thegrim33

>> Industry sockpuppets often like to push statistics about closed-loop data centers

>> So I'm going make my own slew of claims, yet provide absolutely zero sources for said claims, I'll just present my opinions as if they're known fact

Well, you surely convinced me.

Ah yes, the good 'ol "link to an article as proof of my claims, the article then contains multiple links to proof of the article's claims, and the multiple links, when followed, all end up leading to 404 pages with no content." Well, that convinces me.

Ah, another post from this journalist, claiming that a company investing billions of dollars in this, literally designing their own chips for it, that already has experience designing and operating tens of thousands of bespoke satellites, just simply didn't think to figure out how to power/cool them. Surely this journalist, with no engineering degree, that has never worked any job in their entire life other than writing opinion pieces and tech reviews, has this all figured out better than the company does.

On Lex Fridman recently DHH was enthusiastically bragging about how he was letting AI generate C++ that he intentionally wasn't even looking at, he was treating it as a pure black box and just submitting the output.

The root cause underlying all of that is the simple fact that the average person just isn't intelligent enough. They fall for the grift, they fall for the advertising, for the manipulation, the propaganda, the echo chambers, the emotion, the hate, they fall for it all. They're either unable to see it or escape it or both.

With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization.

There's also no real solution to this.

Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things.

The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.

In reality I see the anti-app sentiment as mostly a scheme to get more data into the cloud, more traffic that can be collected and spied on, less power and control for the user, and demonizing local computing and users having control over their data. A scheme to give companies and government more complete control over everything you do. Basically further enshitification of computing infrastructure.

"I almost sold a car today, but if I did, sure it would have been some income, but who knows when the next time I would sell another car would be? Why bother? It's rinse and repeat"

The doomerism has two primary sources:

1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.

2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.

Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.

It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not just another political propaganda outlet.

If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.

I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.

One of the great lakes alone (Ontario) contains enough fresh water that it could supply the lifetime water requirements of 28 billion people.