But,, but, but.....I thought "Data Centers == Bad"...?

Ellison's Paramount Skydance Warner Bros Discovery - and movies/TV can be very subtle in pushing a narrative or shaping public opinion.

As opposed to all the subtle (and lately not so subtle) narratives the current folks have been pushing for years now?

"High performance hardware ... [(was)]  cheap and (was) readily available."

Do you think past tense is an accident, rather than a necessary and prepared-fore consequence ?  Peasants, peons & serfs are supposed to eat soylent-green not porterhouse steak.

"There is a vast space between Luddite and techno addict."

Yes, you would think that. Aristotles' middle-way wins out. Yet the inter-personal  & creative advantages of eliminating all but radio & dial-fone are so great a just First-Cause would have supplied gallons of pine-tar with every steam-powered loom. Sociopath leveraging of auto-functioning tools drives modern cultures toward a dystopian feudal dead-end.

The data centers people hate are the ones powering the AI slop engines, not the Internet. There's a reason traditional data centers never bothered anyone.

I don't read any of them, so I am not censored by them. Lots of other news sources / V/Blogs available. Left, right or center the "town square" originally opened by the internet still thrives.  And ... BTW ...  the quality of writing in the Atlantic is so high that its SJW/WOKE /Trotsky-slut credentials may be ignored.

"These days you can just type in a reasonably clear set of <code> objectives." Actually no. Any novel system  requires analogue sets of sensor inputs searched-for, observed, classified , shared and responded to. How does AI do on qualia? Not so well, I imagine.

...Nothing on them but cranky bastards contributing to climate change while moving between ticky-tacky, 40+ hours of indentured servitude, and temples to Mammon.

I largely agree with most of Klee's points, but there's a serious bias issue with his conclusion: "The internet" is just the road we use to get somewhere. Where we go is up to us most of the time. And in this case, the "old internet" is still mostly there - Case in point, I still have a crappy static personal website up that hasn't been updated since the 1990s.

Problem is, nobody wants to read my ramblings from 30 years ago any more than they did 30 years ago. People want FAANGs, even while they may openly resent those same platforms. Sure, Amazon is evil... But the alternative is leaving the house and going to a store, eew! NetFlix kills everything good after two seasons, but two seasons on-demand beats a 30-second stick-figure animation that takes six weeks per "episode" and depends on the unpaid hobbyist creator not getting bored with the project. TikTok is measurably destroying the attention spans of our youth, but we can't risk missing the next big "hold my beer and watch this" moment.

The problem isn't "the internet". The problem is us as a collective whole. When there's demand for trash, sanitation engineers flip to supply side.

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(

The primary reason companies advertise with Google is to drive search results to their site.

If AI summaries become good enough that nobody needs to click the links anymore - What are advertisers paying for? "Brand recognition" only takes things so far, at some point they need real customers to drop in and throw money at them or they won't have anything to advertise.

My company ships data dumps like this to multiple vendors on a monthly (sometimes weekly) basis.

My side of that equation takes security very seriously. The recipients... Well... When someone offers to send you credentials out-of-channel, the right response is never "Just email it, this isn't a shared account" followed by getting cranky at being told that ain't happening.

You are incompetent... at AI. You've never even made a good faith attempt to utilize it productively. That is the definition of willful ignorance.

Perhaps, but in this case the real pressure comes from having to justify multiple trillions of dollars of debt, using a technology whose actual scope of applicability is much smaller than you've been leading investors to believe. You can practically see the flop-sweat at this point.

The callous part of me thinks that was the intention from the start: wash out the capable engineers who were competently producing and hire ethnic cohorts who played the game.

It's Amazon. Anything that gets them the metric that they can put in their promo doc is a good thing.

6-12 months later, when they've been promoted, they can nix it and add it to their next promodoc as company savings in efficiency.