ic0n0cl4st

I always wondered if Frank Herbert’s “Axlotl tanks” were borrowed from Huxley.

When the Taliban destroyed Bamiyan Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in March 2001, NPR started calling for blood and I realized how spot-on Noam Chomsky was when he said “In times of war, all media becomes state media.”

This was before 9/11 but that week I knew we would be going to war in Afghanistan because overnight the left-leaning pundits were speaking in solidarity with fox news talking points. This really disillusioned NPR for me, and I had been an avid listener for 10 years at that point.

I really only see superficial differences between the two sides of the media at this point.

Living in the future sucks.

We thought we were going to get an Asimovian utopia. Instead it’s more like a sad cross-over between gibson and orwell.

Nor will there be any privacy benefit to the Danes knowing their Apple data is stored within the borders of their nation or having lower latency to these services. The only reason this is being done is to destroy the world with wind turbines.

I’m sure the construction of those other datacenters will also mean nothing to the economy.

Also, as we have seen in The Dalles, Oregon over the past 15 years, the inevitable increase in fiber and power capacity to this region, which will attract dozens of other datacenters to the area, will also have zero economic impact to anybody whatsoever.

Sure, I’m sure you are 200% correct. This will be nothing but a resource drain, and will have $0 economic benefit whatsoever.

That’s why so many regional and international governments clamor to attract datacenter projects. Because they are trying to get absolutely nothing out of it whatsoever.

The datacenter and wind mills are just built in another country, flown in by helicopter, plopped down, turned on, and subsequently ignored and 100% self-maintained.

I don’t think you can see beyond your dislike of wind power to actually understand the economic impact of large projects like this.

Where did you get the idea that the viborg datacenter is offshore?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/03/apples-viborg-den...

> Apple is just going to open more data centers, hardly eco-friendly.

Would you rather Apple build these datacenters in a nation with coal power?

European datacenter construction is heavily concentrated in Ireland or UK. Denmark has plenty of coast and a diverse power grid.

It is also one of the most efficient, competent ecologically and socially responsible governments in the world. It is clearly better to build datacenters there than in say Romania or Serbia.

Please don’t tell me your next argumentnis going to be about bird deaths or ear cancer.

To begin with, those wind turbines don’t build or wire themselves, now do they? Just the construction creates a lot of good jobs, so does the maintenance work involved. So does the infrastructure built and maintained to get that power into the grid. This is all good for the economy.

The datacenter helps grow the tech industry here, the benefit of this should really be self-evident. All my comments above in terms of the construction and maintenance of the turbines also applies here.

These are offshore windfarms in a quiet seaport city next to the existing industrial area. It’s not like these are downtown.

If you had ever been there you would know that the residents are left-leaning, forward thinking people who are very proud of those wind turbines.

They are incredibly eco-conscious and would roll their eyes at your statement, invite you in for tea and tell you how proud they are of those turbines.

Esbjerg is one of my favorite places in the world, also the tiny island next to it called Fanø. I’ve been there twice every year for the past 7 years.

I was married there. Almost all of the (Fanø) houses are thatched-roofed hobbit houses, people rarely knock before entering neighbors’ houses and it is super quiet (except for the fog horn).

Esbjerg is a small (70k) person university city, lots of student co-ops, some industry and a strange phenomenon of stolen / discarded bicycles laying on the side of the roads (not downtown, but a km out of the center on the through-roads).

The uni there has great environmental science, chemical engineering, biology, and marine biology (and marine archaeology!) programs.

I couldn’t imagine a place where this is more appropriate.

I’m working on a decision tree workflow to help burned out / aged out engineers leave the industry and seek a happier career path.

Sure, but This doesn’t get around America destroying your economy via sanctions and embargoes. It also doesn’t prevent America and Israel from assassinating your nuclear physicists and engineers, or attacking your infrastructure with viruses like we did to Iran with Stuxnet.

> Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land.

Consider how much of the fruits of our labor ends up in landfills and this seems like a somewhat disastrous philosophy to me.

Consider the USA’s position as nuclear police, then put yourself in the position of a third world nation on the receiving end of this “gift”.

Here are some of the very valid questions a poor country would have to ask.

“Do we really want America’s unreliable foreign policy to effectively control our ability to generate electricity? What if we piss off the wrong diplomat, hire the wrong leader, or if our people believe in the wrong god? What if they decide to destroy our economy via embargoes? Where will we get our fissionable materials? Will they pull a stuxnet on us ? Will they assassinate our top nuclear engineers?”

> The only thing I'll say is... Extensions have a scary level of access (they're basically almost as easy to use as a website, but with unlimited powers such as recording every site you visit and stealing passwords), and the average user will never understand that.

I’ll second that. I worked for a group which was a startup acquired by AVG. They were a data science acquihire so that avg could better monetize the data they’d been collecting from their extensions over the previous decade.

Once I found decade old content from my dead father’s browser, I decided to never use an extension again.

If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.

You cannot say the same about nuclear waste.

Since you’re going to go there, let’s add in the damage from all the iron, that limestone and uranian required to build the nuclear plant? Also quite damaging.

Photovoltaics, not the best. Now what about mirrors pointing at concrete towers moving liquid sodium around, like in Spain, or pointed at steel pipes filled with water.

The pro-nuclear crowd have two things in common:

1. They have more faith in humanity than we have shown is warranted 2. They won’t accept that Nuclear has failed to achieve the promised widescale adoption and economic benefits.

We can’t even contain plastic bags.

When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions? Does that area become a no-man’s land for decades /centuries, even after spending many billions to try and rectify the damage?

There is absolutely no comparison to long term storage of nuclear waste and discarded solar panels.

Dude, sciatica was my catalyst for lifestyle change as well. I had a bicycle accident 14 years ago and damaged my piraformis. It was the most humbling and painful experience of my life.

Right side of history? I dunno about anything like that. It’s just business, show me the money.

There will be a new trend next year or the year after, ad nauseum.

I’ve been consulting on and off for over 20 years now, I dont even remember my first 10 customers anymore. I get a lot of referrals from customers and from a consulting company I sold.

I was primarily focusing on terraform, which is the only technology I’ve actully ever enjoyed professionally, but there’s just so much stupid $$ in k8s.

It’s unpopular, but I embrace (AWS) lock-in for small and mid-sized infrastructure. AWS’ various services solve 99.9% of any infrastructure needs. High-bandwidh streaming and heavy gpu processing is one of the few places my customers find to be cost prohibitive.

For compute I lean towards an immutable infrastructure. I was a Puppet / Chef engineer for 8 years, never again. It’s cleaner to configure apps via some mixture of pre-baked amis, docker files and some sort of parameter store. (Usually SSM or Vault).

Fargate is a cleaner path but so much more expensive.

Nothing I do in this world is life or death. Hell, my customers neither, mostly they sell or support advertising in one fashion or another.

Some founder I work for might make billions on products people don’t need, why shouldn’t I make $50k off of him? Isn’t that how capitism works?

Actually This is exactly how I accidentally started consulting on k8s. Three of my customers had engineers who advocated for k8s, did 50-75% of an implementation then left.

I have told all of my customers they don’t need this, but they are convinced this is the way of the future.

This past year I’ve finally been able to hit the $200/hour rate as a k8s consultant.

I feel like I’m selling snake oil. I’m working on my 7th implementation and none of my customers need kubernetes.

Basically all of their developers and devops engineers want kubernetes on their resumes or because it is shiny and what the cool kids are using.

My largest implementation was a $3m/year, 9 year old company who could run their entire infrastructure on a couple dozen ec2 instances. However they are under the delusion of “hitting it big and needing to be able to scale 100x”.

Paid off my student loans this year, and soon my house, thanks to superfluous k8s integrations!