through all that, went home, and some lived normal lives. A whole lot hid in that trauma from the neighbors and instead took it out on their families because it wasn't acceptable to let it out to anyone else. Everything was "great". That's how it's remembered decades later. That’s how we got a lot of boomers raised by dads who never got therapy.

Recently, in the days of plague, while millions actually suffered and died, a person in a million cried out online about masks. That's 350 a day in the US alone. And, everyone around the world got to watch. How it's remembered today is every one of us saw at least one of them break down and it still sticks with us all.

This used to be called a whinge. It wasn't celebrated

And, this piece certainly is not a celebration.

The difference between a whinge and a trauma dump is significant here. You should whinge with your buddies occasionally. Not so much you become annoying. Trauma should only be dumped on people who are professionally prepared to help you through it. But, a whole lot of people don’t find prepared help for a whole lot of reasons. Instead they dump it on unprepared strangers. Frequently. Randomly. Commonly. Thus, the term.

"explosive word vomit" is, as yet, the most accurate three-word description of it I have seen so far.

A trauma dump is usually explosive word vomit. Random chain of thought. But, consider the possibility that this piece was crafted carefully. I know it’s easy to dismiss out of hand. But, try. Why is each sentence there?

That doesn’t make it a poem!

I’ll grant there is not a lot of structure to be found here. It’s free verse without the line breaks. Not really prose. It’s not telling a story. There’s a beginning. There’s a state of frustration, compassion, boredom, despair, and a loop back to the beginning. Over and over. For decades and counting. That’s the structure. It’s no iambic pentameter. But, it’s something.

But, impressive vocabulary and flowery visuals? Really? I’m going to assume you are flexible there and don’t require a high school English class interpretation of poetry. As called out in the article.

I think the two of us are on opposite sides of the "These elements include:" list :)

"Laundry to do..." is a trauma dump for pretty much everyone in this third decade of 24/7 local/global disaster reporting. It's the opposite of a unique perspective. But, it's nice to see the common vent presented in a thoughtful way instead of the daily routine of "Everyone holding it in and a few people explosively word-vomiting frustration."

And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment. Feeling it. Taking a breath and exhaling "yessssss......"

Compared to the dollar over the past five years…

The dollar down vs itself by 20ish percent.

The median home price is up 30ish percent.

Oil is up 45ish percent.

Gold and the SP500 are each up 80ish percent.

Bitcoin is up 1000ish percent.

If you snooze through the day-by-day, season-by-season noise, the volatility of Bitcoin is a fun and relaxing rocket to ride. You just have to ignore all discussion focused on time frames of less than four years.

Of course. But, then there's the rest of my comment...