They’re called data centers because they… do actually have lots of meaningful data. Tons of it. A lot of it is stolen, most of it has no business being in these corporations’ hands, and none of it is available to you unless you can cut a big enough check, but it is real data. Why do you think palantir has been worming its way into every government agency? Its because they want valuable data, and they process that data in data centers.

I don’t know if this is a good idea necessarily, but what I do to get grime out from under my nails is to (very carefully) scrape under the nail and across the quick with the tip of my pocketknife. it’s got a very sharp, narrow blade with a fine point. Between that and a heavy-duty degreaser soap, something you might find at a mechanic shop, I can usually get my nails clean enough to eat with in fairly short order.

I have cut myself under a nail using this method and that is very unpleasant so it’s probably not ideal, but it works well enough with a steady hand that I keep doing it. Been many years now since I’ve drawn blood.

If time isn’t a factor, I’ll just wash normally and let whatever doesn’t come off just sit under the nails for a while. eventually it’ll grow out and wash out on its own and I don’t have to go poking around. I only use the knife if I don’t feel comfortable letting whatever’s under my nails stay there. Garden dirt? Let it ride. Automotive fluid medley? Probably not great to absorb through the skin, gonna try to get that off quickly.

My town does have a website but it doesn’t do much other than list phone numbers and office hours for a few departments. what services are available on it are contracted out to corporate partners. I would not be surprised if the website itself is managed by a corporation as well. It is mostly useless and there is very little motivation to improve it.

But I’m not really talking about a municipal datacenter, more like a community center or library branch having a digital commons for the neighborhood, with some useful tools, access to reliable data, and maybe some recreational software. Something like what Nextdoor should have been but not enshittified to death by VC.

lmfao = el-em-ef-ay-oh (like that one ancient party band)

I’d forgotten they ever existed, wow. A true flash in the pan.

My answer is “El’-em ay’-yo”, all the letters distinct but the AO get a little blended together. Southern US vowel sounds.

I guess it depends on how much equipment is needed before something becomes a “datacenter”. I don’t really see a community hub being a massive supercomputer, maybe a small office or a room in a local library. I’d argue that a single server could be called a datacenter if it centralizes data, but I don’t think that is the common understanding of the word. Maybe the word needs to be reclaimed.

I would love a (solar-powered) community datacenter that hosts services for the local population. Community bulletin board or forum to share event notices, lost pets, road closures etc, simple messaging and filesharing utilities for those not technical enough to host their own, maybe some simple games like chess or cards.

The problem with the current explosion of datacenters is that they don’t benefit the community at all, they’re just digital oil rigs that drain the community of resources while also actively poisoning the area they’re in. Small wonder communities are against them.

Yeah but sharkbites aren’t necessary for PEX, I was just using them for convenience’s sake. Is there a benefit to doing home plumbing with CPVC over, say, PEX-B with crimped connections?

what’s the advantage of CPVC over PEX? I’ve run a few PEX lines off my old copper pipes and didn’t need any expensive tooling, just a ratchet cutter and sharkbite fittings, which were a little expensive but suited my small needs pretty well.

God damn it, I knew his voice sounded weird. I just assumed he had a stutter and was bad at editing. Thanks for the catch.

Stealing this, thanks.

Do you know what it’s from? I can’t place it at all.

Reading through the opinion, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this ruling come up in defense of chatbots trained on copyrighted works.

A provider induces infringement if it actively encourages
infringement through specific acts. Grokster, 545 U. S., at
942 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). For example, in Grokster,
we held that a jury could find two file-sharing software com-
panies liable for inducement. Id., at 941 (majority opinion).
The companies promoted and marketed their software as a
tool to infringe copyrights. Id., at 926. The “principal ob-
ject” of their business models “was use of their software to
download copyrighted works.”

“Sure, it can rip off copyrighted works, but your honor, we pinky promise that was never our principal object”. I could see it flying. Interestingly enough, the US Solicitor General explicitly brought up DMCA safe harbor in its amicus brief (siding with Cox):

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (17 U.S.C. 512), gave
service providers, including ISPs, a safe-harbor defense
to claims of copyright infringement. That defense
shields ISPs from liability for copyright infringement
based on, among other things, “the provider’s transmit-
ting, routing, or providing connections for, material
through a system or network controlled or operated by
or for the service provider.” 17 U.S.C. 512(a). To qual-
ify for that safe harbor, the service provider must
“adopt[] and reasonably implement[] * * * a policy that
provides for the termination in appropriate circum-
stances of subscribers * * * who are repeat infringers.”

I’d expect this admin to brief the court in a way that favors Musk et al, and it kind of makes sense that you’d want to bolster safe harbor protections, but I imagine a safe harbor defense of LLMs would require the reasonable policy of not training your LLM on a bunch of copyrighted works without their permission, with the express intent of creating derivative works on demand for your paying clients.

Opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-171_bq7d.pdf

US SG amicus brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-171/359730/20250527172556075_Cox-Sony.CVSG.pdf

Right, i mean if you made the context window enormous, such that you can include the entire set of embeddings and a set of memories (or maybe, an index of memories that can be “recalled” with keywords) you’ve got a self-observing loop that can learn and remember facts about itself. I’m not saying that’s AGI, but I find it somewhat unsettling that we don’t have an agreed-upon definition. If a for-profit corporation made an AI that could be considered a person with rights, I imagine they’d be reluctant to be convincing about it.

Yeah I think for it to be a proper strange loop (if that is indeed a useful proxy for consciousness-- I think there’s room for debate on that) it would need to be able to take it’s entire “self” i.e. the whole model, weights, and all memories, as input in order to iterate on itself. I agree that it probably wouldn’t work for the current commercial applications of LLMs, but it not what being what commercial LLMs do, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done for research purposes.

There’s no reason an LLM couldn’t be hooked up to a database, where it can save outputs and then retrieve them again to “think” further about them. In fact, any LLM that can answer questions about previous prompts/responses has to be able to do this. If you prompted an LLM to review all of it’s database entries, generate a new response based on that data, then save that output to the database and repeat at regular intervals, I could see calling that a kind of thinking. If you do the same process but with the whole model and all the DB entries, that’s in the region of what I’d call a strange loop. Is that AGI? I don’t think so, but I also don’t know how I would define AGI, or if I’d recognize it if someone built it.

Yeah the electoral college is a weird, poorly constructed indirect democracy. I think we should do away with it. Still, electors are elected by the state votes, and congressional representatives (state and national) are elected directly. I think there’s plenty to criticize about the American system, but to go from “it’s got serious problems” to “it’s not a democracy” seems like too far a reach for me. Elections still have consequences in America, and as long as that’s true I think its still technically a democracy.

I’ve always wanted to deploy Chaos Monkey for its actual purpose, but I’ve never been in charge of a big enough infra to make it worth the time. I have turned off databases just to see who files a ticket, which seems in the same spirit.

The horror of being a senior admin is realizing that the whole thing could live or die based solely on your actions and decisions. And that you will be blamed.

Validate your backups regularly.

Also, make backups.

I think what you’re describing is usually called direct democracy. If that’s the only kind of democracy you think is real democracy, I guess we’ll have to differ. I think there’s nothing inherently undemocratic about having elected representatives perform certain functions. I think at some scale it helps to have middle layers more than it hurts. That’s not to say direct democracy wouldn’t be preferable, I don’t know that I have a well-formed opinion on that. But if a system has consequential elections, no matter the structure of the government they elect, I’d call that a democracy.