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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

Imagine what computing would be like if it were still highly networked but datacenters weren't involved

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John Maxwell
@jmax@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber moving away from ttys was a mistake. Programing is hard; why should users be coddled?
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Wulfy
@n_dimension@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber

1990: "HACK THE PLANET!!!"

2025: "NOT LIKE THAT!!!"

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pinche_compinche
@pinche_compinche@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber worst #haiku ever, but yes.
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John Colagioia
@jcolag@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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."
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Jan Hamal Dvořák
@mordae@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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.

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Ludwig Vielfrass
@lerxst@az.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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.

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yomimono, still on earth
@yomimono@wandering.shop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber sounds like someone just had to go to the Loud Hot Bright Place
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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

this is a shitpost of sorts but in all earnestness, datacenters were a mistake

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Janne Moren
@jannem@fosstodon.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber
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.

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Socketwench
@socketwench@masto.hackers.town replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber If a cat cannot jump on top of it in a single bound and sleep on top of it, it's too big.
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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

Imagine what computing would be like if it were still highly networked but datacenters weren't involved

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🌈 Andrew ☄️
@bnut@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber tbh I’m imagining some technical efficiency and architectural differences, but I don’t know enough to know what your point is
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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@bnut mechanisms of power distribution
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🌈 Andrew ☄️
@bnut@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber ah, that makes sense, although we'd need ISP neutrality too I suppose
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Michiel Scholten
@diginaut@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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?
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babble encat
@babble_endanger@freeradical.zone replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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

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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@babble_endanger you're always welcome to try to build something on top of our work!
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gkrnours
@gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber aren't internet exchanges like big dataless datacenter?
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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

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

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zvavybir :palestina:🍉 :FediPact: :Green: :masked:
@zvavybir@social.zvavybir.eu replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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…
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Blort™ 🐀Ⓥ🥋☣️
@Blort@social.tchncs.de replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber
Instead, they could try explaining to you a neat little concept called "ActivityPub". Maybe you've heard of it? 😋
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maryjane :fediverso:
@maryjane@social.coletivos.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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.

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David Bremner
@bremner@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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.
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Christine Lemmer-Webber 🌀
@cwebber@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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

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Asta [AMP]
@aud@fire.asta.lgbt replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago

@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.

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Socketwench
@socketwench@masto.hackers.town replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber Did it have cats?
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Phairupegiont
@phairupegiont@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber this is a shitposts of sorts but... slow, unreliable and inefficient?
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Panicz Maciej Godek
@PaniczGodek@functional.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber everyone could easily have their home server the same way everybody has their modem
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SubductionRheology
@SubductionRheology@cyberplace.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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.
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Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs
@ellenor2000@mastodon.top replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber If datacentres didn't exist, someone would invent them. #lang_en
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Duncan Bayne
@duncan_bayne@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@cwebber
Your browser does not support the video tag.
GIF
GIF
A GIF from The Simpsons showing people dancing happily in a world without lawyers.
A GIF from The Simpsons showing people dancing happily in a world without lawyers.
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Jason Lefkowitz
@jalefkowit@vmst.io replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 months ago
@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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