It's fun to watch how a thing that can potentially create an immense surge of economic development is being vilified. Yes, true, you can't just take and build a data center without having the power and water and all the rest of the things. So fine, make investors to come and build new power plants and get more water lines. This is going to handle a lot of current problems in the infrastructure.
We could have used the momentum to build new work opportunities and resources.
Instead we managed to mis-represent the thing so much that people won't even consider having a data center in their vicinity.
It COULD have been a good thing. It became a bad thing.
That data center is running on local power generation because they failed to get power run to the data center properly and essentially exploited a loop whole in planning permission that allowed them to install local power generation: https://www.loudounnow.com/news/sterling-residents-raise-ala...
It’s the only 1 out of 200 in that area, so it’s not representative of what data centers sound like. It does show how you can’t trust the operators to do what best for the local community. It does show how a functioning government works because Loudon county increased oversight and changes the rules to stop another project like that. Setup policies to manage externalities, and don’t make ignorant bans.
It seems like they should be changing the rules to outlaw that ongoing activity rather than considering it grandfathered. If a kid buys a loud car stereo and then the city passes a noise ordinance, it's not like the kid gets to keep on blasting his stereo because he already bought it.
It certainly sounds terrible. I just don't know how credible this YouTube short is. They could be turning the gain way up, using a completely different sound recording, etc.
A sibling post links to a news story [1] which I think is more credible and they measured the noise at 90db right outside the data center - which is certainly high. But they are filming next to a highway and a shopping center, which were presumably quite noisy to begin with. And both of the residents they interviewed hadn't even noticed the noise before the interviewer pointed it out.
They also show some footage from a different data center in the area, and it is much quieter. So sounds like it can vary from datacenter to datacenter, with this one being unnusually loud.
There are new data centers near me. My employment prospects haven’t changed. My utilities, particularly electricity have gotten more expensive though. Property taxes have gone up a little bit.
I’m not against data centers, I don’t mind one way or another. But they’ve definitely not improved the neighborhood and have almost no positive benefits for the community that I’m aware of.
I really feel like DC operators should have a strike, shutdown 50% of their data halls for an hour, and they will suddenly be the most beloved industry on the planet.
Half the stuff going on in most data centres the terminally online crowd would consider to be human rights these days. But you cant calculate that element from Twitter.
"Whats the value of a router terminating multiple VXC's to me, jim everyman" well jimmy, what if you are about to place a call across that VXC.
You're all on the internet in your community and using software services so that's like saying you have no benefit from having a power station when you all use electricity. They have to be somewhere
Sure, if we’re talking about “the internet” in general.
I’m talking about the data center near me, which powers a large social media service. I do not see any benefit to my neighborhood, and I suspect my power bill and property tax increases are subsidizing the data center, instead of the other way around.
You are absolutely smart enough to know the difference between a data center for internet-distributed software and a data center full of GPUs solely for AI, along with the attendant increase in power and cooling needs. Don’t play dumb, please.
I'm not playing dumb but you I'm not sure. Just think for 2 seconds why datacenters exist. It's not billionnaires scrolling tiktok and making all those AI pictures for Facebook. People want the thing the datacenters exist for. The same way they want disposable clothes made by slaves in far away countries. They just want the datacenters to be far away as well, not to stop them. It's the convenient hypocrisy of complaining about consumerism while swiping your credit card mindlessly, it's always someone else's problem.
I see you moving the goalposts! And that’s fine, because this is also wrong: the pace of AI datacenter construction far exceeds actual demand for AI datacenters or actual AI products. The current pace of construction is purely speculative.
Its if anything incrementally speculative, not purely, unless you think there's actually zero demand. And those datacenters are built to make money selling services, they aren't a vanity yacht.
The modern "data center project" looks more and more like building a stadium for a professional sports team.
Oh sure, you can make the argument about how it's going to drive sales tax revenue and create jobs and all that.
But then the reality sets in. The massive property and corporate income tax breaks and subsidies and land use variances that were all negotiated as part of the deal come to roost. The jobs aren't upwardly mobile jobs. The income tax revenue isn't enough to offset all the other breaks.
And you end up with a yolk saddled on the backs of the working class. Of which the bachelor degreed workforce necessary to make something like a data center happen gets treated more and more like a trade than a profession.
Back in the 90s when NAFTA was on everyone's tongues, something like a data center would have been a huge boon to the local economy. And let us be clear, "local economy" means families. But today, things like this study, show that people have no confidence the Invisible Hand is working for them anymore.
>But then the reality sets in. The massive property and corporate income tax breaks and subsidies and land use variances that were all negotiated as part of the deal come to roost. The jobs aren't upwardly mobile jobs. The income tax revenue isn't enough to offset all the other breaks.
Then it sounds like the issue is subsidized datacenters, and the solution is simple: don't subsidize them.
Almost nothing this scale can be built without subsidies because in the U.S. no company is willing to actually buy anything on their own. Wal-Mart forces local municipalities to pay for the buildings to be built through subsidies and taxation delays. Amazon does the same with their warehouses, distribution centers, and Whole Foods. NFL and NBA stadiums as well. Either the locals pay for the "privilege" of having their money vacuumed out of the area or these places don't get built. And as many city and county level politicians are very poorly versed in terms of macroeconomics they fail to understand that the addition of those two hundred jobs will cost the area two to three times as much as the employees will make because they can't collect taxes from an entity that is increasing wear on the roads, increasing load on the electrical and water infrastructure, and creating new external costs in the form of garbage disposal or light and noise pollution.
These datacenters are like that, but taken even further because they're attached to an industry used to ridiculous tax breaks or lack of taxation in the first place, constant investor capital, and continuous rapid growth. Software production and digital infrastructure have grown up in a wildly different environment from traditional retail and shipping logistics, but they're taking the most successful (and harmful) expansion tactics from retail and shipping.
Unless you can kill subsidies outright for anything connected to a national or international entity and provide enough specifics to prevent them from hiding behind shell companies then it's a losing battle to say "don't subsidize them." They'll either force you to pay for them or they'll move somewhere that will, and those with a poor understanding of the situation will complain for years that everyone lost out on a "big opportunity" by refusing to pay for their own predation. That complaining can echo into local politics for years afterwards and affect the outcome of various policies, either by denials out of spite or misplaced regret over the previous big project, or by politicians being voted out because of their opposition to a Wal-Mart or such being built via extensive subsidies and an agreement to collect no taxes for ten years.
>Almost nothing this scale can be built without subsidies because in the U.S. no company is willing to actually buy anything on their own [...]
All this feels like a heuristic (ie. large projects are bad because subsidies) taken too far. If the actual thing that's bad are the subsidies, then all your objections and talking points should be around that, rather than side claims about electricity costs or greedy tech giants. Otherwise you might actually be losing out on the good datacenters are a net benefit for the county's finances, as others have mentioned in this thread. It's like swearing off credit cards because "interest rates are sky high" and "they need to charge high interest rates because it's an unsecured loan". All of that's true, but it's also true that if you avoid the interest rates, credit cards are quite good thanks to cashback and purchase protections. By taking a generic "credit cards are bad" stance you lose out on the benefits of credit cards.
You're arguing against "the trade-offs make the deal untenable" with good examples of how by just stating "but the trade-offs make the deal tenable." You're not actually adding anything to the argument.
Amazon HQ2 is an excellent example. Even though I live in the DMV, I found it ridiculous that Amazon selected Crystal City in which to build. Not even actual DC! What sense did it make to not select NYC, outside of a sweetheart tax break package that Amazon famously made cities compete over like some kind of perverse reality TV show?
Maybe the solution is a federal ban on local tax breaks for anything not classified as a small business. Of course, such a thing would be impossible. But we really need to end this asymmetric warfare between sophisticated, global scale corporations and the comparatively podunk municipalities those corporations easily fleece on these deals.
Maybe a major city like NYC has enough sophistication built into their local politicians due to just their shear scale to be able to handle this sort of negotiation. That's a really big "Maybe". But other major cities like DC (even though AHQ2 didn't even land in DC, DC has it's own fair share of being duped) have proven they don't have that and time and time again they get taken for a ride. We need to level the playing field for local politicians, many of which are basically just the high-end middle class/low-end upper class middle-management type career people who don't have anywhere near the background support and army of lawyers that a major corporation brings to the battlefield. They're in it for either the backend deals they can make with local real estate developers or some quaint notion of "doing their part," either way they aren't part of a global scale Hydra beast with more money than God to be able to handle these cases.
> t's fun to watch how a thing that can potentially create an immense surge of economic development is being vilified.
Maybe the titans promoting AI should NOT promote it on the "we will make you all unemployable" and "we will flood zone woth slop, what you like will die and you womt have a choice".
Without the years of sociopathic tech CEOs, maybe people would be more open to the idea of "it wont end up as pure power grab, with ai used to extract more money from me while making me earn less".
I wish to bring up the issue of mutual respect on HN. The thing that does not help here is a paywall that I see no easy way of bypassing it.
But nevertheless:
> Both firms emphasize that their capability rests on fusing together massive collections of data of different types and scales rather than exploiting any vulnerability in Starlink.
So this is a data collection agency that tracks starlink receivers on statistical data. I could imagine they can estimate starlink terminals and see who is using starlink to connect to the internet, but not to pinpoint the location of a terminal.
Just as anyone else can figure out my ISP if they wish to do that.
I've checked the article. It's written by a credible creator who has not been caught in a lot of BS. At the same time the article is quite wordy and states that the software does not track the terminals. It can't.
As a person who has been working in payment processing for the past 5 years, I can definitely say: a total norm. I'm impressed they allowed that in the first place.
The adult category is a very touchy one. When one get's an OK to connect to the credit card network he has to go a very arduous procedure of being approved by a CC provider. Because the worst thing that can happen from a viewpoint of a payment provider is a return. At the exact moment when someone asks for a return on a credit card, the provider is the one who is responsible and has to revert the transaction instantly.
(That's why Banks are sooooo lengthy and pushy about you filing those claims. They don't want you to initiate the return.)
Now, if you sell weed, do gambling, sell crypto, do porn or anything else of that sort, you have to pay extra for your card processing, to offset all potential problems for the payment provider.
Problems? What problems? Well, a LOT of transactions for adult content and toys happen on stolen cards. And those cards are not stolen per say. It's just a kid taking parent's CC card, or your SO is using it without your knowledge. Once found, this results in a lot of scandals and quarreling. Followed by a return request. And those returns are very annoying to that. The service "technically" was delivered. But now you are loosing it. And the payments provider does not want to be hit by that.
In fact, this is not a news in the first place. When Kickstarter sign their agreement with the card provider, they specifically stated categories of services they will be responsible for. And I guess porn was not one of them. So what? Now the provider saw a chargeback because of the adult content and did the most standard thing: Went back to the documents, noted the fact that Kickstarter not suppose to be doing adult content, and went back to Kickstarter to tell them to stop.
I handle 2-3 of such cases per month. It's called routine.
But now, enter the world of entertainment. A quick search shows one that Kotaku is a subsidiary of a larger conglamerate G/O Media (Gizmodo - Onion). A private equity company that bought out a bunch of entertainment websites like Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Kotaku. It started in 2019, and went basically bankrupt by 2023. They have been selling their websites to different holdings. In 2025 Kotaku was sold to a Swiss conclamerate that put it into a line of similar useless media resources. And if you check the author - you'll find out that he is a well-established gaming reporter. With little knowledge of the money business.
I don't think it's about AI. It's about the success of the MacBook Neo. Google kinda missed the point that at this day and age you can take a huge cut of the Windows market share just based on the fact that your laptop pairs up with your phone.
That's the killer feature of the Neo. This is going to be the killer feature of this one. Working alongside pixel. You have some sort of a platform.
What are they after? Your data, obviously. I doubt they have such a success, I don't see THAT many Pixels around.
This was the MOST confusing release I've seen in years.
Okay, it took me some time that the mail client is called "ThunderBIRD", not the BOLT. Not that I've used it much. But why the logo in github still shows TunderBIRD?
It looks like Mozilla is trying to catch the band wagon for no particular reason. They don't need it AT ALL. But they just jumped in along for a ride.
I remember the times when Microsoft had a lot of problems 20 years ago because of Sasser and other viruses that were taking over Windows. They did not have any contenders. Yet they have stopped any software development for 9 months just to re-work their entire codebase to prevent things like direct memory execution and stuff like that. The result of that was Windows XP Service Pack 2. After that thing windows XP became a legend.
Now, when Linux is slowly creeping on one side, and Mac NEO on another they keep releasing this AI-slop.
By the looks of it they make most of their money from the cloud and other software things nowadays. And Windows has become a sidekick in their processes.
I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP. It was already dominant, and it's mostly remembered as "legendary" because it had become the target platform for every hardware and software vendor on the planet. Windows 98 was too flaky to engender any serious friction to upgrades, and Windows 2000 was not consumer-friendly enough; XP effectively unified the consumer and professional desktop markets, and became the gold standard.
SP2, if anything, slowed down adoption, since it threw a bunch of spanners in the way of third-party code. It was probably necessary, just to stem the flow of bad press, but no mean a key in XP's overall success.
It was not that bad. I remember when SP fixed a bunch of issues with bluetooth, and windows CD burning program was better than any of the Nero Burning ROMs, cause those became unusable overbloated.
Windows Me was some weird marketing attempt at squeezing more life out of the dead-end '9x line. I honestly don't know who, in their sane mind, would ever pay for such a thing.
I guess it depends on the industry, but most people would happily run anything that had undergone a single round of patching. And plenty were so obsessed with the latest and greatest that they would jump at .0 releases without a care in the world - which is how Vista got its reputation, for example (the .0 was pretty bad, and by the time both builds and ecosystems had improved, people had decided to stay away).
> Windows XP Service Pack 2. After that thing windows XP became a legend.
God that was an era. XP SP2 was a great OS, IE was the best browser, MSN was the most popular messenger, Skype was acquired, HTC's Windows CE devices were shipping real web browsers that worked over 3G.
By the end of the Ballmer era, Microsoft has lost the OS, the browser, the messenger, the meeting service and mobile.
I agree with you on everything except the browser. I'm pretty sure I was using Firefox (or maybe Opera?) on Windows before the release of Vista. I know I was still using IE for some ActiveX web apps for a while. This was the era that I switched over to Linux full-time, but both Windows 2000 and XP were great OSes at this time. Linux was painful to adopt, but I really loved the promise of "full-control" over my computer.
My peeve today is how bad modern chat programs feel compared to the old instant messengers. The modern programs all feel slow and clunky in comparison. I felt that all of the messengers I used (MSN, AIM, ICQ) were more responsive than their modern day equivalents.
Ah, what the times were those. Firefox was just gaining traction.
And I agree. Slack is sitting there, consuming over gig of memory on my computer, and Miranda NG was able to do the same functionality with cool skins and just 30 megs of ram.
They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular. I wouldn't dispute that IE was more commonly used at the time.
Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it didn't come preinstalled.
Never used Maxthon.
Damn, this also reminded me that RSS feeds were everywhere back then, and the browser supported it directly.
There were several points in time (after the SP2 too) when installing WinXP with an active internet connection was nearly impossible, because it would get infected during the installation and shut itself down halfway through it.
We could have used the momentum to build new work opportunities and resources.
Instead we managed to mis-represent the thing so much that people won't even consider having a data center in their vicinity.
It COULD have been a good thing. It became a bad thing.
reply