Pup Biru

because people used to do this all the time with ads: serve up an ad click, get paid… so spin up a bunch of clients and have them click ads on your site, easy money!

and not just any social media: threads

that is an unrealistic solution

I would argue we don’t actually need data centers

data centres were kinda just a stand in for a concept: spare parts and redundancy are necessary… you need spare parts for pretty much any machine that can’t be offline for longer than it takes to get replacements parts. that’s as true for farm equipment and hospitals as it is for tech

and you have to have extras to meet peak demand: restaurants have extra pans, crockery and cutlery to cover a full house and then some extra for example

but data centres do also provide a lot of good:

connected software has made supply chains much more efficient which means less food waste, supporting the original premise

websites support not for profits immensely to reach people and automate self service… eg homeless people are actually reasonably likely to have access to a smart phone and free wifi, so it gives them a platform to access resources very efficiently

provisioning of disaster relief as well as early warning systems are now heavily reliant on servers in data centres

even modern agriculture has a lot of automation involved which relies on a lot of connected servers and databases running in data centres

a huge amount of that “for 30% of the work we currently do” is certainly reliant on data centres

and as much as they do take a lot of energy, they’re actually very efficient too: compared to a similar amount of processing power running on individual computers (if we somehow managed to replace all servers with peer to peer software) they likely use a lot less energy because energy use is actually a huge factor in server design, and chips get more energy efficient per FLOPS (or ghz) the larger they get

The argument isn’t that it would be easy, it’s that were the will there to do so, it is possible.

and my argument isn’t that it’s impossible, it’s that waste is both inherent and necessary. we try and reduce it, but some of that waste isn’t just dumb shit like throwing away product to keep value high: some waste and redundancy are his inherent to feeding and providing for a planet of 8bn people

heck i’ll bet you have at least 10x as many toilet rolls in your house than are on holders (in use) right now… and you wouldn’t likely buy them 1 at a time as you use them… that’s redundancy too: more of these exist in the world than are currently needed

and that the “30% of the hours” figure is similar: some jobs have busywork that could be cut down on, but sometimes busywork waste is also necessary because staffing also needs to be redundant, or over-provisioned to meet peak demand

human life is a larger goal than logistics.

logistics isn’t a goal; it’s problem that you have to solve to achieve a goal

If we don’t try everything to save a life

human life does have a value cap: would you plunge the world into borderline starvation in order to save a single life? no? well then a single human life is worth less than the happiness of the entire human race… the bar is somewhere above that

you’re trivialising a lot of complex things… public health has similar questions where the value of life and health is measured in aggregate

sorry, but it’s just not logistically possible to save this person

literally what happens every day in public health… resources are not unlimited, and so you have to make choices and trade offs

you only read part of this chain

nope i read the whole thing, its just that

if we can’t bring the aid to the people, let’s bring the people to the aid

is still a logistics problem… public transport is a logistics problem, shipping is a logistics problem, air schedules are a tiny part of the air travel logistics problem

moving people and things to where they need to be at the time that they’re needed is logistics

logistics is a tool used to solve problems. stop using it as an excuse to let people die.

logistics is a problem space that you need to solve before you achieve outcomes: it comes before, not after and you can’t start without solving logistics problems

in terms of distribution of medicine and aid, it’s basically the only problem that needs solving: we have plenty of food, we have plenty of medicine, and not for profits aren’t wanting for these things… they’re wanting for ways to get it where it’s needed

that’s like saying that human life is a far larger goal than physics

you can’t just hand wave it away because you deem human life to be “worth it”. it exists and it’s a real problem, and it’s a complex problem even with unlimited money

and also the necessity of surplus and accidental (necessary) waste:

you need spare parts, and some machines are critical… think of data centres: they often have many spare hard drives on hand to deal with failure, which means that there are more than 100% of the required drives in use… some of the workloads running in that data centre service very important workloads - for example because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind - handing SNAP payments… so what, you redistribute those drives so that we are using all that we have? no we certainly don’t… we eat the inefficiency in the case of redundancy (same argument could apply many more times over when you also think about things like mirrored drives, backups, etc: all of that is under-utilised capacity and “waste”)

the same is true for supermarkets: food that is perishable can’t just be allocated where it’s needed. it exists in a place for a period of time, and you either run out a lot or you have some amount of spoilage… there’s a very hard to hit middle ground with overlapping sell by dates, and overall these days were incredibly good at hitting that already!

… and that’s not to mention the stock on the shelves which is the same thing as spare disk drives!

i guess that’s all distribution on the planet

we could certainly do better, but it’s so much more complex than the fact that these things exist so it must be possible to utilise them 100% efficiently

i want s’morebrod

literally the same concept as a comment i just wrote about russian hypersonic missiles breaking apart mid flight because they didn’t put limits on how fast they can change course when going mach 5 aha

idk i fuck up and release buggy code at least 10% as much as management makes dumb ass decisions

but any software engineer knows sensors and inputs aren’t infallible … and neither is your code! you apply limits to account for anomalies, which should just be an expectation

i think it’s certainly possible that it could start down that path, and it’ll become blatantly obvious that trickle down economics, “socialism is evil”, anti-intellectual crap that the red states bow at the alter of is a huge reason for their suffering and they’ll want to join those coalitions, but those coalitions will have years if not decades of policy on their side to make sure they aren’t overrun with the same ideas

could the process then just start over again? perhaps… it could just be a property of the system

but also… they’re arguing for small government. maybe y’all should start pushing in the same direction: make the federal government smaller, keep your blue state tax money, stop giving them as much… it’s what they want after all

and then use that money to form blue state coalitions: form a new, voluntary CDC, FDA, etc between aligned states that are far more robust than what you’ve been able to achieve with republican bad faith tampering

kinda like the EU model, but less central

(and if you didn’t see my instance, i’m aussie so i don’t really get a say, and nobody should let me influence anything - im not a citizen and i don’t live there or have to deal with as many consequences - unless you legitimately agree)

that’s not even the most incompetent part imo

the fact that the missile tries to change direction too quickly and just breaks itself apart from the aerodynamic pressure is crazy… it’s literally hobby robotics 101 to put limits on acceleration etc

now that’s what i call molecular biology!

it also helped to make sure US government tech services were accessible

in complex systems design, you never blame human error. humans are fallible, and if the system doesn’t account for human error then it’s just a matter of time until failure occurs. look for a way to make the system tolerate or eliminate human error

it’s all internal if you draw your own magical borders!

geopolitics is consistently hypocritical… especially when it comes to the US… we absolutely can, and should be telling everyone to stop being imperialist but in lieu of that, we can just tell russia to cut the shit

or the argument holds water and also the US has consistently been in the wrong for the same reasons