This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
> This is one heck of a straw man argument: “if you wanna ban datacenters but not factories they’re basically the same thing”.
The irony in this comment is that you are the one arguing against a strawman, much more so than GP. They never said they were basically the same thing. There's certainly some level of comparison though as GP laid out in their comment.
It's super neat! Just like Kubernetes is also super neat at what it can do. It's super neat primarily because consuming it is so easy, provided you already have all the same abstraction layers in place in your infra.
You...do have all the same abstraction layers, right? No? Oh. Well, don't worry, Google/Amazon/Microsoft can sell you those if you don't want to pay your IT staff to prop it up for you.
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Look, snark aside, yours is the correct take. Google's solutions are amazing, but they're also built for an organization as large and complex as Google. Time will tell if this is an industry-standard abstraction (a la S3 APIs) or just a Google product for Google-like orgs/functions (a la K8s).
This. K8s is easy to consume, and a real PITA to actually setup and support from an IT perspective.
If someone wants production K8s, I'm steering them (and their budget) to a managed control plane from one of the major cloud providers. Trying to prop it up locally when it really hates having to work directly with bare metal does not spark joy.
Honestly, I've been dealing with crap like this for so many decades that I'm a fervent supporter of every "installer" just showing and logging a Git PR-styled diff to the user of every file and system change, everywhere in the system, complete with the ability to rollback from it.
I am tired of inconsistent logging, opaque system changes, and vendors generally being malicious with endpoint security in the name of protecting profit.
Screw the "show me the log" option that scrolls by in a flash and you can't get back to, show me the damn diff first.
I'd argue they need significantly more than that, if they're expected to also pay for childcare, healthcare, save for emergencies, etc. This is a polycrisis we absolutely need to take seriously lest cities become cesspools again.
"Move somewhere cheaper" ignores the reality that most good jobs are in cities nowadays, not rural or cheaper areas. It also ignores decades of calculus of the "city to save, suburbs to live" mentality that's been gradually eroded away over decades of housing mismanagement, not to mention serves as a giant middle-finger for folks who, for one reason or another, MUST live in a major city (healthcare, job prospects, career field, etc). Even if someone were to move somewhere cheaper, they'd forfeit their higher salary in the process - which would likely make the newer, cheaper location just as, if not more unaffordable than their city life was; hell, some of us were trying to move somewhere cheaper in the era of remote work, and look how that turned out. Half the planet lives in cities by UN estimates, and "moving somewhere cheaper" is the most cowardly rebuttal of the problem one could muster.
I'm also shrugging off the uninformed whinging about "welfare kings/queens". Reagan couldn't prove it, two Bushes couldn't prove it, Clinton couldn't prove it, Obama couldn't prove it, two Trumps and a Biden couldn't prove it, because they don't actually exist. Talk to people actually on benefits rather than swallow naked pro-austerity propaganda by rich people angry that their tax dollars help the working poor they themselves created in the first place, and they'll tell you how impossibly difficult it is to get benefits in the first place, nevermind keeping them. There's a vastly more evidence supporting the harms of means-testing than any WFA coming from it.
At the end of the day, NYC is not alone in these problems - but is unique in having an openly Democratic Socialist as Mayor, meaning Capital has a vested interest in pinning all the ills to him and astroturfing the same austerity bullshit that worked with Reagan et al to try and defend the problems they caused in the first place. America cannot roll back to an era where six-figure salaries meant you were "rich" and five-figures were the norm, so we need to build an America where said salaries at least cover essentials again and where median incomes can afford median housing.
Really good piece. I don't have direct experience in Academia, but I can see similar incentives and outputs in everyday life.
I see it in people who will put highway traffic at risk of accidents so they don't miss the turn the GPS pointed out, having not bothered to do the work of learning fundamental navigational skills - or gladly outsourcing them to the machine and leaving them to decay.
I see it in people who giddily challenge the expertise of others because the machine gave them the support needed to reinforce pre-conceived opinions. What is now ChatGPT used to be TikTok, used to be Podcasters, used to be Instagram, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, TV talk shows, supermarket tabloids.
I see it in a cadre of leadership who blindly seize upon the latest Gartner reports to justify every single decision they "made", and feel they owe nobody an explanation because of their title or place in the hierarchy.
I see it in my own damn landlord, blindly following what a machine told them to charge for rent this year until I actually walk them through the financials involved and negotiate a more reasonable rate. How they charge for parking in a facility that's over half-empty, then wonder why residents never have visitors or why fire lanes are always blocked with parked cars overnight.
Hell, it's visible in the financialization of every fucking thing because the machines said we should charge $$$ for X and only pay our workers $ and how come people aren't buying shit anymore?
The narrative for the past hundred years has been that the machines should be trusted to do the right thing. That if you were replaced by a machine, it's because you made bad choices in life. GPS will never fail you, Google has all the answers, the "real" media is on socials, chatbots are smarter than scientists, and the stock market is the absolute best indicator of economic health.
And humans have behaved accordingly, because the incentives - or lack of disincentives - foster those outcomes. There's no need to learn basic orienteering when the GPS gets you there; there's no need to learn to search effectively when a chatbot or search engine spews out an answer 9 times out of 10; there's no need to understand your industry or organization when there's a consultant report right there, replete with recommendations for solutions to that problem you didn't know you had.
We have built an entire society that all but deters and punishes critical/Nth-order thinking. There's no incentive to learn new skills when machines dispense a "good enough" answer with a dopamine hit, and it's plainly visible in the slop of selfishness displayed by people out there. We can't very well close Pandora's Box or get rid of the machines, so we must instead figure out how to incentivize deep, critical thinking across the populace again.
I knew Microsoft was incredibly dysfunctional (you have to understand this if you're supporting their suite and want to succeed), but damn, I'm floored by the incompetence reported on from juniors to the Board and seemingly every step of leadership in between.
Yet I'm also not surprised, because I keep encountering it in non-Microsoft orgs. The current crop of leadership in general seems to be so myopically focused on GTM and share price bumps that even the mere suggestion of a problem is a career-ending move for whoever reported it (ask me how I know). Making matters worse is that Boards and shareholders have let them get away with this for so long, across every major org, that these folks believe in their heart and soul that they're absolutely, infallibly correct. The higher up someone is in an organization, the higher the likelihood they'll reject any and all feedback from "beneath" them that is contrary to their already-decided-upon agenda.
The kicker is that I'm not sure how to actually deal with this in a way that minimizes pain. In my subjective experience, these sorts of companies simply do not change until and unless there's literally no other option other than failure - and then, they're likely to choose failure for the parachute selection instead of doing the hard work of reform. Maybe what's needed is for Microsoft (or any of the legion of similarly dysfunctional enterprises out there) to genuinely fail in a non-recoverable way so as to shock the wider industry/economy into taking serious action on corporate misgovernance.
Maybe failure is the best option.
I don't know. I just know that this isn't tenable.
> Maybe what's needed is for Microsoft (or any of the legion of similarly dysfunctional enterprises out there) to genuinely fail in a non-recoverable way so as to shock the wider industry/economy into taking serious action on corporate misgovernance.
The naive model of capitalism says that the benefit of market competition is that it's possible for failing companies to get out-competed by non-failing ones. In practice, there's enough of a combination of "natural monopoly", lock-in effects, and anti-competitive practices that the software landscape is covered in companies that are too big to avoid, let alone too big to fail.
That's what I've been trying to impart on folks for a decade, now. The lack of regulations has let apex predators capture the environment, and short of an environmental collapse (as in, the sudden and permanent destruction of compute in general that makes their business unrecoverable), the only solution is hunting the hunters - i.e., government regulations, monopoly breakups, market penalties, etc.
There is no feasible way for someone to out-compete Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Oracle. None. They have to fail in some capacity to a significant, global-economy-harming degree to even provide an opening to competition in the marketplace. Even if AI turned out to be a huge nothingburger tomorrow, they'd still be unassailable.
1, Reading the Headline on HN) "Man, this is probably going to be something more practical, but I wish they were superconducting go-karts or golf-carts to get around the facility in."
2, Reading the article) "...okay, I was right? Kinda? Huh. Something feels off. Wait a-"
3, Remembering the Date) "FUCK. OK, CERN got me. Good one. Still want a superconducting kart though."
Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in, because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take decades of work and cost multitudes more than just eating Oracle's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can you sell that to the board? Nope.
The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use their cloud services.
Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the fuck off of it for anything that remains.
The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep giving them money.
A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP
The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare.
Every business runs slightly differently than everyone else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I wonder if the solution to ERP isn't just targeted microservices exposing data via APIs...
yeah but i think that is the problem - everyone wants to customize / thinks their business is super unique, but honestly the customization is what makes ERP so painful. industry customization is important (motels are different than a small manufacturer) but for SMEs a standard solution that fits their industry is the can be implemented in a manner that's not akin to open heart surgery would be far more valuable to these firms.
The current datacenter boom isn’t general compute, but AI compute - a highly specialized form that’s not adaptive or recycled into other, demonstrably useful forms of compute should this end up being a highly speculative bubble or dead-end technology. The demonstrated environmental impacts are very real, and the reason they’re shoved through has everything to do with secrecy around their known impacts in an effort to get cheap land and government buy-in before locals protest the harms of the buildout.
As for a modern, highly automated factory like what China builds? At least then we get cheaper goods and services to buy while still creating jobs (repairfolk, technicians, roboticists, etc) as opposed to AI datacenters, which just slurp up resources while delivering chatbots that kill society’s best-paying jobs and careers and centralizing power under fewer hands.
So yeah, I’d be totally in favor of factories that build things and employ people, versus AI data centers that just hoover up resources and shunt costs to locals without consent.
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