Hyperland being funded for 3 years benefits all distros and users that rely on it. The same goes for Quickshell. And my guess is that this is only the beginning. They will support any project that Omarchy is built on. They even reached out to AUR maintainers to support them financially and build better, more stable infrastructure for any distro that depends on AUR, but they refused.
> If the former, grow up and accept that the time of slavishly following the narrative is coming to an end, that free speech means people are free to voice their own thoughts and that you not agreeing is interesting only to you.
Consider taking your own advice here? Free speech means people are also free to object when other people with whom they disagree politically receive corporate funding. And likewise, you not agreeing with them is only interesting to you.
I disagree with the parent's wording and agree that the whole "people are free to say what they want" thing is generally not a compelling point in internet arguments, but there is a distinction you are omitting. People aren't just disagreeing with DHH's politics, they're implying that his project shouldn't be financed because of his politics. In that light, your counter-point isn't as applicable, since it's not symmetrical to what the parent is criticizing (regardless of whether you believe his politics are worthy of black-listing his work).
"DHH's politics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. He has most recently called for citizens of western countries to be expelled on the basis of race. So while it's not exactly symmetrical, the people objecting to companies funding his project are not the only ones using their speech to put pressure on others.
You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.
So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
>If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC
Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission.
Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.
So if I build a heavily protested foundry that spews carcinogenic lead smoke into a residential neighborhood, it’s not my fault and the operation of my foundry is unimpeachable. It’s the government’s fault for not stopping me from doing it. Since the people affected are responsible for compelling government to limit business, businesses are not responsible for anything. Privatize the gains, then socialize the losses, then blame the government for not stepping in, and ignore the company actively undermining the public’s leverage in the process. Ok, got it. That makes complete sense. It’s decidedly not nihilistic justification for doing obviously unethical things in pursuit of profit.
The third paragraph of my comment already addressed this. A data centre is not a foundry.
In a metal foundry some of the physical externality is intrinsic to doing the process. It's a continuous industrial chemical operation emitting smoke, metal fumes, VOCs, dust, sound etc. You can capture 99% of pollution, but you're still melting, casting, shaking out and finishing tonnes of hot metal and sand. Complete physical isolation is expensive and imperfect.
With data centres, most local externalities are engineering choices. With enough money and sensible siting, you could plausibly build one whose effect on neighbouring residents is extremely close to nil. The biggest remaining externalities occur upstream in the electricity/water/grid system - and those are unusually amenable to being charged directly to the operator.
If a local data centre is impacting you negatively it's a failure of your government because it didn't need to be that way. It's not an intrinsic part of data centre operation. They turn electricity into heat and money, a comparatively simple factory to have completely deal with its own externalities.
People aren’t complaining about the idea of data centers, abstractly. They’re complaining about the actual way they’re being built. To ignore the reality of what living next to GPU data centers is like, and the amount of resources they actually demonstrably use, and instead paint this as a theoretical argument is completely disingenuous.
One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".
Unlikely. I'm not sure where HN is hosted, but I think it's a bare metal server in a colo, not a data center.
The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad", and then stretching the position to "data centers bad". I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud. Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there. We need the solar/wind equivalent for hosting. The problem is data centers have efficiencies at scale that we can't achieve with more distributed solutions, but I'm not a specialist in that particular analysis.
How much if that is true and how much of it is carefully constructed propaganda? Implanted and reinforced beliefs to make workers hustle to ensure the server fields produce enough crop this quarter.
Most people on the planet are not tech people. Their world is not built on cloud at all but ensuring there is sufficient food and stuff to satisfy their biological needs.
It's asocial terminally online tech workers who think the cloud is akin to strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity; so essential they are fundamental forces of nature themselves
Hopefully you can get the obvious bias of your perspective; species of 8 billion is not propped up by a few million script kiddies
I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters.
The Trump administration pulled a bunch of ocean sensors, whose data was aggregated in the cloud, in an attempt to save money. Except, those sensors were not only providing research data on changes in ocean currents, but helping fisheries make predictions about yield. The administration backtracked because of this.
There is a similar story with weather forecasting, and farmers being able to manage their crops.
Let's not even get started on the economic impact worldwide of datacenters were not available to process stock and bond trades.
New technologies seem optional, but once society passes some tipping point in their adoption, they no longer are. AI isn't there yet, but cloud computing is.
I think I've given you far more than you're due in this conversation, so I'll stop here.
In short, I think you're being dismissive, particularly when you try to frame my position as "society is propped up by script kiddies". Seems like a deeply inaccurate way of summarizing my points.
> I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters.
These things were with us and worked better before datacenters even existed. Datacenters are a mere convenience which is now used to force monopolization of compute while subjecting society to extremely risky, but unnecessary dependencies and centralization.
You say we're already there? A good reason to start undoing it ASAP.
That's not the proposal, and is utter fantasy. I'm engaging a hypothetical here -- none of what's being discussed is even close to reality, in the sense that it won't be implemented. There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't.
What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy. Theoretically possible, practically impossible.
> The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad"
Why is that childish? Bubble data-center economics is bad, we have the history to prove it, this isn't the first bubble. Do you have real arguments against it besides calling it "childish" which is itself childish?
> I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud.
You're begging "the collective" to stop worrying and learn to love the bubble... or else? OK, or else what? If everything is already "built on the cloud" there's already enough cloud to go around, built at a normal pace, without bubbles and without incurring huge debts, deficits, circular financing and what not. See, the how can be done better.
> Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there.
That's a strawman, which you sneaked in here: 'reducing that to "more is bad" and then ... to "data centers bad"'
The issue is, and always has been - the bubble way of doing it as bad - slow down and do it properly. Either way the public isn't going to get the benefits of the build-out, at least try to reduce the negative externalities to an acceptable level.
But do you really think we have more datacenters now, or even an equal number, to what we'll have in the future?
It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales. I don't know where the conversation goes when folks just talk about how useless it is and how compute is bad.
Take two steps back: do you really think we're at peak compute? If not, shouldn't we focus on how to scale in a sustainable way? The rhetoric doesn't foster that inquiry. That's my issue here.
Every single critique has said "slow down to do it right". That's similar to the DEI fallback of "Do the work". It's not that the goal is wrong, it's that it takes no effort to demand something vague like that, because it requires no thought. What forwards the discussion when implementation matters is the specifics: what do we want folks to do differently. If gas turbines in data centers are causing noise pollution that affects quality-of-life (which is absolutely appears they do - it's really bad), that's not a call to ban the idea, but rather the implementation. I see that distinction too often being dismissed in these discussions.
> It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales.
I don't think your premise is obvious at all. Developed countries have stagnant or shrinking populations, and there is a general trend toward greater power efficiency over time. So why should total power consumption be expected to keep increasing?
Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.
Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing.
AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers.
Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere.
Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
Opus 5 is so wordy, it doesn't feel any better than 4.8 at coding (at least not for what I use it for), I hopped over to Grok4.6 after the announcement the other day and its been pretty good so far. It also is very fast.
Sure, if we're talking about total "wealth". Towns might put the cameras on their balance sheet (unless they're just leased in some way), but I strongly doubt that any towns are selling their flock cameras.
Moreover, the quote was about budget - it only hits the budget if they replace them. Likewise, if someone steals your car, it only hits your budget if you replace it or otherwise incur other expenses (taxi, etc). If you shrug because you have 4 other cars, or just walk and bike most of the time, its not really hitting your budget.
"I think this guy is dumb and wrong. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is going to have outsized influence on a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy may profit from a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is using his wealth to do dumb wrong things."
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