Mastodawn

Deastrom Aug 19, 2025

Reporter: what are you going to do to keep your data centers from destroying the planet?
Tech bros: we have a robust set of ambitious strategies to—
Reporter: *shoots dart full of truth serum into their necks*
Tech bros: oh god, nothing, nothing at all. You’re fucked, obviously, but we’ll all be fine, so we absolutely don’t care. Not at all. If we could cool our racks for less money by liquefying your pets, we would absolutely do it. You got a cat? You look like you got a cat. Gimme your cat.

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Ultra Verified 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Aug 19, 2025

@SethRudy

I want to live in this world

.... "Reporter: *shoots dart full of truth serum into their necks*" ....

#makeitso

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Fiona Bianchi Aug 19, 2025

@SethRudy “… and if that doesn’t work we’re gonna use all those tiny nuclear reactors we’re installing everywhere as bombs and blow shit up!”

Here’s a solution: distributed/federated compute. Stop putting it in data centres, have local compute for people’s needs. Not big DCs maybe community compute for a village or town. Or even my own personal compute that can run tasks that pertain to me.

I think we need to flip this all around - central compute requires BIG DCs and power stations to handle load. Distribute everything and power demand is now spread out.

I haven’t worked out the details but the current approach of “Cloud” is clearly broken 😡

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Kudra

Aug 19, 2025

@fionasboots @SethRudy In the olden days of the Intarwebs, this was literally all there was. BBSes you just dialed into.

These days the #selfhost crowd are doing it on ridiculously low power mini servers and sometimes even just on solar power, but the requirements to diy everything including backups is nerve wracking and requires a reasonable amount of nerd knowledge. There are some moves to local wifi p2p networks, for ultra-local networks, with no connection costs, but mostly people are doing this to be a backup in case of loss of power & /or phone networks. So it is happening, but it's really enthusiast level.

... kinda like it was in the Olden Days!

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Fiona Bianchi Aug 22, 2025

@kudra @SethRudy yeah, self-hosting is something I want to look at but I agree that the security, backup, etc is all complex and scary.

I like the idea of a community WiFi mesh! Certainly it would be good to have a network that wasn’t blocked/monitored by governments and corporations!

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Kudra

Aug 22, 2025

@fionasboots @SethRudy yup! I'm loosely involved with a group doing this but it's slow going and not really local to where I live though I visit the area regularly.

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Raquel Vanisse Aug 19, 2025

@SethRudy Oh goodness. Nailed it.

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Nathan A. Stine Aug 19, 2025

@SethRudy when my employer made a push to use AI (Copilot), someone asked about what we'd do to offset the environmental costs. Answer from CTO: That's Microsoft's problem.

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c.reider

Aug 19, 2025

@SethRudy saw one of the tech bros, i think it was Altman, saying they’d be building Dyson spheres for the data centers so they won’t be on earth at all, and i was like, wow people take this dude seriously?

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