My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters.
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There's a very simple and actually very affordable alternative to data centers, both commercially and consumer: Self hosting.
Do you have a router in your home? Congratulations, you've got more computing resources than you'll ever need for your own little soapbox on the web as well as sending & receiving email.
For the moment it's too much of a configuration challenge for john-and-jane-doe average, but that's a software problem, that's very much solvable.
Small and mid sized businesses used to host their very own compute infrastructure, some 30 years ago. I was there, I worked summer jobs in their IT departments
IBM System/36, AS/400, Novell Netware, dBase/Clipper… those were the staples of the times, you could find at least one of them, but often several in most mid-sized businesses in Europe and North America.
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My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters. 2005-2007, I was a datacenter assistant monkey working from Google working somewhere in the Chicago suburbs, swapping out hard drives and ram and writing shell scripts, as myself and my friends unknowingly laid down the prototype for the kinds of datacenters we all see today.
And so it is with some significant expertise that I say:
Fuck datacenters. Datacenters are an anti-pattern.
@cwebber @YakyuNightOwl Looking at the replies, I'm seeing so many of us who built this who are in dismay at what it was built into.
For me it was working for an enterprise CRM/CIM software company '05-10. I supported the development of knowledge bases and customer support streamlining (chat, automation) because I thought it would be used to relieve call center agents and help customers get to accurate information faster. Instead it became a dehumanization tool, distancing customers from accessing real people and real help when they actually need it, and reducing the tech skills of agents. Utterly devastating.
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@farfalk Datacenters are concentrations of power. Anytime a datacenter is involved, it's a sign of power centralization. The rise of datacenters corresponds with the death of p2p and other visions of a more decentralized internet.
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@cwebber @farfalk like, I can appreciate some of the advantages of having them. Like you could get more computer per watt, maybe. I think valuable research is done with supercomputers and modern, more modular approaches to big data. But we could do way more with way fewer datacenters if these weren't used as a way to paywall functionality at the server side. The move to the cloud almost makes me miss when my problem was Cubase requiring a USB dongle.
@thomasjwebb @cwebber @farfalk there is always a "but sometimes" so maybe we can take it as a given that for any strident statement in short form chat there isn't all the nuance about exceptions.
The overall direction seems right to me though. We've got a not insignificant ipv6 deployment for residential use, where is the Cobalt Qube of personal computing? There is no good *technical* reason I shouldn't be able to host my personal email on my own domain, at home, on my own computer, along with a website or whatever. Big monopolistic platforms, which require huge datacenters and complex tech stacks, are an antipattern.
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@cwebber @farfalk I think it more corresponds to the death of personal computing as it was? People don't have desktops anymore and barely have laptops other than for work? Which is a problem for p2p? Seems like most people's decentralized/federated nodes for things are hosted in data centers? All question marks because just speculating.
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@thomasjwebb @cwebber @farfalk there is always a "but sometimes" so maybe we can take it as a given that for any strident statement in short form chat there isn't all the nuance about exceptions.
The overall direction seems right to me though. We've got a not insignificant ipv6 deployment for residential use, where is the Cobalt Qube of personal computing? There is no good *technical* reason I shouldn't be able to host my personal email on my own domain, at home, on my own computer, along with a website or whatever. Big monopolistic platforms, which require huge datacenters and complex tech stacks, are an antipattern.
@raven667 @cwebber @farfalk sure I just don’t want to be seen as someone who hasn’t considered the obvious counterpoints. I have the “always include depth-first nuance” kind of autism and ocd. But yeah I think if we design protocols right, maybe people won’t even have to self-host in many cases. It could be some truly p2p stuff than can run on the client.
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My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters. 2005-2007, I was a datacenter assistant monkey working from Google working somewhere in the Chicago suburbs, swapping out hard drives and ram and writing shell scripts, as myself and my friends unknowingly laid down the prototype for the kinds of datacenters we all see today.
And so it is with some significant expertise that I say:
Fuck datacenters. Datacenters are an anti-pattern.
@cwebber The main motivations for using data centers are security, reliability, flexibility, and efficiency. A data center can manage power consumption much better than your typical on premises installation. Infrastructure can be shared by many users, which allows dynamic scaling without having to over provision on premises. It also allows users to share expert reliability and cybersecurity engineers.
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@cwebber that's an interesting point of view. I mean, of course the current datacenter craze is complete madness, but it seems you consider an anti-pattern the concept of datacenter itself. Why is it so? What do you suggest as an alternate solution to the problems data centers try to solve?
@farfalk @cwebber A datacenter doesn't solve problems. A 2026 datacenter built on modern AI compute as intended usage literally, solves zero problems (As the "Content" that is its output is the solen and flawed sea of data can't give you anything better than only does completely unpredictable things 20% of time and it costs thousands a day). All it can do is serve us a degraded version of what we already had. It runs culture through a shredder. A methamphetamine dealer high on their own supply pastes all the shreds back together and tries to add meaning. It's dangerous nonsense and it's accelerating the biggest crisis the world has ever faced. So yes, fuck datacentres of all kinds. We already built far too many of them, we need to be looking at frugal computing, not hyper accelerating the energy costs to an already fragile planet.
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@farfalk Datacenters are concentrations of power. Anytime a datacenter is involved, it's a sign of power centralization. The rise of datacenters corresponds with the death of p2p and other visions of a more decentralized internet.
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My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters. 2005-2007, I was a datacenter assistant monkey working from Google working somewhere in the Chicago suburbs, swapping out hard drives and ram and writing shell scripts, as myself and my friends unknowingly laid down the prototype for the kinds of datacenters we all see today.
And so it is with some significant expertise that I say:
Fuck datacenters. Datacenters are an anti-pattern.
@cwebber
huhinteresting.
about that same time;
had 3 interviews with the goog
as a 'linux beige box wrangler'
at a big campus dc in northern va
my linux clue-kit was deep & shallow at the same time
they passed me over
I was bummed, bigly
then it all changed
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Small and mid sized businesses used to host their very own compute infrastructure, some 30 years ago. I was there, I worked summer jobs in their IT departments
IBM System/36, AS/400, Novell Netware, dBase/Clipper… those were the staples of the times, you could find at least one of them, but often several in most mid-sized businesses in Europe and North America.
@datenwolf @farfalk @cwebber lots of financial institutions still have private datacenters, and still run IBM mainframes. Just easier to manage from a security perspective.
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@farfalk @cwebber Really look at “the problems data centers try to solve”. At face value, LLMs and other “AI” are not functional or even profitable by themselves, but they are the supposed reason for the data center boom. But there’s strong evidence that the boom is driven by market manipulation for the hardware, not organic demand for its work. Further, the face value function of “AI” is to extract short term cash value while denying resources to humans. That is the secondary problem the centers try to solve (first being fraudulent investment in the centers themselves). That’s why framing it as “what’s your alternative” is a mistake.
@Moss @farfalk @cwebber sorry I can't quite understand your point. I am sure you use the internet for distributed software; data centers per se allow networking. Having products controlled by monopolistic rent seeking companies that haven't a better business plan than ads is a political problem, not so different from rail roads/oil distribution; political solutions will work when we focus on democratic power not individual purity. Bubbles happen when $ is unregulated by work/life/democracy.
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My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters. 2005-2007, I was a datacenter assistant monkey working from Google working somewhere in the Chicago suburbs, swapping out hard drives and ram and writing shell scripts, as myself and my friends unknowingly laid down the prototype for the kinds of datacenters we all see today.
And so it is with some significant expertise that I say:
Fuck datacenters. Datacenters are an anti-pattern.
@cwebber I did this in Oregon. The town looks nothing like its old self.
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@Moss @farfalk @cwebber sorry I can't quite understand your point. I am sure you use the internet for distributed software; data centers per se allow networking. Having products controlled by monopolistic rent seeking companies that haven't a better business plan than ads is a political problem, not so different from rail roads/oil distribution; political solutions will work when we focus on democratic power not individual purity. Bubbles happen when $ is unregulated by work/life/democracy.
@jayalane @farfalk @cwebber “data centers = networking” is the same as saying “data center water and power consumption = indoor plumbing and wiring.” We had global networking long before the present eruption of resource-hogging new data centers. My point was exactly as stated: the so-called problems that the DCs are supposed to solve are fake. A narrative beard for fraud and global resource extraction.
