computers are a blessing
computer corporations are a mistake
computer datacenters are unforgiveable
Discussion
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@cwebber moving away from ttys was a mistake. Programing is hard; why should users be coddled?
@cwebber As John Sherman put it, though with some parts of the vertical not-yet-invented, "if we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life."
@cwebber @xChaos Runs a small DC where I house my cobbled up "desktop Ryzen with ECC RAMs on a server board inside cannibalized old supermicro chassis" server.
Heat is reused by the inhabitants of the house apartments. They have this huge bag of water right next to my server. Now imagine if cities laid fiber and every other house had a small DC like that.
There is a middle ground.
@cwebber My three favorite things in this world are music, computers, and movies. They are all amazing and awesome.
Stick the word "industry" on the end of each of them, and they all become hellscapes.
@cwebber sounds like someone just had to go to the Loud Hot Bright Place
this is a shitpost of sorts but in all earnestness, datacenters were a mistake
@cwebber
I know it's a shitpost, and I get what you mean.
I know it's a shitpost, and I get what you mean.
But sometimes, in HPC, you can't do things on just a single computer (or a loosely networked set of machines).
Also, for the same work, running it on separate desktops would take more energy than running it on a cluster in a datacenter.
@cwebber If a cat cannot jump on top of it in a single bound and sleep on top of it, it's too big.
Imagine what computing would be like if it were still highly networked but datacenters weren't involved
@cwebber that'd be interesting. More cubbies at home and at offices? Also, probably less efficient cooling, but maybe because of that the use of more efficient hardware? What's your thought process here, apart from DC's being terrible to spend time in?
@cwebber I have been thinking about friend-to-friend networks and an idea that somebody called "communist web hosting"
it's probably redundant with your work but maybe I'll get lucky and make something useful
@babble_endanger you're always welcome to try to build something on top of our work!
@cwebber aren't internet exchanges like big dataless datacenter?
btw for anyone wishing to explain datacenters to me, I will let you know in advance that, alas, my first tech job was as a datacenter technician at Google from 2005-2007
@cwebber Given how often someone has to explain ActivityPub to you, I'd say that that qualifies you for not knowing anything about data centers…
@cwebber
Instead, they could try explaining to you a neat little concept called "ActivityPub". Maybe you've heard of it? 😋
Instead, they could try explaining to you a neat little concept called "ActivityPub". Maybe you've heard of it? 😋
@cwebber But, But , But... How can the Internet mansplain you about data centers in that case?!
Could you please unlearn what you learned at that job?
Just to make mansplainers happy.
@cwebber That was a different Google though. These days a shareholder value focused datacenter has to have a side hustle as a private prison, live fire killer robot training range, or something similarly patriotic.
@bremner Indeed, 2005 me had said "I wouldn't work for any corporation, except for Google, because they seem to be trying hard to be ethical"
And when I got there, I really felt that was true, and over the course of two years, I watched the beginning of that erode
@cwebber@social.coop a datacenter is a little like an activity pub, which is a place where activities get together to share in the warm glow of companionship, except this time the activities are data.
@cwebber Did it have cats?
@cwebber this is a shitposts of sorts but... slow, unreliable and inefficient?
@cwebber everyone could easily have their home server the same way everybody has their modem
@cwebber I don't think you could do modern computing without datacenters even if communication was free. A database the size needed by a State Farm or a Progressive Insurance needs to be hosted in a datacenter to meet QoS requirements. And to do datascience queries in a reasonable timeframe lots of compute resources are needed locally. In a datacenter these resources can be returned to the pool after the query.
A GIF from The Simpsons showing people dancing happily in a world without lawyers.
@cwebber There was a line I read back in the '90s -- I think in something by Robert X. Cringely, but I've never been able to find the exact piece again -- that said "today eBay is hosted in a datacenter, but in 10 years it will be hosted on the CEO's laptop, and in 20 years it will be hosted on their wristwatch."
We lost that future when Moore's Law hit the wall, of course. But I still dream about it
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