𝕛𝕨𝕞-𝕕𝕖𝕧

well modern public schools are basically glorified daycares.

awful start time policies being the norm never changes despite the massive mountain of evidence it should because parents typically need to go into work in the morning. society collectively decided shafting kids’ sleep schedules by starting school before the already absurdly early 9-5 was the best we could do on that compromise.

and to an extent, that’s true, because we’d have to reform a lot more than just schools to effectively implement this change. there just isn’t the will in the public sphere to push this.

Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy?

It’s less absurd than it sounds and requires understanding how modern data center facilities that are being deployed by big tech actually work and run at a facility-wide and systemic level. They do generate this energy, they just proceed to use it. Notice he says roughly a gigawatt of energy, which is nowhere near the gross need for the facility as per the article.

Most modern data centers built in the past few years, especially those that are “campuses” as described, have on-site power generation solutions. Sometimes this means classic oil/coal/gas generators on the property, sometimes it means more involved and nuanced situations. What Lehane is telling the AP here is that, of the energy consumed by the new data center as a whole, “roughly and depending how you count,” 1 gigawatt comes from such sources. The article clearly states the center is set to deploy at 1.8 gigawatts consumption scaling up to 10 gigawatts over the lifespan of the facility. Presumably these are on the same time scales and everything. Frankly, for an AP article this was written quite poorly and the exact meaning of most this information isn’t very clear. I don’t think that’s Lehane’s fault implicitly. Just seems like bad reporting.

People have this image in their heads of these big data centers opening up and just like, sucking up all the power from the local grid due to their demand and this is what causes things such as blackouts. This is mildly incorrect. The negative effects of these data centers’ power demands is less to do with them “overloading” public grids and more to do with the market economy of energy. You get blackouts because all the energy they can’t generate themselves on-site must be acquired somewhere else. They can walk up to the local power companies and buy energy just like any private citizen can. They often get discounted rates compared to the plebes, too. You end up with blackouts because the energy companies don’t give a shit who they sell their product to, they just care that it sells. When companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, or OpenAI roll up with significantly more capital and resources than anyone else in the local economy, they’re easily able to out-compete even the entirety of the local domestic power demand. That’s what causes blackouts.

No one wants to talk about this because it’s easier to just say braindead shit like “fuck datacenters/AI/big-tech/fuckingwhateveritis” so you can feel like you’re “on the right side” than it is to acknowledge the long line of people in both the public and private sectors who had to rubber-stamp personally fucking the average person for us to even get to this point. Does big tech suck absolutely, fat, stinking donkey balls? For fucking sure. Are they anything more than a symptom of a much more entrenched societal rot? Nope.

i grew up in the state.

it’s honestly not so bad, most people are reasonable and not entirely insane. at least any more so than the rest of the USA. i’ve traveled all over the country and seen that 1. most places here are, for all their differences, pretty similar and 2. an oddly large number of people will, without any irony at all, ask dumb as shit questions like “oh you guys have houses? i thought they still lived in tipis there…”, which is part of what compels me to clear up the image that Oklahoma is just some backwater. OKC and Tulsa are both larger cities than New Orleans, and by a non-insignificant population count too.

it’s just one of those states where the republicans have a gerrymandered, fascist hold on the government and have for a long time. they win virtually every single election at every level in Oklahoma and control the entire state government, all appointments are basically made solely by the republican party here. they control what does and doesn’t pass the legislature. yet, demographically, the republicans do not have nearly the super-majority that would justify this power. we’ve been prisoners of y’al-qaeda for basically the entire history of the state. and this isn’t by any long shot the only state like this, it just might be one of the worst. they test their shitty fucking playbooks and “go-fuck-yourself-with-razorblades” laws out on us because it is a large market/population. a century and a half of being the american fascist guinea pigs has led us to be one of the civil societies here in the US that is in the most disrepair. we’re near bottom or dead last for virtually any metric of societal health when compared to other states.

don’t hate these people please, not saying you are but it’s a common sentiment. i fucking despised the south and would belittle southerners when i was a naive teen bc of my resentment for their racism and general ethos. a lot of them are fucked up, but for a large number of them, they are victims too.

well yeah forwarding your VPN’s ports is a possible leak… that’s the point of opening the ports?

i think it’s only a privacy risk if you don’t understand the network stack and don’t understand what using port forwarding on a VPN entails so that you can take proper precautions.

regardless, it’s fair that most users would be at risk just wantonly fucking with settings they don’t understand. probably not a valid justification to limit services but i can see the business rationale.

anyway not disagreeing with you or anything i had just read the mullvad team disabled port forwarding because they were experiencing distress/PTSD dealing with the administrative and legal issues that arose due to the way some of their user base chose to use the service, and they decided removing port forwarding would be a reasonable way to target and cut down this type of traffic without affecting most users. privacy leaks might have been mentioned somewhere but ig i just hadn’t seen it. not exactly a mullvad expert, myself lol.

i dont use VPN services like mullvad anymore, though. don’t really trust the big VPN companies and prefer running my own hardware and nodes.

even then the degree to which charles babbage was responsible for his machines is somewhat contested.

even then charles babbage was inventing in an environment that was already highly geared to explore logic as a discipline with many people actively pursuing the same or similar objects of fascination. there are experiments in computation and entire computers far preceding babbage, going so far back as the earliest annals of recorded history.

a lot of people also don’t understand that babbage’s initial inventions weren’t even autonomous or mechanical/electrical. they weren’t computers in the colloquial, modern sense. at first they were basically just arrays of literal physical drawers, that the user had to physically move objects between, that could represent something akin to modern memory. this was rudimentary even at the time - the classical greeks famously were astute mechanist and the best of the wondermakers could make much more than just cranes: think autonomous robots, analog computational orreries, literal fucking lasers powered by the sun. by babbage’s time europeans were intimately familiar with engineering and computational principles far beyond what the average contemporary person realizes. the actual innovation is the conceptual handling of it. without that, babbage just made a fancy shelf.

either way babbage isn’t even remembered very fondly by the field. lovelace was far more influential and had far more intuition and genius to her work.

mullvad is good for most casual users but if you want to do anything technical i’d steer clear.

you can’t forward the ports anymore in mullvad. don’t get me wrong, they did it as a measure to reduce the volume of CSAM and other trauma-inducing imagery their administrators had to deal with and i totally respect that reasoning. people get legitimate PTSD moderating and administrating certain platforms/services.

just a shame torrenting gets made harder for everyone because of a handful of despicable individuals.