I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.
Meta offices are pretty full at 5pm lmao. In fact they are still decently full at 7pm after dinner at 6. Baffles me why people just make up random crap in areas they clearly know less than nothing about.
I assumed this happens on any employer machine anyway. If not specific mouse movement and keystrokes then file access and connected devices. I honestly don't understand the outrage.
> [...] Better hygiene meant that infants and young children had fewer opportunities to encounter and develop immunity to polio. Exposure to poliovirus was therefore delayed until late childhood or adult life, when it was more likely to take the paralytic form.[22]
That’s because the parent claim is known as the hygiene hypothesis and has been disproven by science, in common with anti vaccine claims. The immune system has not been shown to benefit from training, but has been shown to be damaged by illness.
I'm not sure how you would disprove the hygiene hypothesis, because it is a really weak claim and rejecting weak claims is really difficult.
The anti vaccine position makes a very strong claim, namely that vaccines will cause complications that are strong enough to justify not vaccinating children, which is obviously false since a lot of the diseases that are vaccinated against have actually killed children and the vaccines have dropped child mortality significantly and the complications that are supposed to be avoided by refraining from vaccines tend to be both rare and non life threatening.
You can't make the same argument with the hygiene hypothesis, because the claim is really weak. Nobody is saying that extreme hygiene will kill you. The argument is along the lines of "lack of exposure to environmental microbes, viruses or allergens may lead to an unprepared immune system that hasn't developed a wide variety of anti bodies or is more likely to develop allergies or autoimmune problems".
I'm not sure how I would be able to argue against this claim since it only takes one microbe, virus or allergen to make it true.
The context here isn't hand washing vs not hand washing, it's aggressive ozone + UV sterilisation vs regular hygiene.
Not to mention that the hygiene hypothesis has an even weaker version still, namely the "old friends hypothesis". It seems pretty weird to equivocate this to being against vaccines.
Maybe you should qualify 'anti-vaccine claims'. Throughout the history of vaccines which have saved countless lives, some people have died or suffered severe reactions linked to a vaccine. This is hardly surprising given our metabolic heterogeneity.
'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the other hand, those who are frankly contemptuous of any claim that a particular vaccine (evident particularly with the vaccines developed in response to the Covid outbreak) might be dangerous for certain people. Both extreme views have been on view recently and are indefensible.
The major issue here is the difficult task of identifying people likely to react badly to any specific vaccine.
Meanwhile 'Congress and Institute of Medicine Confirm Government Licensed and Recommended Vaccines Can Cause Injury and Death' and 'The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act was the first U.S. law to officially acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and recommended by the federal government, which are routinely mandated for school attendance by state governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of children.'
You're right about the reqs. A lot of the menu screen behaviors were traditions borrowed from arcade games and big box demo kiosks. The idea is that your game must do "something" if idle for a long period of time without someone officially "starting" it.
Not to be insensitive about the humanitarian and economic situation, but, I am curious why there are data centers in that region at all? It just seems horribly inefficient from a cooling and electricity standpoint. Not to mention water.
My pessimistic assumption is that Amazon said "yes" to handouts from regional government efforts to be relevant in tech, and that those data centers dont really matter to anyone but local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.
Middle East isn’t some 3rd world. If you can imagine futuristic cities, rich Middle East countries are already living in them with all the oil wealth.
They have phones, computers, digital services just like the US and Europe. Makes sense they want a data center in the region, close to them just like the US and Europe have data enters close to their users.
I have lived in the Middle east (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia) for ~10 years. I have also lived in the US for 10 years. Infrastructure in the Middle East (roads and bridges, public transportation) is actually better than USA. Poverty is lower because the government has oil money and everybody (citizens) is on welfare. Some countries like Iran are more educated than the USA. Saudi Arabia has the biggest supercomputer in the world and my college friends who went there for grad studies got duplex villas to live in whereas I toiled on 20k annual salary in the US. Of course there are issues- human rights, minorities, cultural issues and racism- but it's not like those problems don't exist in the US.
The data centers are there because customers are there. If you stumble on to a twitch streamer or tiktoker from Dubai, you'll find there's are thousands more.
Slight tangent, but to me futuristic cities are actually places like Amsterdam, with cozy streets and bike lanes everywhere, not places like Dubai with 16-lane freeways and a quasi-slave underclass staffing the tacky malls.
I said "independent to the degree possible", not absolutely.
I do not live in a binary world. I accept things in between.
Being part of group should be voluntary, not forced
What I definitely do not want is my life to be dictated by a few imbeciles at the top who are bought by large corps to pretend to be "by the people for the people".
The solution to that is widespread active low level constant community engagement in policy and monitoring the people you hire to debate policy (politicians) and the various silo's created to enact policy (military, civil service, legal, emergancy response, etc.).
Some people think it sufficient to pay no attention and let things slide indefinitely because "ultimately we can just rise up and shoot the government".
Isn't it expected that in a system that favors individualism over collectivism that a few people will be able to amass disproportionately more wealth and power than everyone else with no incentive or societally enforced responsibility to share that wealth and power, thus creating a society were your life is dictated by a few imbeciles at the top, not who are not bought by large corps, but who own the large corps?
Collectivism has many problems as well including that some are "more equal" and amass the same disproportional wealth (maybe under the cover and not placated but it is still there).
Indeed. It then follows that the optimal arrangement will find a balance, ameliorating the flaws of system each with the strengths of the other.
Several Northern European countries (like the Netherlands, which GP finds congenial) pursue this, though pragmaticism (unlike ideology) never reaches an end-state, and remains a work in progress. The USA, from ~1933 until sometime in the 1970s, operated on this model. It's probably only possible to sustain in high-trust societies.
A city whose citizens mostly drive is less independent than a city whose citizens mostly ride bicycles. Bicycling infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain than the same for heavier, motorized vehicles. It's not just the roadways: you need service stations, tire shops, parking lots and garages. Gasoline engine cars need gasoline distributed to stations all over the place and emissions testing. All of these things take up lots of space because motor vehicles are big.
All that bicycles really need are a (much narrower) right of way and some cheap pavement. Maintenance can be done all at home, even in a small apartment. The apparent independence available to motor vehicle drivers is an illusion afforded by massive private and public investment.
Maybe, but the "loneliness epidemic" articles and frankly, my own experience lead me to believe that independance is overated. Community is not though.
Independent? You say independent, I say parasitic. Just like any ruling class of the Middle East, especially the UAE. They’re not independent, they’re very much dependent on the semi slave labor they manage to exploit. Anything that makes life worth living is the result of collective labor. People coming together and building or learning upon previous knowledge. Hell, even your understanding of yourself comes from the social relationships you form during your formative years. This desire to be what amounts to an outcast is a defect, an abnormality imposed by the mode of production that organizes the world right now.
This sounds like a wise parent explaining some higher truth to a kid. Except that it is not truth but some our of blue baseless conclusion you've managed to somehow extract from my sentence.
Look man I'm just telling you about my own life. I feel more independent when I have a smaller space and less stuff that's easier to account for or move around.
Eh, I think its just that the infrastructure rewards having a car and not bikes. I thought the same before, only after experiencing for years the small things that make it possible, have I come around to it.
The little Honda City/Today with its trunk scooter from the 80's was ahead of its time, really. Its a path one should look at in large metropolitan areas. With electric bikes, even cities with large elevation deltas have a chance nowadays.
Indeed, but sprawling lead-smoke infested freeways is the stuff of the 1950s; bike lanes and playgrounds and grassy tram tracks is what some cities are starting to do just now! So actually more futuristic, objectively speaking :)
This is a hilarious comparison given Amsterdam's own history with regard to immigration. Not even historically but contemporarily too.. Just Eat, probably the largest employer of bargain bucket labour across Europe today is headquartered in Amsterdam
It was snippy and unclear, after the edit, its that and weak. I’d motion you just delete. Not sure literal slaves is comparable to a company that pays bargain basement salaries
It is hilarious, because it is blinded by our own self-imposed optics. It has been our policy to import droves of immigrant workers who have little hope but to take up gig economy jobs often illegally and remain fixed at the same (or worse) levels of economic status as the day they arrived in the country. Yes in Dubai they simply confiscate passports. At least they're honest about it
The kafala system confiscates your passport. You can't quit, can't switch employers, can't leave the country. People die in labor camps building these vanity projects. The UN classifies it as modern slavery.
A Just Eat rider in Amsterdam can quit tomorrow and sue their employer. Those aren't the same thing. You can criticize Europe's treatment of immigrant workers without pretending the difference is just honesty.
As I understand it in most cases they have enormous wealth disparities, so like the rich in Dubai have pampered tourist experiences but there's also serious issues with like lacking basic sewer infrastructure for ordinary people.
Americans seem to think the middle-east is some dystopian place where everyone is near poverty living in mudhuts, when places like Iran have a higher level of literacy than the USA, with more female college graduates.
There's definitely a lot of issues that need to be addressed at a cultural and social-economical level in places like Dubai exploiting migrant workers like slaves, the UAE, etc... but America has plenty of issues back home at a state by state case. Poverty, infrastructure falling apart, lack of education, lack of affordable health care, lack of job opportunity, high criminality, drug epidemics, etc... Some states feel like entirely different countries when compared to something like New Hampshire.
Even places like NYC and California which are economic hubs have this wide disparity of class, with entire communities of homeless populating the streets at crazy numbers that would make other nations blush (Cali has well over 100k).
I’m not really surprised. The US (and their allies) has made a concerted effort over a number of decades to turn them into to the third world. The current sitting US president has threatened to blast them into “oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”. A lot of imagery of middle eastern countries seen in the west is of the places they’ve collectively destroyed.
So... The future is Dubai? I am still to hear a better argument in favor of extinction.
This reminds me of a quote from "Stranger Than Fiction":
> Harold: "I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?"
> Dr. Hilbert: "Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes"
Even 3rd world have those nowadays, unless you talking the more troubled of countries. TBH "3rd world" as a concept is quite outdated.
I'm a bit skeptical on how "futuristic" the cities are. There's a lot of money, sure, but from I can tell the projects are pharaonic in a lot of ways, including being out of touch with the practicality of such projects.
> but it certainly is from a culture and society perspective. Like living in the 12th century except there are also shiny glass skyscrapers.
I am surprised looking at this seemingly racist comment.
Just because someone doesn't follow your tradition/culture doesn't mean they are living in the 12th century. There are people living everywhere in the world.
Dubai is in fact very developed, and there are not just camels living there - there are people, and many companies - albeit not so much primarily in the tech industry.
They do not have the tallest building in the world there worth $1.5 billion for no reason.
They have tech needs like any other country and I hope that clears your confusion.
Putting aside the cast-based insane wealth inequality and the extremist religious zealotry, I suspect they are referring to the pervasive slave labor culture
I don't think you really understand Middle East countries. 94% of Iranians are literate. They are a very sophisticated culture that dates back to pre-history.
They certainly may appear backwards from our western culture but that is only superficial.
Sorry, how are gay couples treated in Japan? People are conservative here, so no marriage, but from all gay couples I know here, they’re doing fine. Now, you can talk about PDA, but that kinda includes the straight couples as well to a point.
"people are conservative". Perfect, not allowing same sex marriage is now "conservative". This is how fickle people are, perfect example.
Edit: Just as a side note, I saw western people bend over backwards to please people when I went to Japan. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy some treatment they get will be positive when you behave in such a way (like a guy bowing 5 times just for getting his photo taken, stuff that would never happen to anyone else) almost embarrassing really.
Man, what are you on about? Conservatism here is much different than NA’s conservatism. Japan has a lot of problems, but the ones you’re rambling about are kinda… weird?
As opposed to the West’s genocide of millions upon millions of natives across their colonial projects? How about the millions killed as a result (directly or indirectly) of wars of aggression in the global south? Or perhaps the ongoing & unrelenting support by the West of genocide in Gaza?
Or are we not allowed to compare these things because of who the perpetrators are?
And, in the case of colonial crimes, don’t tell me to “let bygones be bygones” until apologies have been made and reparations disbursed.
In the meantime, the West is complicit and can instead direct their holier than thou attitude and patronizing lectures inwards.
The people who voted for Trump are going to tell you how to be civilised. It is peak irony. So many rights are going to be taken over time and there doesn't seem to be self-awareness. Oh well, self-inflicted damage.
There's a fair amount of nearby customers. There's decent connectivity via undersea cables to Europe, East Asia, and Africa. UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are very encouraging of outside investments in their countries.
I did some work with hosts on GCP in the region and you get fun things like hosts in Israel has bad routes to customers in nearby countries and vice versa, though. I don't know if AWS has access to better routing. Definitely a case where physical distance doesn't really correspond with network distance.
To provide some practical examples, Dubai is it's own region in some online games like Valorant. It has relatively good connectivity to the region and there are enough customers there
Data centers can run on closed loop cooling systems which doesn't need continuous water supply. Only bottleneck is Energy supply which the MEA area doesn't lack.
Hundreds of millions of people live in the Middle East and a lot of large corporations are based there. Likely they thought it would be profitable, and likely they saw some decent use.
I imagine the same reason they have a data center in places like Sao Paulo. More locally centred businesses want the low ping, and AWS wants to be your cloud compute provider of choice no matter where your target audience is.
If anyone here is involved in making decisions about where to locate such centers, I'd love to hear more about how geopolitical risk factors in, and whether you plan and price out contingencies (e.g. "This is near an unstable area, worst case is we write off $###M, but after Y years it breaks even. And the site is better in these other factors than alternative Z over there..."). Is it similar to factoring for geophysical instabilities (e.g. earthquake/tsunami zone) or other risks? Or would this type of event catch you completely offguard? I'm guessing insurance riders specifically exclude these types of risks.
Insurance. No need to write off anything or take a loss, just a slightly increased yearly cost. The cost of said insurance is likely going to be very high for a long time now though.
I insure a bunch of big datacenters (crypto mining, AI); there are really two main drivers of cost of insurance per $ of equipment:
1) Internal risks and controls within the datacenter (the company involved and their operating history, fires, flood, etc,) -- for a sufficiently "good" datacenter, you can assume it gets maxed out in quality, or at least to the point where it's no longer efficient to spend more. Most of these risks also cause service disruptions, so if you're building for high availability anyway, the rest of this stuff is usually handled as part of that. Essentially, if you're too cheap to build a good enough datacenter to max this out, you're not getting insurance anyway in most cases, so it's not a variable factor so bunch as binary or maybe a few broad risk bands (ISO tier for datacenters).
2) External risks. This is mostly natural catastrophe ("nat cat" or "cat risk"); usually there's one dominant driver of that ("severe convective storms" in Texas; floods and hurricanes in places like Florida; earthquakes in California). In some places it's multiple risks (Japan has both earthquake/tsunami and typhoon). This drives the majority of insurance premium.
War risk, geopolitical, political risk, terrorism, SRCC ("strikes, riots, and civil commotion") are in a third category -- often essentially not a factor (e.g. for a $200mm facility in rural Texas), but often handled through special programs at a national level or specialty insurance. A lot of normal policies exclude or let the client buy-back that part of the risk.
As my personal interests in war zones, drones, etc. and professional interests in crypto, AI, and datacenters seem to have converged, looking forward to seeing "quality of air defense artillery/integrated air defense system" as well as "comprehensive quick reaction force capable of dealing with national-level threats" as elements of insurance underwriting for $50B AI datacenters/"AI factories" in the future. I assume in most cases this kind of stuff will be handled by national, military, defense, or civil defense parts of the government, but could easily be contracted as well. I don't think Oracle Cloud is likely to stand up their own private army though.
Sure, but insurance is just outsourcing that calculation to a third party. AWS is big enough that I would think they largely self-insure, though I don't know if they do.
My impression is most commercial insurance policies specifically exclude acts of war (and similar). The extent of systematic damage that can occur in such scenarios would easily put them into insolvency. There are exceptions for life insurance, maritime shipping, aviation etc. but I gather they're uncommon, often limited-time in nature and come with high premiums. I've never heard of the equivalent for buildings and contents. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
I also agree with the sibling comment that suggests even if there were outsourced options available, hyperscalers might do better to self-insure.
But regardless whether the company eats it, or pays it through insurance premiums, I'm still curious how this type of risk is planned for (to whatever degree it is) and accounted. I assume it must have been contemplated in a deliberate manner, somewhere on a scale of "We knew this could happen, considered x, y and z, decided the venture was justified, and here's how we planned for such a contingency" to "That was dumb siting and someone will be fired". Obviously anywhere you put a building entails some level of local risk.
As years as a volunteer firefighter we do a lot of risk management at the tactical level and have to think through assessment and potential consequences. There are lots of guidelines we learn to help produce sound decisions. But at the end of the day to apply them you may need to make a judgement call, and you need to be prepared for things to go wrong. In a way I guess I'm asking about the economic and operational equivalent at the scale of hundred-million dollar data centers.
I think the easy answer is: because there are customers there. It’s a region full of major commercial and industrial companies. I can imagine that you’d want data centers close to where those customer are.
Technically, I can see challenges in power and cooling, but those can be overcome. The real question is-
Are there enough customers in the region to support local data centers? I think that’s clearly yes.
Data governance compliance is a huge issue for some industries. "The days can't leave the country" will drive AWSs normal customers to demand bespoke regions setup and turned on
Water is used for cooling. You take in liquid water, release water vapor, and the phase transition takes away a lot of heat. Otherwise you need to pump that heat into dry air, which is much more difficult (energy-expensive). It's the same thing you do when you sweat.
They have the cheapest oil in the world and in the future (and present) they will likely have cheap solar energy.
And until this fine misadventure, it was also possible they would get extremely cheap nuclear energy.
Given that the Gulf is fairly central, has tremendous flight connectivity, has tremendous capacity for business and business conference growth, Dubai was only looking to increase its share of global finance, law, and other major services, is a major center of shipping, is a region that has neutral to friendly relations with nearly every country, has 3rd world like cheap labor but first world like luxuries if you have the money, and a lot of money they were willing to spend on these data centers, it’s not the worst idea.
Of course, that whole plan has come crashing down now that having US bases has turned from an asset to a liability.
> local politicians and monarchs who believe they have a seat at the table.
Are you from another planet? They DO have a set at the table because gulf Sovereign Funds are one of the largest and most reliable LP pools available for VC funds for quite some time.
The current AI buildout is heavily dependent on Gulf money.
Oil is not forever and Sovereign Wealth Funds usually have goals that are not simply acruing direct investment returns, it makes sense that the folks deploying 100 billions tranches will have some say on where to put all those H100 their money will buy.
Nobody sane would predict Israel and the US would start this war.
Yes, and also pushed for by the Israeli and US governments. Tech investment is part of the Abraham Accords - i.e this is part of the prerequisites for normalization of ties with Israel.
I was thinking the same thing about cooling. I guess a high pressure heat pump can work in any environment if it compresses a gas up to a temperature that’s higher than ambient. Couple that with abundant cheap energy — sunny, oily, and gassy! — and it doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.
Once Iran ramps up, its going to be a free-for-all
against all US data infrastructure. Iran has friends in low places so they don't have to do all of the dirty work themselves. This should be a wake-up call.
They aren't 'difficult' to cook. They are dangerous to eat if uncooked (and thus undercooked).
While true morels themselves can be dangerous while uncooked, there are similar looking species that are both less and more dangerous.
Species of Gyromitra or "false morels" like Verpa Bohemica will commonly all be called "morels": both as an intentional cultural colloquialism or simple misidentification.
Depending on which hemisphere you live in, some Gyromitra species may be more dangerous than true morels. They can also be more dense and harder to cook thoroughly.
Most mushroom species will cause an upset stomach if undercooked. Drying is an effective way of reducing both dangerous and uncomfortable compounds. It's suggested for morels out of an abundance of caution, but it is not a necessary step.
(Note that not all compounds are destroyed! "Magic mushrooms" are famously traded dry for example!)
The advise to add an additional preparation step also increases the chance someone will notice the wrong species hiding in their ingredients. Undesirable species can have overlapping habitats and climates so its not uncommon for a careless or ignorant forager to pick the wrong thing.
Despite many people such as you and I yelling at random hippies and hillbillies online, they continue to call everything "morels". Reread my comment again: it is true that people colloquially misname dangerous species. I cannot help this. I can only point this fact out.
I find it more pleasant to do UI within the context of a video game renderer than to bother with ui libraries and native hooks.
You only have to deal with windows enough to get you a rendering context: then you can do everything in your walled garden.
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