[fnord]
I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destructive computational resources.
There's a lot of excellent projects here.
Also, people in your community probably own businesses that advertise or sell directly on a Meta platform. That's money affecting many things you interact with online and offline.
Also also, you describe yourself as an ordinary person but say you have no presence on any of the largest social media or messaging platforms. I think that's fairly far out of the ordinary.
From the taxes they provide
If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.
https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-news/2024-12-02/dek...
https://ipmnewsroom.org/how-do-data-centers-benefit-the-plac...
> META received a 55 percent tax break as part of the Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program, which is a state initiative
You asked this
> How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centres?
And I gave the answer. How do you think you can eliminate the middleman?
> Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program
The amount I showed was after accounting for the Tax abatement program. And its almost as if there's a reason the state wants to have this program in the first place. Almost as if it helps broader society.
Your response is that - no you don't need the money, you can get it elsewhere.
This is a kind of senseless argument, I'll let you decide whether that's the case.
> Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax breaks, and bonus depreciation.
Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.
In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.
Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.
For example, what is the benefit of google existing? Sure you can do google searches. You can use maps. But can you quantify it?
The benefits of living in a society that respects pluralist values is that even if you personally have never used Instagram ever, you still respect what it provides for broader society.
Its easy to give a popularist argument against anything you don't like - "how does it benefit me?!". Well it need not, but others use the products.
On a side note: I'm glad to live during times where we respect pluralist values. I hate football and find it mind numbing. But its great that those people can have their fun and joy without having to convince me. And I can have mine with League of Legends.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/collectivism
“Pluralism” refers to a society supporting diverse systems of law, religion, or culture. Like the United States.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pluralism
I don’t know what “popularist” is but perhaps “populism”; however, the complement of collectivism is individualism.
Even you use HN.
Not everything can be local.
My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time.
> My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house
> (where I pay $0.35/kWh).
Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.
"Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that."
The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
I don't think Dang is responsible of that part, but I may be wrong.
HN used to run on a single server (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and I don't see why that would have changed given that the hardware keeps getting better.
> Why does HN use Algolia for search
Algolia is a YC company, it's pretty much free marketing for their asset.
> That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?
You don't need to run it for 24 hours a day, nor do you need it to be the only process running on your machine.
Jitsi is a bit heavy for a phone, but easily fits on an old M1 macbook/mac mini, whose idle power consumption is well below 10W (idle power consumption is what matters, since your machine isn't going to be handling calls all the time). If you shut it down at night, you're almost good. And for any additional service you serve from the machine, you reduce the cost per service further.
Modern computers are fast, and fascinatingly energy efficient.
(And honestly I don't see why it would have changed given that the hardware has been getting faster in the meantime).
Just look at the proposed data center in Utah. It was originally proposed to be larger than Manhattan, use more electricity than the entire state uses, in a place that already is suffering a water crisis. And for what? So a few connected politicians can get bribes, and AI money can be made by people thousands of miles away, while meanwhile AI takes the jobs from people that actually live in Utah (not my words, these are the words of folks like Amodei and others actually building this stuff).
Pretending this is just a consolidation of servers currently living in office closets is laughable.
AI computing capacity is doubling every seven months. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-chip-production.
All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.
No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.
> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.
> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."
> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.