Comment Re: Oh well (Score 1) 248
They MIGHT even have to HIRE!
They MIGHT even have to HIRE!
It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.
Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.
If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.
I used to think that. Then I looked at the math. The amount of money possessed by the billionares and a trillionare pale in the face of the size (and needs) of the actual economy. Just having no rich people doesnâ(TM)t mean society suddenly has a bunch of wealth. Like you can generate wealth once, for like a year, and then there is nobody to take money from any more, and everyone is back where they were: same expenses, same income as today. But mysteriously, nobody wants to make businesses actually workâ¦. So the income starts to decay, the prices rise, and with nobody to blame, people start going really weird. And everyone feels that they have a veto power over anything that bothers them, so: bye-bye innovation of every kind. Look at how neighbors police their neighborhoods, and then scale that to every business civilization-wide. Nothing new will ever be created. âoeSafety.â âoeEnvironment.â âoeThreatening jobs.â Everything just⦠stops.
I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.
Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.
The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.
Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.
And then technology just froze. No sensor components got cheaper. Computer vision stopped, as a field. Multimodal AI didnâ(TM)t get invented. Robotic hand technology development stopped. Robotic planning and error recovery did not progress. Time just froze, after McDonalds ended its robotic program.
Just another means to control people that can be turned around and sold to governments. Getting used to it my ass. It was foisted on people without consent and those who know don't use it.
My take was: "Buddy movie in space."
It was fine.
One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.
Never put off till run-time what you can do at compile-time. -- D. Gries