Welcome to November, and welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
you unfortunately have to dig quite deep for sneers in this weird post about datacenter votes in the recent US elections, but they’re there
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vakRzGKXLknQNJ9M/stephen-martin-s-shortform?commentId=ec8LnnTjBMcow3C82
especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else, like Iceland (retracted after someone points out that Iceland is probably even more woke than, say, Vermont) and Paraguay (which recently had a digibank seized and closed, leading to the president stepping down).
Then there’s this gem
So cutting through the jargon, “inputs” in this case means
All of these are constrained in various ways. The places with abundant accessible power tend to be relatively developed parts of the world. Same with water which is the most efficient mode of cooling.
Building your datacenter in Texas means you’re on familiar ground with local laws and regulations, and can draw on skilled manpower to actually construct the thing and keep it running. I’d wager that the actual hardware is cheaper than almost anywhere else. Once it’s built it’s in the security zone of the USA, which means property is efficiently defended by LEO and emergency services.
Paraguay? You need to find a skilled workforce there, or import it. Same for all the bits and bobs needed. Then you probably have to pay more for the same, as well as having to deal with an unfamiliar planning process. Not to mention political instability. And you might have to build a shit-ton of supporting stuff yourself, like power generation and fiber comms.
These people are delusional.
there’s no fucking way people will happily accept data centres near them after Big Tech has so happily made clear that they’re on the side of MAGA and fascism
Also I can’t imagine the MAGA crowd being excited about their tech minions operating in someone else’s territory. Data sovereignty is all fun and games until some Paraguayan commie starts getting chummy with China or whatever.
iceland also has gdpr, and i’d like to see how it fits with data thievery of ai companies, but they prefer to put excess electricity generation into aluminum smelting
Why didn’t they start out there then?
I think they’re saying that stopping a datacenter won’t do squat to stop AGI takeoff
at least this a reading of
so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal’s wager:
I’m not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.
I don’t know, I think that’s insanely optimistic
And this is why they invented the basilisk.
Sometimes you miss a few shots. Well, sometimes you miss 40 shots in a row with those anti-data center ballot measures. I’m sure their streak of bad luck will end eventually and they’ll find tons of people who love having data centers near their homes.
just bribe 'em, bro!
They’ll just skip straight to the Dyson Sphere, dontchyaknow