It’s not that the datacenters don’t “use” water (you’ll find plenty of sources confirming that), but rather that the argument stretches the concept of “water usage” well beyond the limit of meaninglessness. Water is not electricity, it can’t usually be transported very far and the impact of a pumping operation is fundamentally location-dependent. Saying “X million litres of water used for Y” is usually not useful unless you’re defining the local geographic context.

Pumping aquifers in a dry area and discharging the water in a field: very bad.

Pumping from and subsequently releasing water to a lake/river: mostly harmless, though sometimes in summer the additional heat pumped into the water can be harmful depending on the size of the body of water.

The real problem is that lots of areas (especially in the US) haven’t updated their water rights laws since the discovery of water tables. This is hardly a new problem, and big ag remains by far the worst offender here.

Then there’s the raw materials in the supply chain… and like not to downplay it but water use is not exactly at the top of the list of environmental impacts there. Concrete is hella bad on CO2 emissions, electronics use tons of precious metals that often get strip mined and processed with little to no environmental regulation, etc.

Frankly putting “datacenter pumped water out of the river then back in” in the same aggregate figure as “local lake polluted for 300 years in China by industrial byproducts” rubs me the wrong way. These are entirely different problems that do not benefit anyone from being bastardized like this. It feels the same way to me as saying “but there are children starving in Africa!” when someone throws away some food – sure throwing away food isn’t great, and it’s technically on-topic, but we can see how bundling these things together isn’t useful, right?

You can also be right for the wrong reasons. You see that a lot in the anti-AI echo chambers, people who never gave a shit about IP law suddenly pretending that they care about copyright, the whole water use thing which is closer to myth than fact, or discussions on energy usage in general.

Everyone can pick up on the vibes being off with the mainstream discourse around AI, but many can’t properly articulate why and they solve that cognitive dissonance with made-up or comforting bullshit.

This makes me quite uncomfortable because that’s the exact same pattern of behavior we see from reactionaries, except that what weirds them out for reasons they can’t or won’t say explicitly isn’t tech bros but immigrants and queer people.

Did you even read the article? Even under the VERY GENEROUS interpretation of contract law that contracts can’t be predatory (which is not a particularly popular philosophical stance outside of cyberpunk fiction), AWS MENA fell short of even their typical termination procedures because they accidentally nuked it while doing a dry-run.

I don’t know where you work but if we did that to a paying customer, even IF there was a technicality through which we could deny responsibility, we would be trying to make it right.

The author put it well:

What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.

Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you’re giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.

This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that’s the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn’t need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That’s right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else’s multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.

Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.

Ranked-choice voting is a decent choice for uninominal elections.

Proportional elections are a popular alternative, and they are arguably fairer than even RCV because they are not susceptible to gerrymandering or votes otherwise being weighted by geography (i.e. your vote still matters just as much as anyone’s if you live in Redneckville, Mississippi). They do have other downsides though.

Unfortunately here in Belgium we do proportional voting and the Prime Minister is nonetheless a far-right separatist in charge of a right-wing coalition so, uh, maybe FPTP is not the only thing that stands between the citizenry and a communist utopia lol

That is… not the threat that you think it is.

I highly recommend watching Fantasies of Nuremberg. Be warned, it is extremely heavy to watch. But it is absolutely essential framing to keep in mind when talking about Genocide.

People on the more spiritual side of things thought that being photographed meant trapping a part of your soul into the camera. It was a more existential creation than we give it credit for. Before then, nobody had ever stopped time.

A computer-generated “Van Gogh” is not art any more than a mass-produced coffee mug is artisanal, no matter how “realistic”.

This has all happened before. Take photography. People thought it was the end of visual art. If anyone can take a photograph, why would anyone spend years learning to paint?

Artists answered by pushing the medium beyond the limits of realism. Impressionism. This did not make photographs go away. But when I see a picture of someone’s cat, I don’t usually go “art!” – even though 200 years ago the mere existence of a photorealistic picture would have implied very impressive artistry.

The work that clankers are very quickly taking over is that which does not require art. Visual filler. Lorem ipsum. Corporate communications. Out with artisans, in with industrial machinery. This is the same story that has already happened to almost every artisanal trade, from scribery to pottery to smithing. Visual artists and writers thought themselves exempt from the industrial revolution; they aren’t. It will be a worsening socio-economic crisis. But it won’t “end” art. Clankers definitionally cannot, and will never do art. Not until they gain a conscience of their own.

So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.

Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.

Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.

Is it prejudice if I have extensive first-hand experience with it?

The worst environment to me (react-native)

Which is exactly what the Windows start menu runs on, doesn’t it?

I don’t even care that JS is slow, in most circumstances. I like Python, it’s not any faster necessarily (though it is much easier to debug CPython than V8 when you do eventually run into low-level issues, and python is still a lot better at multithreading than javascript even if the GIL is an issue, but that’s besides the point). My real problem is that the ES “standard” “library” is a complete clusterfuck, absolutely diseased, like engineers heard of the concept of technical debt and decided to build a shrine to it.

Sure, you can technically use JS decently. That’s hardly an achievement. Any sufficiently fast Turing-complete apparatus can be “used decently” if you start by re-implementing a python interpreter. But the entire ecosystem is fucked. The appeal of javascript, the entire reason it has taken over, is that the lowest bidder is not going to use decently but will do the wildest, most insane shit imaginable to get a product out the door.

I commented the other day about PHP. Same problem. The language is too easy to use badly. Sure, you can write magnificent code in either, if you have enough experience and discipline to avoid every footgun. But when every other tool in your shop is an unlabeled footgun, maybe it’s time to admit that there are some deep-seated issues.

Speaking of treating JS like a turing machine; that’s what TypeScript does. And, I have to admit, it solves maybe 40 % of the problems I have with JavaScript. I still don’t like it, because the stdlib and ecosystem still sucks donkey balls and V8 is a subpar JIT interpreter in every way besides raw single-threaded performance, but at least TS itself is decent enough and lends itself to static analysis well enough for senior engineers to have a hope of safely defusing or refactoring away most footguns set off by the junior/offshore devs. Most.

“I want predictable behavior for all possible inputs” is hardly a requirement that requires a fortune teller to see coming.

JavaScript has a particularly insane stdlib because this language wasn’t designed, it is a botched chimera with deformities so severe it should have died 15 times over but people just won’t let it.

Then to rub salt in the wound this horrific mess became the most popular language in the world by virtue of being the only language for the most popular application ecosystem in the world (the web). So the cancer is spreading and now you can find JavaScript in servers and fucking desktop environments and now your windows start menu takes five seconds to load because fucking react.js is loading the 75 polyfills necessary to make up for the fact that JS’s “standard” library looks like it was designed by 3 cocained-up gibbons.