While I'm interested to see how they adapt Neuromancer to the screen, I get a sense that the author of the article never read the book nor took the time to understand Neuromancer's place in culture.
Likewise. Having read Neuromancer a good five years before The Matrix ever hit the cinemas, the two are well distinct in my mind in a manner in which they apparently aren’t to this author.
To start, there is a lot of misinformation out there and the NDAs that surround data center construction and operation don't help. People will cite water consumption as a huge problem when modern hyperscalers use substantially less water because they're now using closed loop cooling instead of evaporative cooling. You'll see people cite noise because they saw a video online of a crypto mining grifter who bought a bunch of shipping containers and haphazardly threw together air cooled mining rigs with 80mm fans screaming away. I even saw one video of a woman who claimed data centers gave her diabetes despite the fact that she was obese.
Amazon and other companies already have job training programs because they cannot find enough skilled labor to build and operate their data centers. The number of jobs commonly cited are comically lower than what is common to operate a modern hyperscaler. In my experience, hyperscalers often have at least 100-200 people on site to operate the data center and I've seen more than 1000 people on a site when the data center is under construction.
The real issue, as always, are the local governments and utilities that sellout out the citizens and fail to create and enforce building codes. The governments should be using the demand for data centers to partner with the companies and have them pay to modernize and fix the power grid. They should be using them to help subsidize green energy initiatives among other things and fund other projects to benefit the community.
The inconvenient truth is that the problem with data centers lies with the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community. Data centers just happen to be the latest scapegoat to distract people from corrupt politicians and an community that is not civically engaged enough to hold their politicians accountable.
> the people in the communities who continue to elect politicians who, time and time again, make decisions counter to the best interests of their community.
I wonder where all the politicians are who would make decisions for their communities instead...
The core issue is that most Americans aren't civically engaged. They don't take the effort to track what's happening within their government which then means that they don't know and are unable to hold their elected officials accountable.
Communities can have more effective politicians, but that means voting out individuals who make bad decisions or decisions that are counter the will good of the community they serve.
Also worth noting that several studies have shown pay differentials to be highly correlated with women being less likely to negotiate compensation or ask for less.
Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men. I recall reading a study about harassment in the restaurant industry. Both genders were harassed but harassment towards men was largely ignored in the analysis because it didn't fit the focus or narrative of the authors.
As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.
I saw more than one video about datacenter noise that were clearly crypto mining. There are some questionable designs leveraging shipping containers and what sound like a lot of 120mm fans.
As a lifetime Mac user, I will say that the last few updates to MacOS have made me start looking towards linux. Ignoring the many sins of liquid glass, Disk utility is almost nonfunctional, as are many of the built-in utilities. Sure I can use the command line tools but to me it's a concerning trend that highlights poor attention to detail that the Mac was always known for.
As someone who has done this very thing, and is a lifelong Linux fanboy (I run Linux on literally everything else), I would strongly suggest you don't do this if you're using a Macbook. The losses on battery life are far too high to accept, and if you have lower specs on the Mac laptop, you will really feel them on most Linux flavours.
> The losses on battery life are far too high to accept,
Why do people keep saying this? I have been on M1 Air on Asahi for the last 4 weeks, getting 8-10 hours daily. I see my wattage consumption on screen at all times, it varies between 2.5-3W when scrolling web and around 5W when actively working with apps. I see no difference between macOS and Linux! The only difference is the s2idle consumption but personally I don't care, besides all other modern Linux laptops have same exact issue, often worse.
On my Intel T14s 4th Gen I was getting maybe 5 hours, and that's already with heavily optimized setup!
Impressive, that must be a recent fix then, and it's good to hear. I tried Asahi some time ago and it was about 3-4 hours on average. I am still running Linux Mint on an old 2015 Macbook Pro and had to make some major power management tweaks (preventing it from _ever_ boosting up from base CPU and GPU frequency) to get close to the battery life I had before.
Definitely not 5h, not anymore. I just got off the train after working on my laptop for 3.5h, connected over wifi to the internet, browsing, searching files, etc., and ended with my battery down to 65%. I have no complaints, this is as good as it gets for Linux users. I think it's worth noting that Linux and its stack is probably most efficient OS nowadays, performance wise, so while not totally optimized for hardware, the software gets extra 10% or so over macOS and it might be showing.
I'm with you here. Mac user since my father brought home a Mac SE, even briefly worked for Apple. Every new version of Mac OS is worse. Basic things like Finder or Disk Utility are barely usable to say nothing of the poor UX decisions.
The assumption everyone seems to have is that the customer is the average consumer purchasing items and services on Amazon’s website. That hasn’t been true in more than a decade.
The real customer are the third party sellers and those using Amazon platforms.
IMO, Isaacson isn't the most objective biographer and his sourcing tends to be pretty awful. I don't trust anything he's written about contemporary people and I'm still disappointed that the access Steve Jobs gave him was seemingly squandered.
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