| ▲ | ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago |
| [fnord] |
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| ▲ | functionmouse 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| it's not a consolidation because all those computers are still in office parks and the like. This is new usage, and it consumes exponentially more resources than all of the previous usage. |
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| ▲ | jazzyjackson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don’t know why you’re phrasing it like it’s not a big deal that these juggernauts are attempting to make themselves indispensable. |
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| ▲ | donmcronald 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything. 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. |
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| ▲ | lioeters 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Found a good phrase to describe the situation: > "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. |
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| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Man, I wish I had more downvotes. This is not just about consolidation, it's about massive resource usage in areas where hardly any of the benefits accrue to the locals. 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. |
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| ▲ | eska an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People would love to build their own servers (and run AI or other workloads on them) and kids would love to build their first PC, but big tech is buying all the hardware and stuffing it into data centers. You make it sound like they asked for it. |
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| ▲ | measurablefunc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks. 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. ¹https://solidproject.org/ |
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| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? From the taxes they provide | | |
| ▲ | measurablefunc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've never seen a cent go to any service in my local municipality from Meta's taxes & whatever does end up in the city coffers is not big enough to have any real effect b/c those services could just as easily be financed by direct payments instead of some circuitous route of federal, state, & sales taxes from transactions enabled by corporations like Meta. 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. | | |
| ▲ | rcpt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Those workers pay quite a lot of federal taxes | | |
| ▲ | measurablefunc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Meta takes more in than whatever it pays back¹ > 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. https://share.google/aimode/INoZEto9gPbRPilrV | | |
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| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Brief google search shows that most Meta DC's give around ~15M per year taxes on average per year. I'm not sure what circuitous route you are speaking about. https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-news/2024-12-02/dek... https://ipmnewsroom.org/how-do-data-centers-benefit-the-plac... | | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | measurablefunc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Meta is an unnecessary middleman, all those payments could be handled w/o them & their advertising network. Also, from your own link > META received a 55 percent tax break as part of the Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program, which is a state initiative | | |
| ▲ | simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This doesn't make any sense. 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. | | |
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| ▲ | rcpt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People in London buy Instagram ads to sell products to people in Birmingham and that money comes into the US. There are plenty of ways for you to catch some of it. | | |
| ▲ | simianwords an hour ago | parent [-] | | This is downvoted but factually correct way of looking at it. The benefits of Meta are convoluted and hard to state in ways that are quantified to simple numbers. (Well you can - Meta contributes ~0.25% of USA's GDP which is enormous) 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. |
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| ▲ | rahimnathwani 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 'regular people' use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. 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). | | |
| ▲ | lioeters 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I always imagined the HN server running on a single machine in some basement, running a magically efficient Lisp program that easily handles millions of requests per second. | | | |
| ▲ | littlestymaar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Even you use HN. 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. | | |
| ▲ | rahimnathwani an hour ago | parent [-] | | Does dang run HN on a single server? Why does HN use Algolia for search and Firebase for its API? "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? |
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