The distinction is that Mastodon doesn't have to grow, and Bluesky does. There's an extent to which Bluesky is viable because its venture-funded owner pays for the infrastructure it operates on (Mastodon communities generally have to stand on their own two feet). If there's no path for Bluesky to grow into a viable business on its current financial runway, the funding for the infrastructure will end.
Sure, but not if you've taken venture funding. We already have a public, community platform for building slow-growing tight-knit communities: Mastodon/ActivityPub.
I mean, not really, right? Permeability would help, but the first and second principal components of our flooding situation are the fact that we're built on a flat swamp, so water has no natural place to go, and we're built around an undersized combined sewer system that would be dazzlingly expensive to replace.
This is exactly why we took our cameras down in nearby Oak Park in Chicagoland.
People talk online as if this is a Flock technology issue, but it only peripherally is. The core problem is that the hotlist systems states set up were never intended for real-time enforcement; there's a great deal of imprecision in them that tends not to matter in human-scale enforcement, but matters a great deal when enforcement is automated.
This distinction is important because there's basically not much Flock can do about it. The source of truth about which cars should be curbed isn't Flock's and can't be Flock's; it's core law enforcement data that belongs to and is the responsibility of the state. Companies like Flock can presumably rig up Rube Goldberg devices to double-check and cross-check hotlist data, but their goals are in tension: they have a window of just minutes to detect and interdict a car. Our police department pledged to do voice confirmations on these hits, and everyone knew that wasn't going to work.
In our specific case, we curbed more innocent vehicles than stolen ones (though not at gunpoint). In each bogus case, Illinois LEADS had left a car recorded "stolen" weeks after it had been "recovered"; "recovered" in scare-quotes because many (most?) of these cars were never stolen to begin with, but rather driven off by a relative without notice. More context on why these data sources are unsuited for real-time enforcement!
Unfortunately, every law enforcement ALPR deployment in the country is a dragnet for all curb-able offenses, from stolen cars to failure-to-appear warrants (the plurality of arrests under our system, which turned our police force into municipal debt collectors for neighboring suburbs). The starting point for mitigating this problem would be to drastically reduce the set of offenses you alert on --- and that's tricky, because your instinct is to reduce them to the most serious offenses, but what you really need is the set of offenses least likely to result in false positives. We settled on "stolen license plate" (no innocent explanation) before giving up on the endeavor entirely.
Having put two kids through college now: this makes sense. First semester grades are a shitshow anyways, and aren't especially predictive. The first semester at an R1 is utterly unlike any ordinary high school experience and a lot of what you're measuring is just kids getting their sea legs. What's the point? If it's causing drama, just get rid of it.
Maybe. Maybe not. In my case, that first semester of near-failing grades was the kick in the pants I needed to start exerting myself. I entered college assuming it was just as easy as high school. It wasn't. Not even close. And a semester of pass/fail wouldn't have taught me that lesson because I did pass, just barely.
I was initially thinking they were being too coddling, but you're right, my first semester grades weren't all that good either. I was working hard, but it takes a lot to adapt to the much higher expectations of a decent uni.
They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.
Do you see this as a self management issue or a course intensity issue.
My anecdotal experience with the University of California system was that course load was a step down from Highschool university prep (which wasn't that bad). Classes were easier than their AP counterparts, and most students who struggled had an issue with attending morning classes after late nights socializing.
My impression from family going through this process now is that the high school prep has only gotten more intense, so what is the gap? Has college gotten significantly harder in the last 20 years?
Part of the backstory here I think is that ALPR cameras are a commodity technology. They're not defensible by themselves medium term; the market will go to whoever ships the cheapest most reliable cameras with the best pre-sales team, which is a tough space to compete in. For Flock to defend a growth-stage startup valuation, it needs to come up with value-adds.
For a while it looked like that was going to take the form of single-pane-of-glass fusion products (think: Grafana for public safety orgs), but post-AI that seems pretty hard to defend too; Axon doesn't need deep roots in SFBA tech culture to compete on that anymore.
Don't they have network effects? Let the locals search the next few towns over?
Obviously this diminishes with distance; there's not a lot of benefit to Denver sharing with Minneapolis.
They do, but it's unclear how defensible they are. You don't have to operate Flock cameras to get access to Flock data (or Axon date) from neighboring municipalities; Flock even operates (last I checked) a subscription product for doing queries on their sharing network without their cameras installed.
I don't think Flock is going to care that much about profit and growth. Their CEO seems to be a true believer, as opposed to the typical SVer whose god is cash. And at this point they need to win hearts and minds a lot more than they need new installs.
Data is the real product (the whole point of this is having a large network of correlated data, not just putting one security cam in an office), so at some point the Ring<->Flock combo may be proposed again, probably as Flock acquiring Ring (if they get the cash together). Ring was un-ironically marketed as "pre-crime", which is basically Flock for doorbells.
Are these really local businesses or are they employees forced to take on liability as a condition of employment? Tech has been mislabeling employees as independent contractors for years.
It would probably make the most sense for Amazon to scale out their on-road infra as drone delivery capacity (and much more slowly, the regulatory environment) is hammered out but I’m personally leaning towards the org going for a more practical response that ends up routing most packages through USPS instead.
It's also, as the article points out later, a permitted cap, not an emissions estimate. New plants generally have permitted caps far higher than their expected emissions.
You hope. People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!
(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)
"People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!"
This statement can be applied to literally any topic and it fills me with a dread that is only matched by trying to fathom the inifinite nature of the universe and time. The notion of having good faith, well intentioned debate and discourse around any conceivable subject just feels impossible most of the time.
That was my point. People disagree about this topic. I happen to agree that climate change is a real and imminent problem (though probably not, with the previous commenter, about its solution space). Pointing to public opinion about smoking in the 1950s is a conclusory argument; it doesn't get us anywhere.
I think you're talking about coal production that's sold to other states. Texas leads in both coal and natural gas consumption by far. Texas produces an insane amount of energy.
You seem to have a huge misunderstanding of how big the Texas grid is. And no, it shares almost nothing which is why we had a huge power crash in the freeze of 2021.
>Texas led the nation in energy consumption in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA reported Texas' total energy consumption was twice as much as California's, the second-highest energy-consuming state, and more than three times as much as third-place Florida. The EIA's State Energy Data System finds U.S. total energy use peaked in 2007. Between 2007 and 2023, Texas energy consumption rose 21% while U.S. energy use decreased 5%.
I have zero idea where you're thinking that Texas exports power, or doesn't use it all, but it's very odd given the plethora of evidence to the contrary.
Correct. We have very little cross transfer capability to other grids. Add to that the Texas grid consumes 2x the power of California, so the scales are huge.
It's not majority opinion to be against data centers? One of the largest bipartisan issues of our time, something like 70% of the US population being against it in some capacity (likely even higher)?
That poll says Americans broadly oppose data centers in their local area. A poll of all Americans would likely find broad majority support for the construction of data centers in Texas; a poll isomorphic to this one would also find similarly broad opposition to the construction of apartment buildings in their local area.
Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.
I'm not convinced these two things (data centers vs apartment buildings) are that similar, though there is probably some overlap.
People don't just hate the idea of data centers "in their backyard" the way they do with housing, they also just fundamentally despise the tech companies and personalities who are creating these data centers.
People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.)
The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just:
(1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well
(2) Political polarization (Democrats --- I'm a lifelong Democrat --- are currently getting marching orders to oppose data centers)
(3) Bogus concerns about water.
We spend a great deal more time and energy thinking about DCs on HN than the median poll respondant ever will. And still, the idea that there's striking public opposition to data centers anywhere in the country is hard to support with evidence.
Fortunately, I think the public opinion fever about data centers is starting to break. I'm reading more and more left-leaning stories questioning the narrative. I think there's a good chance this sentiment crystalizes to something more specific and productive, like "stop letting Elon Musk do things".
What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good. It feels similar to the Tea Party movement after 2008.
I'm not seeing polling break, just opinion writing. You're kind of making my case for me when you talk about people showing up to protests with guillotines.
I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.
It is kind of bonkers if you consider that all of us already had "data centers" in our backyards already.
Every corporation and even most small businesses have had a machine room, wiring closet, or some kind of server shoved into a room, since 30 years ago now. They all had them in every office building you ever drove by, or lived next to, or shopped near. It's simply that people didn't even register them, because none of the general public really sees or knows what goes on in office parks, and behind the tinted corporate windows. It could be as benign as a toy distributor or as wicked as a defense contractor, and from the outside, they look alike.
But they've all had computers, and networks, for decades. And what we are seeing now is consolidation and concentration. The offices and parks and buildings are hollowed out -- they've laid off workers, they've gone WFH, and most importantly, they've gutted their machine rooms and removed on-prem equipment in migration to the cloud. So each and every company that migrated to the cloud has shrunk their own machine room's footprint by X amount that is reflected in data-center capacity by an identical (or perhaps larger) X. And that, of course, means that power, cooling, and resource consumption is not necessarily enlarged, but merely transferred and concentrated into DCs rather than power-hungry machine rooms, humming secretly inside every office building.
I look back to my first job--I worked at an ISP, and we colocated with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The SDSC was a data center par excellence with the finest machines that ever existed on the floor. And I was still a kid when I'd be admitted to the main floor, I'd walk past a Y-MP, a Thinking Machine, an Intel Paragon, a Nearline Tape Robot, and there were our humble little pizza-boxes, sitting on a table trying to keep up with Usenet. Our own ISP offices didn't even have a machine room of our own, just a rack with a hub--yeah a hub--and a Sparc 2 pizza box to serve the office. We were already "in the cloud", as it were. More or less literally--SDSC was where they tested nuclear weapons, predicted the weather, and explored outer space, through the magic of FORTRAN...
So what people are complaining about is something they can see. If you're dying of cancer for 20 years but you never go to a doctor, you won't feel it. Once you see the doctor, the chemotherapy starts, and then you croak from the chemo. So this building of datacenters is simply bringing this into the open, and into the light. And people are angrily reactive at social media, and techbros, and surveillance capitalism, and AI-job-losses, and corporate hijinks in general, so data centers do give a focus to that futile rage.
But it's futile, and we all depend on data centers already, even before they are built, and we need DCs now to sustain our economy and our civilization as it already is. It's futile to resist and if you want to come in with a tractor to demolish them, you'll be arrested, and the Flock camera attackers will be hauled into prison too, and technology will just impassively march along as a juggernaut with no feelings, no remorse, and no mercy.
It's a pity; we were really nice folks for a few hundred years.
This piece would have been better if it had just been the prompts used to generate it. The entire underlying story is just "company does discretionary RIF".
Some of these generated stories pay their freight on HN, because they develop genuinely interesting technical[†] ideas (I'd still like to see the prompts, if I can't get the story in the author's own words). But when the story contains essentially no interesting content, it starts to make sense to consider them off-topic.
† usually! I'm equally into genuinely interesting LLM-generated explanations of thoughts on modernist poetry, I guess.
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