This is one of the things that scales with the growth of their business. Power costs are a _signifigant_ chunk of computing costs. Their datacenter opex is probably not as insignificant as people are assuming here.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/2...
"In its second quarter earnings, Google reported that cloud revenues increased by 32% to $13.6 billion in the period. The demand is so high for Google’s cloud services that it now amounts to a $106 billion backlog, Alphabet finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said during the company’s post-earnings conference call."

Google is in the business of .. computing. Google needs to squeeze more from less and do it faster, to increase profits like anyone else. There's no scale that makes it go away, because it scales with everything they do.

Power is the biggest cost in a datacenter. They're measured in megawatts. It doesn't matter who builds them, they aren't cheap and they don't get cheaper at scale.
I'm not sure what the argument is, Google has lots of money, therefore they should be running everything on a pack of mainframes? A flock of big iron UNIX boxes? I guess you could be forgiven after years of all the AI power demand pearl-clutching and crypto waste in the news, but what do you think a square meter of plain old boring servers in any datacenter did? They suck power and produce heat which sucks more power, it's their whole thing and we do that as densely as practical so we don't have to build more datacenter.

You're talking about a company that famously built their own custom distributed servers and switches. You can head canon that as Google alien science voodoo custom special sauce magic super servers or... lots of rough edges and they did it to save a buck, lots of bucks at scale. This is more of the same.

So the same way some mainframe bro was cheering when x86 killed SPARC and Power servers, well, this crusty Solaris admin is not, NOT cheering about ARM taking your lunch money. Suck it Intel. For a lot of you this is probably a wakeup call, enjoy the race to the bottom. I hope your out of band management blows, your firmware sucks, and you enjoy all the reliability of the cheap consumer grade junk you paid for. I welcome our new ARM overlords. /s but we do get what we pay for.

What the fuck does economics have to do with people being dicks to each other. Nothing.

And being a dick is entirely rational if you reject the golden rule and go with what feels good. That's just evil. Not helping someone being attacked by a dick is also entirely rational, and evil, and not having fuck-all to do with capitalism either way.

Do you want a longer lesson on what evil looks like? Yes it's man-made, you moron.

That's bullshit, I drink mine black, but coffee also tastes great when diluted in something else. It's why a faint whiff of it in the air smells so AMAZING. You can get that beautiful coffee aroma in other stuff. Instead of rinsing out your coffee cup, fill it with some cold milk. Or coke. A little coffee flavor goes a long ways in cheese cake, anything chocolate too.

I'm sorry RobinH, you're saying TED has lost it because of some behind the scenes inside ball hand wringing over a controversial speaker and topic? THAT is how TED lost it? It's not all the shitty speakers like this guy...

This is just like conservatives complaining about being censored very loudly on all fucking channels constantly. In fact that's _exactly_ what this is. You point to a published TED talk and complain that people didn't like it. It's published. I'm reading/listening to it.

And... That guy is plainly full of shit. Color blindness isn't real. Unconscious bias is very real.

Color blindness is like a man saying he sees a woman for who she truly is on the inside, just another person. What a great line, and it lets you set aside empathy! I think I know why this is popular with some people. No need to walk a day in her shoes, or admit that her experience with life may vary wildly from yours. What difference could boobs make anyway, I don't see those! What's gender normative household roles.. you need to leave now to pick up the kids from school because your husband doesn't, I don't see that bleep bloop just person woman boobs we're all the same bleep blop. How convenient.

Hi homeless person, I do not see what could possibly be evidence of a very differently lived life, why are you living on park bench, silly human, stop that. It's so clean and simple, I see why the anti-empathy crowd loves it!

The answer to unconscious bias is awareness, introspection, and empathy. Not fucking ignorance, not color blindness. Last example: a customer with no arms walks up to you, what do you do. Well, I'd think about it. What would I expect if I were him. Am I making an inappropriate assumption? Touch him on the shoulder? Fuck Coleman Hughes and the horse he rode in on, he'd probably just stick his hand out for a shake. It's not that's he wrong, it's just so stupid and intellectually lazy and wrong.

Whoa kid, it's a nonprofit, not a charity.

A nonprofit is just a business that spends profits on its mission, operations, salaries etc. If you don't like what reasonable compensation for executives looks like in the New York market, I don't know what to say... but they're absolutely not volunteers, and it's not a charity.

All modern software has a shellacked turd at the center. Wrapped in more crap and more varnish. I'm not sure where we're trying to go with this, no software is trustworthy if you didn't write it, and if you did, that just means you know where to find some peanuts. Hasn't stopped us from getting by with what we have because I don't want to make all that crap myself. Security isn't black and white, it never was, it's about risk.

"Compromised" sounds an awful lot like how "unfree" is thrown around. Some kind of purity test for other people's crap. Sorry, but I'm not putting any shiny turd up on a pedestal, free or not. I'm using what works while taking a measured, risk based approach to security.

OK Putin

Projection.

so long as people still want to buy beanie babies ...

What language is this?

You are wrong. In all levels of knowledge work, if you provide garbage input you get garbage output.

There's an old notion that if you don't put care and consideration into what you're asking me to do, I might threaten to do exactly what you ask and let you find out. I may know better, my more professional judgment may be to do what you want, not what you ask. It may often be to TELL you what you want, and disregard everything you said. Someone less experienced would simply do what you ask and cause a lot of trouble. There are FAR more people like that than seasoned veterans that will tell you what you're asking is stupid to save you from yourself. People that know when to say NO.

That is why you're wrong. There is an entire world of information workers that will try to do what you ask, and they are not useless. We use formal communication to reduce the chance of errors, we make you fill out forms for work requests, we review the work of junior employees to make sure they're not satisfying a weird request or in an unconventional way without reason. We watch out for **clever** solutions that should have been aborted early because the ask was stupid. That's not even just knowledge work I described there, that's our entire workforce, every job ever, the purpose of team leads, shift leads, whatever you call them.

It's sad that on /. we have this much ignorance. There are dozens of free LLMs out there, there is no excuse for being this uninformed. They are useful because of the work we can get out of them.

You COWARD, don't you DARE blame video games for deranged psychopaths attacking election officials, judges, congressmen, governors, mayors, the Capitol, pizza parlors, or Republican leaders openly threatening to imprison or execute their opponents because they disagree with them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://apnews.com/article/cou...

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

You know god damned well video games have nothing to do with all this hate, all the lies and all the cruelty going on around us. "metaphor" my ass, people eating cats and dogs wasn't presented as a metaphor, it was presented as truth, to dehumanize normal everyday people, and to stir hatred and paint a target on their backs. And that's just par for the course, because if I have to make up something cruel to bring your attention to the hatred, I will. - Vice President of the United States. Fucking video games. Are you serious.

DarkOx on self censoring to not to enrage a minority group's feelings. When he is in that group.

Yah I know your post history bud, fuck your feelings.

Everyone that doesn't understand what misinformation is should irrigate their nasal passages with hot shallow pond water to boost activity of their immune system.

That's factual, it will make your immune system go wild. It's also misleading, and dangerous. But only if you believe in misinformation, if you don't, then make sure you get the water all the way up there for maximum effect.