UnderpantsWeevil

If datacenters were losing money at $0.07/kwh on the grid, wait until they’re spending $.33/kwh (15 kwh per $5 gal) before you even factor in the price of the diesel generator hardware and maintenance.

Half the joke of those Grok server farms in Mississippi is how ludicrously expensive they are to operate. Elon is paying a premium to ruin local livelihoods.

A lot of that AC usage comes down to poor insulation, older and poorly maintained units, single family housing, overly large housing, vacant housing that still needs to be cooled to keep it from deteriorating before someone can cover the inflated asset price, the need to insulate offices separately from housing because we’ve abolished work-from-home rules…

A well-maintained stock of publicly accessible homes in dense mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, with a professionally managed building-wide AC unit, could reduce the per-capita electricity demand enormously.

But instead, we’ve queued up billions of dollars in concrete and steel to build city-sized warehouses for scorching hot chipsets.

A pair of wire cutters work just as well. And they’re a lot quieter.

A tiny back office with half a dozen industry plants will be told to produce one high profile case every six to twelve months.

A trick Reddit was pioneering all the way back in the late '00s. Drive engagement by using bots to fake engagement.

And it’ll happen to you, too!

Marriage, as a romantic notion, is about demonstrating a lifelong commitment to another person.

Marriage, as a legal institution, is about creating an economic incentive for intergenerational land ownership among the government-favored ethnic group.

I might suggest that you, at a bare minimum, like the other person even if you’re not romantically fixated on them. The marriage process comingles assets and incomes in a way that’s very difficult to unwind over time. Idk if I’d consider you “broken” for thinking about it. But you might want to reconsider what you’re getting into, especially if there’s someone other than your prospective partner who does have a romantic interest on one (or, fuck it, both) of you.

For folks who are married, the joke has been made a thousand times “We should have done this when we were poorer”. And I even have a friend who did a court-house wedding, months in advance of the family celebration, just to get the tax rebate sooner.

But, it’s a big decision. You’re sharing credit as a single household. Depending on the state, your partner can have all sorts of medical and legal authority that constrains you. And if you don’t even live with the person you’re married to? The economic benefits slide off quite a bit.

Sort of the joke in this. Crime in western countries has declined as police hyper-surveillance has increased. I don’t think it is unfair to say that a suffocating perpetual dragnet created by a public-private Big Brother network has contributed to depressed rates of stochastic violence. Or that the few groups capable of committing crimes and getting away with it are the police and sheriffs offices, the individuals in their employment, and the turncoats they use to influence and infiltrate other groups.

We don’t count “preemptively solved crimes”, unless we’re trying to make headlines with “foiled assassination/terrorist plot” to inflate some bureaucrat’s reputation. We also don’t count false positives - people who had their doors kicked in and their family roughed up and their dog shot in the dead of night - when we’re tallying police effectiveness. Out of sight, out of mind.

The only thing we really see is active shooters on the evening news and burglary footage on the local. So we’re always having a “crime problem”. The current police state is never big enough. Surveillance isn’t “real” enough to impact the news cycle, because something is always happening somewhere that can be reported on as the next big Crime Wave.

Nobody sane is using Quora as a legitimate source of information.

• Nobody uses anything but Wikipedia

• Nobody I like use anything but Wikipedia

Uh-huh

Would you also suggest Pinterest lead the charge in representing collective human knowledge?

If you’re interested in art, fashion, or any number of other hobbies, absolutely.

But if you want to host other media on their systems, it works just as well. I suspect you just feel embarrassed to use other websites.

You’re describing a single centralized warehouse for physical media. You’re neglecting thousands of other information repositories and alternative methodologies for conveying information.

And as people convert ancient scrolls to modern hard cover books, you’re screaming “nobody reads books! This will never work!”

No one uses this.

Estimated annual revenue of around $100M. That’s half of Wikipedia’s. Someone’s using it.

No one uses them.

Quora alone has 400 million monthly active users.

Look at the rest of the internet. Literally every space, every niche, every congregation of experts has rotted away

None of that is true. Your institutional knowledge hasn’t keep pace with the modern net. And your nostalgia has biased you against anything novel or unfamiliar.

You’re rotting. The net is doing fine.

Well, unfortunately, there is no project like that with Wikipedia’s critical mass. Most attempts with any attention are rather horrific. See: Grokipedia.

Idk if you even want the kind of attention Wikipedia achieved, given how it ultimately became the target of endless waves of scams and influencer operations.

That said, the Wiki format has been prolific in a way even the core website has not been. The core data for Wikipedia has been harvested and replicated across a thousand different boutique iterations. A lot of what made things like Grokipedia and Conservapedia and the rest flop is that these projects tried to administer the sites even more tightly than the original. And it’s an enormous project, so that loads a phenomenal amount of work on a handful of people.

If Wikipedia dies, nothing good will replace it.

That’s an absurd presumption. Just straight off the bat, you have the old Encyclopedia Britannica. You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors. You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts. You’ve got physical libraries. You’ve got digital libraries. You’ve got LLM compositions of libraries.

The biggest flaw most of these have is the same one any search engine after Google had. “Why would I go here if I can just go to Wikipedia instead?”

But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.

Wikipedia is valuable because its a reasonably sane default reference for billions of people

It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.

What you will experience is not merely a lack of oxygen but a surplus of boot on your neck.

Questionable leadership or not, it is a lighthouse in the information dystopia of the 2020s, which literally helps hold society together.

It pioneered a novel mechanism for collaborating on a project with minimal trust between contributors. But it was also riddled with bias and vulnerable to exploitation and as prone to cultivating disinformation as a universal source of truth.

Rather than fixating on the site as some last bastion of Web 1.0 nostalgia, we would do well to do better than Wikipedia.

Organizations like the Internet archive project have, imho, done as much or more than Wikipedia because of their commitment to accumulating primary source material. Managing that catalog and incorporating it into an encyclopedia of knowledge is much more than just stuffing a hard drive full of editor arguments and dead links from the old site.

We should probably all be downloading the website and printing off the important stuff

Sort of defeats the fundamental purpose of a collaborative online encyclopedia.

If I want a massive hard copy of collected human knowledge, I just go to the public library. I don’t need to print my own.

But if I want to look something up on the fly (much less check down a bunch of citations), a thousand dead trees worth of printer paper isn’t going to deliver the goods.

This is probably the most recent version I’ll ever need.

Assuming nothing historically significant happens after that download, sure.

I’ve got an ancient encyclopedia from the 1950s that my dad owned. Let me tell you how useful that’s been over the years.

In a sane system, he wouldn’t have so much to lose.

But he’s sitting on a functional monopoly bolted onto a surveillance state with infinite money. So he can keep fucking up forever.

He wrote a creepy stalker website that became the foundation for a massive network of college educated socialites to communicate.

And then he sold their conversations to marketing firms and intelligence services.

critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with

Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.

If you don’t have useful information, you don’t have spare time, and you don’t have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.

I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. “I figured it out because I think critical! You didn’t because you’re a dumb-dumb!”

But more often than not, it’s two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they’ve incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell “You’re an idiot!” at people who disagree.

How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?

Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn’t anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members

Zuck can only be interrupted into making an even bigger mistake, so no need to hold back.

Half the joke is that Reddit was ground zero for AI slop even before AI had gone mainstream.

The company got harvested back before the AI firms were overly worried with cross-contamination.