What sucks is there will be a day when we actually want more data centers - you know, in a responsible way that is respectful to the people - and we will still have a bad taste in our mouths and will not trust it.
Thanks tech bro capitalists, you ruin everything you touch.
The amount of data center the average person needs can fit in a shoebox. Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever. We don’t need gigantic warehouses.
Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever.
I’m not trusting the average person to not let it turn into a botnet.
You’re not wrong, but those already exist and are less bad for society than data centers.
People already have phones that can get turned into botnets so I don’t think it’s a new problem.
Hell, just have them host services on the phone with peer to peer networking.
Also, I want most of the services they want to move to the cloud to still work when the net is down.
I may want to use a computer to watch my media library or play a game that I already own with out an active internet connection and ID card. Or, just use a word processor or tax program, or image editor.
Sorry, please provide your ID to log in to the cloud to do basic daily tasks, citizens. This is for your own good, trust us.
A couple weeks ago my internet went out and it was great that my Plex server still worked on my local network.
We were out after the hurricane last month and it wasn’t until two weeks later that I realized we could have all been watching movies off my generator. 🙄 Oh well. I did have 5 houses running refrigerators and chargers off that crappy genny, so there’s that.
It’s been a heavy rainy season here, lots of wind, power and net issues.
Meanwhile, the LAN works on a UPS, solar, and no Internet.
(Sure is nice being able to put on a movie or music playlist, and work on documents, or sort though old vacationphotos when it’s a rainy day with out a cloud failure blocking it.)
We already did that and the early internet was wildly power inefficient and unreliable. I’d rather have a million websites in one DC than a million server closets splattered all over the planet.
This post brought to you by this DC:
The power efficiency ran us afoul of the Jevons paradox, and more distributed outages is better than fewer universal outages.
Everyone hosting their services on their own hardware is the web infrastructure equivalent of getting everyone to smelt pig iron in their backyards. Some amount of datacentres are necessary for the functioning of a modern internet.
The problems we’re seeing at the moment are a result of artificially inflated demand driven by AI bullshit disrupting supply lines of hardware that could actually be useful to people, the lack of environmental planning, and the condescending refusal by datacentre builders to engage with the reasons communities are opposed to their projects.
Yeah, regular data centres have existed for a while and don’t come with a fraction of the drawbacks that come with AI data centres
Amazon and Google’s cloud businesses are probably loving this because it soft locks out any new future competitor to that business
Been talking about AI backlash causing friendly fire. Over on Bluesky, people were enraged about a new DC going up because they assumed it was an AI hyperscalar. Nope, it was the size of a large Walmart, in an industrial park outside of town, with a large water supply available. The owners are the state university and Sandia National Laboratories, not tech bros, and they listed some laudable (to me anyway) research goals.
Even with a handful of us explaining the situation:
“I don’t CARE! We don’t need no GOT DAMNED DATA CENTERS!”
“Including the one that sent me your message? AWS-US-EAST-2 needs to go?”
Like windmills, solar panels, and everything else corpo lobbyists said were bad because they were leashed to their oil barron daddies.
Aren’t people commenting on tgese things when they’re really against or for? How is that indicative of the general population?
I’d say the balance is more to the negative - I think people are more likely to comment on things they feel badly about than those they like or feel neutral.
Good thing the wealthy elite ignores what 99% of people say.
There is a sampling bias in that.
If only those dirty peasants didn’t buy up so much RAM for their personal computers. These poor, struggling data centers need more tax breaks so they can compete.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
-Datacenters
They got greedy - bought everything, from memory, electrical equipment, to whole governments, in search of money, forever soiling an emerging new tech with the need for greed
… but they’ll build them anyway because the American regime could not give less of a fuck about the American people… and sadly, that’s exactly how Americans like it
