It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in the most basic manner,… Read More »
We need to talk about data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred photos and cat videos, binge watch Netflix, and ask ChatGPT inane questions and get instant wrong answers. We’re destroying our environment to store copies of copies of copies of stuff we have no intention of ever… Read More »
As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker recounted for Wired. Ruiter, a local Dutch councilor, had parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rose out of the flat North Holland farmland. The guard had seen… Read More »
You do not want to live close to a data center. Having one near your home is like having a lawn mower running in your living room 24/7, as one local resident described it. Residents talked about low-pitched roars interspersed with high-frequency screeches, as the whir of loud fans echoed through the air. A growing… Read More »
Like Moore’s Law, energy efficiency for data centers began to run out of steam by the 2010s. After substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, the energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much between 2018 and 2024. It didn’t stop the PR spin about how Big Tech is so efficient and getting more efficient every year. You’re… Read More »
For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for the environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more power than all… Read More »
The data centers were coming. Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs, so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and huge tax breaks. The data centers came. Where were the jobs, people asked? The government would not… Read More »
In some ways, a data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Super-high security, ugly warehouse buildings. In other ways, a data center is much worse than a prison. A prison will bring some jobs; data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more water… Read More »
Morals matter. Ethics matter. Character matters. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters. AI is the latest bitcoin, the latest blockchain. It is the latest way scammers, con artists and grifters think they can grift, scam and con. It is the latest magnet for… Read More »
AI is a master of “bureaucratic cruelties, scaling administrative violence in ways that intensify structures of inequality, such as when AI is used to aid decisions about which patients are prioritized in healthcare or which prisoners are at risk of reoffending,” stated Dan McQuillan from the University of London. AI inevitably increases what historian and… Read More »