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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • Fire suppression systems, and fire prevention mechanisms, are no joke in a data center.

    Plenty of systems that displace oxygen in the room to prevent combustion.

    Many places won’t let you even bring combustable materials into the data center spaces. Receiving department unboxes and puts cardboard right into the baler. Wanna store stuff in your cage? Better be in a tote.

    Also, humidity is strictly controlled to prevent static buildup.

    The most likely place for a fire to break out in a data center would be from battery backup systems. But at the scale that most large facilities have, there is a dedicated battery room, or they use something else for instantaneous load transfer, like flywheels.






  • That’s exactly the problem. We don’t, and in many places can’t, make things here.

    A lot has to do with access to resources. China is dominating in electronics in part because they essentially (but not really) colonized most the world that has good silicon.

    But moving manufacturing around the world, to a place where literally everything is more expensive, is an costly endeavor that simply won’t be worth it for most businesses.


  • That’s the point of tariffs…to give domestic supply a shot.

    It’s stupid and short-sighted in a modern economy. It’s not worth it for any manufacturer to shut down existing mega factories and build new ones here. They won’t find enough people to do the jobs (especially if we deport/denaturalize a ton of people) and the costs and re-investments are huge.

    Plus the only places that are left to build giant factories are distant from population centers. And I doubt there will be mass transit into them. So more pollution from personal transportation. And more pollution from local factories. Ripping the EPA to shreds will help with that, and that’s a part of agenda 47.

    And you just know the ones that choose to come and build here are gonna get really nice tax breaks to do so, so there won’t be any real return for the community for a long time, if ever.

    The end result is either they pass the costs into consumers, or they cut costs by laying off their expensive state-side employees and moving their positions abroad. American middle-class loses bigly either way.








  • I went to Texas for the eclipse. Made a big family vacation out of it…landed in Houston, rented a Mustang Mach-E, stayed there for a few days, drove to Austin for a few days, drove to Dallas for a few days (and for the eclipse, was at the Perot), then back to Houston for a few more days.

    I say this because this was a lot of highway driving. More than I would usually do. And I absolutely loved one-pedal driving in the city, and the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping on the highway. I trusted it much, much more than in our 2019 Odyssey.

    Anything more than that, I don’t think the tech is really ready for. I wish it were. I know theoretically a computer could be a much, much better driver than humans…but it takes a non-trivial amount of intelligence to drive. We take it for granted, because a lot of it is practically instinctual to us, and almost entirely subconscious. It’s an incredible amount of identification and complex decision making that goes into it if you actually break down the number of inputs you observe and variables you “know” the values of (such as stopping distance for various surface and weather conditions).