it is a case of socialize the losses, privatize the gains.
regarding tax payers, the biggest sins of new data centers seem to be:
* driving power bills parabolic due to no mandated investment in power generation or delivery grid
* consuming water from the city system far beyond normal usage; water bills go up for normal people
* pollution; xAI in memphis illegally uses gas turbines with no pollution controls; air is very dirty around their data center; data centers apparently are noisy in places
legislation is needed to force costs currently being borne by normal people back on to the data centers reaping all of the profit.
I don't think we got a full picture of Israel's leverage over US politicians and business people. How many people like Epstein are out there acting as "access agents" to Mossad? How many US gov employees and politicians like Shapiro of Pennsylvannia have served in the IDF? How can Shapiro with IDF experience ever be considered for VP of the US?
Why are American politicians so comfortable supporting an ethno-state even though the US is not supposed to support apartheid regimes? Why is the US administration now so willing to throw US allies (Japan, South Korea, NATO members) under the bus with a 1970s style energy crisis to save 1 country of 9 million from a war they single unilaterally started?
Finally, to answer the OP's question:
* Israel is facing an existential threat; the US ending the war means de facto end to their state;
* US - not allies as that requires mutual consent to wage war; see above text for actual real power relationship between Israel and the US
> the US ending the war means de facto end to their state
Every state ends, regardless. I'm not convinced Israel will cease to exist in the next 5 years without US support. There are plenty of countries Israel can, will, and still do partner with to various degrees. Notably much of Europe.
> I'm not convinced Israel will cease to exist in the next 5 years without US support
I genuinely couldn't believe people actually believed this until a friend of a friend voiced the opinion in person. Like, no. Israel doesn't poof if America stops supporting it. Destroying Israel would require American military action.
> Destroying Israel would require American military action.
Or an Iranian nuke. Iran has a big clock ticking down to year 2040 where they say Israel will be destroyed by, if the current Iranian regime isn't destroyed by then they will do everything they can to destroy Israel. That is why they can't agree to not enrich uranium for 25 years, because that would prevent them from destroying Israel.
Anyway, if USA peace out and leaves Israel hanging Israel will just continue to bomb Iran now and never let Iran recover, since USA has weakened Iran enough for Israel to handle the rest now, so it wont happen. However if that happens you will see much more death in Iran and much more disruptions to global economy.
I have an irrational hatred of someone who believes in "reality distortion fields". Over the last 10 years, I also have come away with an intense impression that Silicon Valley is full of the self-delusional type, as evidenced by Sara's book, Palantir's weird advertising and CEO, and the insane Nimbyism.
I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. I and many others had enough of Silicon Valley.
Side note: I find it illuminating that one of the most popular social apps that birth social trends did not come from Silicon Valley, but China. I don't think Silicon Valley can drive social trends at all (anti-humanity types are too prevalent).
> I have an irrational hatred of someone who believes in "reality distortion fields".
Can you clarify what you mean by "believes in"?
I believe Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field, that he was an expert convincer. Do you hate me or do you hate him or do you hate something else entirely?
That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices.
To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.
We don't need to support business. We need to support political institutions that oppose proprietary software and support people's right to general purpose computing
It's exactly this over reliance on companies to shape society that got us in this mess
The fact that they're at least honest about what they care about (money) makes them far simpler to deal with than these entities (both private and public) that spin complex webs of half truths about how they're making the world better by implementing 1984.
> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast
I'm not an American, never set foot in the US for that matter, but I'd say I'm pretty sympathetic to the people actually living there. All this to say that I've recently had the same realisation as you when it comes to West Coast people vs East Coast people, by this point the SV automatons are way, way outside of "normal life", maybe that has always been the case but for sure back in those days SV didn't have the same power as it has now (I'm not talking money, even though that is important, I'm talking actual power to have control over people's lives), not by a long shot.
Silicon Valley must be destroyed to save America.
Gladly more are waking up to this. There’s been a surge on both the right and left in my state of people wanting to reject the place and it’s disgusting “culture”.
Some politician in Japan pushed zoning away from cities up to the prefecture and national level. So locals do not get veto rights over new construction.
It's an archetypal social coordination problem that can't be solved at a local level. If relaxed zoning pushes all new buildings into my neighborhood, because all other vote against it, then I'm going to end up with 20 stories of balconies hanging above my property but see no benefits, not even indirect ones like lower rents leading to lower inflation and prices etc. Some developer will simply capture that rent - both in the rent extraction sense and the real estate rent meanings.
A smart central planner can act for the shared benefit, they are sensitive to the votes of renters in some other high density area that also can't solve the problem locally etc.
if your neighborhood gets denser you will see the benefits
if you want to live there you can pick from more options
developers capture value, but the buildings are there
obviously the usual problem is that the land value goes up, and thus the rent goes up too (because suddenly the neighborhood becomes more desirable - which again is a sign of benefits for those who already live there)
My state did something similar recently as well for land within a quarter mile of transit, they have to be zoned for a minimum number of housing units, and parking minimums cannot be enforced in that radius. Some of the municipalities impacted are suing the state.
20 years ago there were a lot of peer to peer applications. For example, Skype used to bounce calls across peers. Now, all calls gets routed through big-brother Microsoft.
NAT and American assymmetric bandwidth ISPs both killed this business model and now we are stuck with tech monopolies like Cloudflare. I see this ipv4-only strategy as another monopoly tactic to kill competition.
And in Asia, it is getting more difficult not to get stuffed behind a double NAT (CGNAT), which means you can't even play games without using big-brother rent-seeker services (no port-forwarding/upnp). But at least here you get ipv6 for free and everything just works.
I want to echo this comment. I am on Map-e in Asia and it is very difficult to get an exclusive ipv4 address without paying extra money.
And I want to connect to my machines without some stupid vpn or crappy cloud reverse tunneling service. Not everyone in the world wants to subscribe to some stupid SaaS service just to get functionality that comes by default with ipv6.
I think Silicon Valley is in a thought bubble and for people there ipv4 is plentiful and cheap. So good for them. However, the more these SaaS services delay ipv6 support, the more I pray to any deity out there I can move off these services permanently.
btw, is it me or is there any justification for anyone including a developer to run more than 8GB of RAM for a laptop? I don't see functionality as having changed in the last 15 years.
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
There's all the usual "$APPLICATION is a memory hog" complaints, for one.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
This depends on industry. Around here, working locally on laptop is a luxury, and most devs are required to treat their laptop like a thin client.
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
our company just went with the "server in the basement" approach, with every employee having a user account (no VM or docker separation, just normal file permissions). Sure, sounds like the 80s, but it works rearly well. Remote access with wireguard, uptime similar or better than cloud, sharing the same beefy CPUs works well and gives good utilization. Running jobs that need hundreds of GB of RAM isn't an issue as long as you respect other's needs too dont hog the RAM all day. And in amortized costs per employee its dirt cheap. I only wish we had more GPUs.
> Interesting. I required all my devs to use local VMs for development.
It doesn’t work when you’re developing on a large database, since it won’t fit. Database (and data warehouse) development has been held back from modern practices just for this reason.
Current job used to let us run containers locally, but they decided to wrap initially docker, and then podman with "helper" scripts. These broke regularly, and became too much overhead to maintain so we are mandated to do local dev but access a dev k8 cluster to perform any level of testing that is more than unit and requires a db.
A really shame as running local docker/podman for postges was fine when you just ran the commands.
I find this quite surprising! What benefit does your org accrue by mandating that the db instance used for testing is centralised? Where I am, the tests simply assume that there’s a database available on a certain port. docker-compose.yml makes it easy to spin this up for those so inclined. At that stage it’s immaterial whether it’s running natively, or in docker, or forwarded from somewhere else. Our tests stump up all the data they need and tear down the db afterwards. In contrast, I imagine that a dev k8s cluster requires some management and would be a single point of failure.
I really don't understand why they do what they do.
Large corp gotta large corp?
My guess is that providing the ability to pull containers means you can run code that they haven't explicitly given permission for, and the laptop scanning tools can't hijack them?
Yes, zero latency typing in your local IDE on a laptop sounds like the dream.
In enterprise, we get shared servers with constant connection issues, performance problems, and full disks.
Alternatively we can use Windows VMs in Azure, with network attached storage where "git log" can take a full minute. And that's apparently the strategic solution.
Not to mention that in Azure 8 CPUs gets you four physical cores of a previous gen server CPU. To anyone working with 4 CPUs or 2 physical cores: good luck.
The issue for me is that bookmarks suck. They don't store the state (where I was reading) and they reload the webpage so I might get something else entirely when I come back. They also kinda just disappear from sight.
If instead bookmarks worked like tab saving does, I would be happy to get rid of a few hundred tabs. Have them save the page and state like the tab saving mechanism does. Have some way to remind me of them after a week or month or so.
Combine that with a search function that can search in contents as well as the title, and I'm changing habbits ASAP.
Regarding wanting to preserve the current version of a page: I use Karakeep to archive those pages. I am sure there are other similar solutions such as downloading an offline version, but this works well for me.
I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.
Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).
While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.
I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.
I've started using Karakeep as well, however I don't find its built-in viewer as seamless as a plain browser page. It's also runs afoul of pages which combats bots due to its headless chrome.
Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.
Websites that are walled off behind obscure captcha don't do well in Karakeep for sure, but so far for me those are usually e-commerce sites or sites I don't return to anyway.
If I'm doing work than involves three different libraries, I'm not reading and committing to memory the whole documentation for each of those libraries. I might well have a few tabs with some of those libraries' source files too. I can easily end up with tens of tabs open as a form of breadcrumb trail for an issue I'm tracking down.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.
The high memory usage is due to the optimization. Responsiveness, robustness and performance was improved by making each tab independent processes. And that's good. Nobody needs 80 tabs, that's what bookmarks are for.
There is no justification for that IMHO. The program text only needs to be in memory once. However, each process probably has its own instance of the JS engine, together with the website's heap data and the JIT-compiled code objects. That adds up.
How much would it take up if there was less RAM available. A web browser with a bunch of tabs open but not active seems like the type of system that can increase RAM usage by caching, and decrease it by swapping (either logically at the application level, or letting the OS actually swap)
The computer has 18GB of total RAM so I would hope that it’s already trying to conserve memory.
It’s kind of humorous that everyone interpreted the comment as complaining about Chrome. For all I know, it’s justified in using that much memory, or it’s the crappy websites I’m required to use for work with absurdly large heaps.
I really just meant that at least for work I need more than 8GB of RAM.
Browsers can get quite bloated, especially if one is not in the habit of closing tabs or restarting it from time to time. IDEs, other development tools, and most Electron abominations are also not shy about guzzling memory.
How does Mark Zuckerberg triggering a genocide in Myanmar, among election interference, rank up with your disdain for EU digital policy?
Are politicians not supposed to do anything about Zuckerberg after watching Sarah Wynn Williams testify about Mark Zuckerberg selling out Americans for his fetish for kissing up to the CCP? Or hearing the current administration threaten the EU over impinging on Zuckerberg to engage in election interference in EU countries?
The gamble these executives are making is that prosecutors in a different administration will not prosecute them for bribery.
If you watch House of Cards (based loosely on real life), you can see the degree of separation between corporations/lobbyists and Congressmen. These guys participating in building a ballroom are crossing that line. Juries will not have to connect so many dots compared to before in order to put someone in jail.
regarding tax payers, the biggest sins of new data centers seem to be: * driving power bills parabolic due to no mandated investment in power generation or delivery grid * consuming water from the city system far beyond normal usage; water bills go up for normal people * pollution; xAI in memphis illegally uses gas turbines with no pollution controls; air is very dirty around their data center; data centers apparently are noisy in places
legislation is needed to force costs currently being borne by normal people back on to the data centers reaping all of the profit.
reply