Not surprising, as the market has broadly moved on from add-in cards in favor of smaller form factors and external devices, absent some notable holdouts in specific verticals.
Gonna miss it, though. If they had reduced the add-in card slots to something more reasonable, lowered the entry price, and given us multi-socket options for the CPU (2x M# Ultras? 4x?), it could have been an interesting HPC or server box - though they’ve long since moved away from that in software land, so that was always but a fantasy.
At least the Mac Studio and Minis are cute little boxes.
I've found that teaching DNS is an excellent gateway to learning about how the internet itself works, especially to "green" tech folks who go blank-faced when you get into protocols, IPs, etc.
Break out a piece of mail, connect the dots, and you see their eyes light up with comprehension. "Oh, so that's how my computer gets to google.com; it's just like how my postman knows where to deliver my mail!" Then a critical component is demystified, and they want to learn more.
Running a DNS server is honestly such a good activity for folks in general.
This is honestly why I've been getting deeper into Linux and self-hosting since early COVID. As much as I've loved my M1 Pro MBP, Apple's OS decisions - and my career expectation to always be on the latest version of OSes/software to help vet organizational migrations - have basically killed my enthusiasm for their kit. The hardware is phenomenal; the software does not spark joy.
And if I'm being frank, my time with Linux (Debian 13 on an N100 NUC w/ Docker) has really opened my eyes to just how excessive modern compute is, specifically to power increasingly bogged-down operating systems and woefully inefficient software. The N100 sips energy while happily transcoding 4K video streams on Jellyfin, running my IRC server for friends to hop off Discord, reverse proxying my entire home network, letting me stream game nights via Owncast, host some image board shitposts for various friend groups, host my RSS Aggregator, and still yawns with 75% excess capacity left over.
I'll still have a Mac because that's what my family uses (if they want free tech support from me, that is), and I'll still have my Windows gaming PC, but I'm already drafting up cyberdeck plans for my first primary Linux box, with just a CLI to get me by. Realizing I don't actually need ten cores and 32GB of RAM and a hefty GPU to do daily work is pretty damn revelatory - and shows how grotesque mass-market software and OSes have become in the name of marketing cycles and advertising dollars.
I've been hearing this line for over a decade, now. "Immersion cooling will make data centers scale!" "Converting to DC at the perimeter increases density!"
Yes, of course both of those things are true, and yes, some data centers do engage in those processes for their unique advantages. The issue is that aside from specialty kit designed for that use (like the AWS Outposts with their DC conversion), the rank-and-file kit is still predominantly AC-driven, and that doesn't seem to be changing just yet.
While I'd love to see more DC-flavored kit accessible to the mainstream, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that neither the power vendors (APC, Eaton, etc) or the kit makers (Dell, Cisco, HP, Supermicro, etc) seem to want to take the plunge on first. Until then, this remains a niche-feature for niche-users deal, I wager.
Those vendors all have DC power supply options, to my knowledge. It’s hardly new; early telco datacenters had DC power rails, since Western Electric switching equipment ran on 48VDC.
That’s just it though, telco DCs != Compute DCs. Telcos had a vested interest in DC adoption because their wireline networks used it anyway, and the fewer conversions being done the more efficient their deployments were.
Every single DC I’ve worked in, from two racks to hundreds, has been AC-driven. It’s just cheaper to go after inefficiencies in consumption first with standard kit than to optimize for AC-DC conversion loss. I’m not saying DC isn’t the future so much as I’ve been hearing it’s the future for about as long as Elmo’s promised FSD is coming “next year”.
I think the real reason is because battery power didn't have to be converted twice to be able to run the gear in case of an outage, so you'd get longer runtime in case of a power failure, and it saves a bunch of money on supplies and inverters because you effectively only need a single giant supply for all of the gear and those tend to be more efficient (and easier to keep cool) than a whole raft of smaller ones.
Immersion cooling was/is so fucking impractical it is only useful for very specific issues. If you talk to any engineer who worked on CRAY machines that were full of liquid freon, they'll tell how hard it is to do quick swaps of anything.
Its much cheaper, quicker and easier to use cooling blocks with leak proof quick connectors to do liquid cooling. It means you can use normal equipment, and don't need to re-re-enforce the floor.
A lot of "edge" stuff has 12/48v screw terminals, which I suspect is because they are designed to be telco compatible.
For megawatt racks though, I'm still not really sure.
We had a cluster of liquid cooled CDC Cyber mainframes. One of them developed a bad leak and managed to drain itself into the raised floor. This was a Very Bad Day for many folks in the computer center.
As seen on HN a few days ago, immersion cooling is dead: turns out the risks of getting sued to oblivion due to widespread PFAS contamination isn't worth it. [0]
DC doesn't have such a killer. There are a decent bunch of benefits, and the main drawback is gear availability. However, the chicken-and-egg problem is being solved by hyperscalers. Like it or not, the rank-and-file of small & medium businesses is dying, and massive deployments like AWS/GCP/Azure/Meta are becoming the norm. Those four already account for 44% of data center capacity! If they switch to DC can you still call it "specialty kit", or would it perhaps be more accurate to call it "industry norm"?
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the rest of the industry is essentially getting Big Tech's leftovers. I wouldn't be surprised if DC became the norm for colocation over the next few decades.
It is weird to me how far from the state of the art mainstream server equipment is. I can't imagine anything worse than AC-AC UPS, active PDUs, and redundant AC-DC supplies in each rack unit, but that's still how people are doing it.
At least for servers, power supplies are highly modular. It just takes 1 moderately sized customer to commit to buying them, and a DC module will appear.
Looking at the manual for the first server line that came to mind, you can buy a Dell PowerEdge R730 today with a first party support DC power supply.
Surely if it makes sense for the big players, they will do it, and then the benefits will trickle down to the rest? Like how Formula 1 technology will end up in consumer vehicles.
The piece gets into that in extensive detail that you should totally go read, but the long and short of it is that even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law, and we need to exercise that early and often to redistribute capital before its concentration leads to legislative capture.
In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.
Double Insulation was dire in the early 20th century as well. It works great for self-serving elite politics until, to stretch the analogy, the voltage gets high enough. Then it breaks down.
> those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law
If the divide is over who can write code and who can write statutes enforced by the state, it's obvious that the latter is the one that requires capital and moats, while the former does not.
I wouldn't rely on a single human being to fix this kind of issue. It's only solvable through massive collaboration and communication among those who want to fix it.
Movements that ignore the need for a charismatic leader fail, often spectacularly. It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure. Who was its leader? Is the human megaphone a species of "massive collaboration and communication"? Can you name me one leader from that movement who was nationally recognized as such?
Strong leaders are always required. Such people reduce the cost of messaging and communication which would otherwise be insurmountable to cohere a movement and actually make change. You don't elect a mob. Find leaders you trust and spread your conviction without apology. Roosevelt was not Roosevelt until after his works were done. We don't need some amorphous "massive collaboration and communication" we need to elect leaders who will fight for what we believe. So many of your friends, family and neighbors are willing to elect sell-out leaders. You could start there, that is if you actually want to fix the problem rather than invent new ones.
> It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure.
This claim is enormous. I would instead argue that the movement lacked cohesiveness because it basically complained about too large a set of (correctly identified as interconnected) issues and lost momentum because the surface was too large.
That said, I agree w your point about a face being important. Even in software, where tech can speak for itself, we see this heavily: Torvalds, Matsumoto, van Rossum, Jobs,
...which is typically done by building a movement around a leader who represents the values a movement wants to achieve.
FDR is a good example of an American leader who made substantive, wildly successful, left-leaning policy changes that ushered in decades of prosperity and (in part) last to this very day despite facing heavy opposition from the business elite of the time. They even tried to coup him!
At the time, the long term trends were dire for the American left. Double insulation was strong and getting stronger. Then the Great Depression hit. Around the world, populists and radicals were elected to office, and one way or another they changed things. In America, we managed our reform process without trying to conquer the world and without starving millions. Not Hitler, not Stalin. Roosevelt. I think that's a worthy goal to aim for again this time around.
Perhaps I mean to ask a question then, how did FDR manage to become such a widely heard leader back then with so many less ways for people to talk together? Did it make a bigger difference that he had to exist as someone people spoke to other people about? Shouldn't it be easier to find these leaders with so much more access to everyone nowadays?
Communication friction is only one cost of running a campaign among many, so the structure of parties and campaigns and primary / general elections has largely remained the same. Even if the technological barriers went away, I suspect the human factors would still hold up the structure because only so many people are willing to spend years of their life building legitimacy and promoting a political platform and each voter is only willing to spend a certain amount of time participating and choosing.
Exactly how that may have played out in the last century could be explained by many, many chains of causes and effects. But it wasn't a great leader that made it happen. At the bottom of everything, I believe it was this:
Decades of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death destroyed not only capital but huge swaths of the labor pool. With labor at a premium, it became more valuable and power shifted.
I think that without a similar apocalypse, it will not happen again.
Yes, economic disaster is the driver (tangential: a lump-of-labor supply shock was not the transmission mechanism), but big political movements always happen from the pieces lying around. Everyone can feel that a disaster of one form or another is coming. We need to make sure the right pieces are lying around.
> even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law,
In the country where I live, politicians pass laws to serve their corporate donors, not the voters. This results in regulatory capture, as the law works to protect the already-entrenched players. Democracy is just another institution co-opted by money.
I don't see any realistic way to use democracy to get out of this.
This is the sort of goodness the internet was made for. I'm no beer drinker myself, but I'm already sharing it with those in my circles who do.
Also a great way to teach folks on how to hold others honest and accountable, a skill sorely underdeveloped at present. Start with the pours, and push upward from there.
Good on them. Devices shouldn't collect any extraneous data by default other than that needed to fulfill a feature a user consciously selects, and that includes this stupid age verification spyware regimes are pushing.
An adult had to pay for the ISP connection; that's the extent of age verification needed. We shouldn't be demanding adults expose their identities to for-profit entities and surveillance states, so much as mandating for-profit companies make parental controls easier to use, more effective, and stopping them from harvesting data on kids in the first place.
Not every corner of the universe needs to be baby-proofed; we just need to build a society where parents are enabled and supported to be parents, rather than outsourcing such a critical role to strangers and/or devices so they can get back to work.
Fewer and fewer countries. I think none of the countries I've been too where I've purchased a SIM without ID allow that anymore. It is required to try to limit purchase by scam call centers and to enable phone number portability.
Apps requesting an age is not extraneous and there are many legal and safety reasons why an app may collect this information. If the operating system doesn't do it you run into the cookie banner situation where every individual site has to implement a dialog box asking the user instead of there being a standardized way to do it.
Except the cookie banners are also optional, unless you're using third-party services to collect that data. Don't blame the cookie banner, blame the dozens or hundreds of "partners" that site is using to "process" your data, blame the site owner for building such a travesty of a page that they have so many "partners" in the mix harvesting extraneous info unnecessary for basic functionality instead of building a better, cleaner, leaner, targeted service.
So is an app needing the age of the user. That doesn't mean there are not a bunch of people who will collect the information. It's like saying washing your hands before cooking food is optional and that people should blame restaurants for serving food. It's not a serious suggestion. Restaurants will continue with the business model of exchanging food for money and websites will continue with the business model of showing ads. These kinds of businesses will exist forever.
I have! And an adult still has to pay the connection charges to offer that free wi-fi. Or provide the funds for a kid to buy a device to connect to said free wi-fi.
You can go down the rabbit hole as far as you like, but it's to no avail. At some point, an adult has to consciously enable the child to connect to the internet. Full stop.
I agree with the sentiment you're expressing however I think "consciously enable" might be taking it a step too far. Modern devices off no end of unexpected was to gain internet access.
It’d be nice if folks like yourself were equally obsessed with the systemic harms that would come about from solving or addressing this problem rather than charging full-speed ahead into the unknown at everyone else’s expense.
Problems aren’t solely technological in nature, nor are their impacts and solutions. Never forget the humans behind the models.
It's understanding impact before taking action, especially on issues at scale (like labor displacement/replacement technologies). It's being vocal about shaping society in ways that reduce harms that naturally occur from inventions and technological revolutions instead of pawning it off to "other experts" or the workers themselves. It's engaging stakeholders beyond your comfort zone and social circles to build consensus, shape movements, and mitigate damage done while amplifying the good that would come from such a profound change. It's slowing or stopping work if society refuses to adapt, or targeting your output to harm those blocking the transformations needed to protect the commoners and guarantee prosperity is shared equally instead of hoarded. It's ostracizing those who choose to pursue such selfish ends while remaining willfully ignorant of (or worse, deliberately working towards) the harms they'll cause to others, applying negative pressure to influence positive reforms or warning others of the harm they'll incur by engaging in such socially-hostile behaviors.
At its core, it's about understanding (the metaphorical) you are not a single person but a cog in a much larger machine, and that your actions reverberate throughout that machine in ways that are largely predictable, at least for a reasonable number of next-order impacts. Putting aside emotional intelligence like empathy and compassion for a bit, the practical intelligence needed to solve these tasks at a scale where robots or machines can displace labor implies a similar capacity to understand the harms and impacts of said solutions on a populace. To focus solely on solving the problem before you rather than acknowledging the impact it will have beyond you is to willfully reject accountability in favor of achievement, and we have enough vainglorious chuds in technology as-is.
You asked me a question, and I answered. You didn't say, "could you read this paper of mine and see where we might differ or what my blindspots are", you just gave me a throwaway one-liner that, in hindsight, seems to have been little more than a tee-up for this exact response.
I read that, and it’s one thing to advocate for relaxation over scarcity when, say, the Gini index shows decreasing inequity.
But the organized right-wingers regularly talking about scarcity. The unelected deep state DOGE operatives who have never run for office. Does contradicting the narrative about scarcity necessarily mean undermining the top billionaires?
This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me.
The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN.
But maybe that's just the anxiety and trauma talking, encouraging me to recede back into the shadows and re-apply the old mask of "acceptableness" I've been trying to toss aside. Maybe the fact a free chatbot can do such a thorough analysis is in fact reason enough to stop worrying about every aspect of my identity and its perception by others, and instead just...be me, and deal with whatever consequences arise from that.
I dunno. Just...lot of emotions, here, most of them quite bad.
Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now.
Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
It's a lot to take in, if I'm being honest. Growing up in the sort of cultures where gossip and tabloids were the norm, this tool is painful to me in a way I'm not sure many folks can understand. It's not even low friction anymore; it's no friction, in the sense that anyone with a chatbot and minimal rails can just ask it to do these sorts of profiles now, on anyone they choose.
We desperately need to modernize laws around discrimination in light of the proliferation of these tools. No longer does someone need to thread the needle in interviews around "illegal" questions to find something to (metaphorically) hang an interviewee with, as these tools can pick it apart quite cleanly. People in protected classes are going to get reamed by bad actors leveraging these tools.
That said, after rubber ducking with a friend on this, I've come to the conclusion that there's two paths forward from this point: flight (scrubbing socials, hiding online, creating an acceptable persona) or fight (being firmly authentic, owning your weirdness, and accepting you can't control the outcomes of others' actions using these tools). I've spent decades in 'flight', and I'm tired of it. I can't control who uses these tools and to what end, so I may as well just be my damn self anyhow and do regular threat assessments accordingly. The more people who behave authentically, the less power these tools have over us.
I think it's not unreasonable, if one is in an oft discriminated protected class, to aim ones career / expense trajectory towards stability for the next couple decades. (Prioritizing remote, focusing towards subfields where there's more tolerance, working for companies in financially stable industries)
The law, currently predicated on the difficulty of discriminating en masse without leaving a paper trail, will take a while to catch up with de facto use.
We've come a long way in some aspects, while staying pretty much in place in others.
I taught infosec 101 course at a university ~20 years ago. (Twice.) On the topic of privacy I used an example of harvesting data on peoples' habits, movements and behaviours and then said that as a society we use two different terms for the same thing. "When an individual does this, it's called stalking. When a company does this, it's called data mining."
The economics department students, many of who already knew they would want to work in marketing, were quite offended.
From another perspective, it's like hearing others judging you behind your back. First few times it's awkward and maybe even annoying, but given enough time you stops to give a damn about it.
But, the problem is real if it's a nation states or megacorps are doing it. They'll use such tech in an unjustified way, make a misjudgement, and then ask you to explain yourself out of the situation. Yeah, they're definitely going that, because they don't give a damn about it.
I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be 21st century communism's (read China's) fatal flaw: the corrosive effect of panopticon monitoring on population productivity.
Because eventually apparatchiks with the data at their fingertips are going to use it to rule out the next Einsteins from participating in {insert major Chinese project}, and you've effectively self-selected at scale for people whose shared characteristic is "not being different."
We'll see if the US and Europe course correct on individual freedom enough to reap the benefits of that though.
This is not entirely surprising, as the evidence was always weakly correlated. I say this as a proponent of legalization, mind you.
Cannabis, like alcohol and tobacco, is a vice. It definitely helps with some physical ailments (like helping stimulate hunger in cancer patients), just like alcohol and tobacco can with other ailments, but it’s not a panacea for mental health disorders.
We need to stop marketing these things as curatives when they’re mostly just coping mechanisms or social lubricants. We’re doing more harm than good by leaning into the “legitimate pharmaceutical” angle.
Gonna miss it, though. If they had reduced the add-in card slots to something more reasonable, lowered the entry price, and given us multi-socket options for the CPU (2x M# Ultras? 4x?), it could have been an interesting HPC or server box - though they’ve long since moved away from that in software land, so that was always but a fantasy.
At least the Mac Studio and Minis are cute little boxes.
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