My first job was building out the first mega-datacenters.
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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.
I spent half my career maintaining plastics manufacturing plants. I learned about what effects that had on the environment, so I started maintaining food production plants. Yeah, highly processed foods. So, I'm now working with very low energy electronics. Hopefully, a few electrons might be less damaging to our future...
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Working in that environment, seeing as Google rolled out the idea of "cloud computing" meaning "you have no involvement or agency in your computing because we do it for you" radicalized me for much of the work of my career.
It was one thing to run a datacenter to index the world's public web information. I understood that, it made sense.
But watching as Google and Apple co-developed the idea that computers, which I cared about, got abstracted into toys and jewelry that had all your key computing done in a way you had no agency over... where I saw firsthand the kinds of churn of resources necessary to keep these things going, it made me want to fight for a different computing future.
@cwebber
The core problem is not AI, cloud, or interfaces.The real problem is ambiguous and centrally controlled information.
Without deterministic foundations, civilization will keep scaling dependency, manipulation, and chaos.
CTMinfo is the first real attempt to solve this at the root.
CTMinfo: Ontology-Based System for 100% Verified Data
CTMinfo is an ontology-based system designed to achieve 100% verified and reliable data across industrial, trade, and engineering domains.Unlike Big Data approaches that accumulate unverified information, CTMinfo introduces the concept of SmallData — a model built exclusively from verified and logically consistent entities. The system establishes a structural ontology ensuring the full traceability of each object, its origin, and transformation throughout the production and supply chain. This approach eliminates ambiguity, duplication, and corruption in data management. CTMinfo also introduces the principle of OpenTech, emphasizing open, structural, and transparent technological development as an alternative to opaque “deep-tech” systems. The project demonstrates how a precisely defined ontological framework can serve as a universal infrastructure for verified industrial information, creating a foundation for trustworthy AI, automation, and sustainable economic systems. Author: Dmitriy Andriyanov (CTMinfo Founder and System Architect)
Zenodo (zenodo.org)
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@thomasjwebb I've been meaning to write a blogpost for a long time. Sounds like it's time to write it!
@cwebber @thomasjwebb I remember "datacenter" starting as "colocation hoster" - you rentet rackspace or several racks with redundant power supply, internet link, packed in some pizzaboxes and a router, and there you go. Physical safety was better than the rack with dev servers in the basement, so what else could you ask for?
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@cwebber do you have a writeup expanding on “datacenters are an anti-pattern” because this is 100% how I feel. I’m not fighting over AI. I’m still fighting over the cloud. Society has badly fumbled the fact that everyone has incredible computing power in their pocket. We’ve already been wasting electricity on idle servers and inefficient high level code. I’ve been - and am - part of the problem, moving functionality to the cloud for business reasons I hate.
@thomasjwebb Not to pre-empt Christine, since I don’t know what she has in mind, but you may find the essay The eternal mainframe by Rudolf Winestock interesting if you haven’t read it already: https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html (archive: https://archive.today/mz7Zk). (It’s from 2013, so admittedly a bit old.)
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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 At the moment we ended up with a phone that could do most of what we wanted, but had no agency over, at the backend there was the datacenter explosion, which we had no agency over. Now you can't even buy a laptop anymore because the datacenter explosion caused scarcity of its components. Check mate.
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P pixelate@tweesecake.social shared this topic
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@thomasjwebb I've been meaning to write a blogpost for a long time. Sounds like it's time to write it!
@cwebber @thomasjwebb why am I starting to hear Bohemian Rhapsody in my head?
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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 agree with your premise. However, realistically, convincing businesses to return to on-prem is challenging. It's not just about management – maintaining, securing, and procuring on-prem hardware is a significant expense and effort compared to provisioning cloud resources.
MSPs could help, but even with their assistance, the ongoing costs and complexity often favor cloud-native solutions.
How do you think we could convince small business owners to move from Shopify for example?
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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.
@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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@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 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 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.
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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.
@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.
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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.
@cwebber @farfalk How would you approach defining the threshold of concentration past which it's undesirable? The only obvious approach I can think of is "it's too high if there's a positive feedback loop", but that's both not really knowable and probably too low, given that we ~started from much concentration and arrived at current, clearly undesirably high, levels thereof. -
@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.
@johns @cwebber @farfalk it's telling that hardware for user-controlled computing is disappearing. Memory and storage are disappearing from the market and it feels *intentional*. https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business
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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?
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.
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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.
