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'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

techwerkers.nl

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Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#71

Post by mc32 »

skeaker wrote: post #47
mc32 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s as productive as people who glue themselves to roadways. It irritates drivers/commuters (who are then more likely to have a negative view of the cause) and it slows traffic resulting in even more fuel usage. Yet, they think they are doing something good.

I suppose if you're one of the people that live near where it would be built it might be worth sabotaging it if only to go another week without the incessant hum and brown, filthy tap water.

It’s port area. Are you certain the protestors/saboteurs were locals?

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#72

Post by inigyou »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #60
smallpipe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

delay the project, bring attention to the problem, feel better about themselves by doing “something”. “That achieves nothing” sounds like what a Microsoft PR person would want you to think.

> feel better about themselves by doing “something”. "The real friends are the clicks and attention you receive along the way."

grabbing attention is literally the point of a protest so yes

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#73

Post by OkayPhysicist »

exabrial wrote: post #7

Right, all they're going to do is rip the concrete out and repour it, causing even more damage to the environment (concrete production and curing is unbelievably C02 intensive) I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.

Sabotage works by introducing friction into your opponents activities. Sabotaging one piece of one data center doesn't do much, but the more you do, the more outsized the impact.

Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.

The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#74

Post by Legend2440 »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #63
tadfisher wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the loom smashers should have won. I'm not sure we ended up on the better timeline.

Yesterday I watched Bernadette Banner visit a Loom Museum and try them out for herself. A few takeaways: 1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body 2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations 3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that th…

But also, it is important to remember that automating and mechanizing is what brought society as a whole out of abject poverty.

It would be very short-sighted to look only at the jobs lost by the few weavers, and not the wealth gained by everyone else.

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#75

Post by inigyou »

cryo32 wrote: post #54

I hate all this weird activist stuff. It's pointless. Someone just pays for it and the problem is fixed. If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.

If they keep doing it will they keep paying for it?

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#76

Post by tavavex »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #48
junaru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people will hear about this and subscribe to chatgpt pro in spite. You have to be special to think this is comparable to paint throwing on works of art or blocking public roads. Everyone outside tech hates AI.

I don't know a single person under 80 outside of tech who isn't using ChatGPT or more on a regular basis. If you really think everyone hates it, you are being very selective in your information/opinion sources. Yes 100% of lefty journos probably hate it, but they are an unrepresentative elite, jockeying for cultural power.

Everyone uses it, but how much of the AI opposition do you think pays to use it?

No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.

LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#77

Post by inigyou »

Legend2440 wrote: post #42
tadfisher wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the loom smashers should have won. I'm not sure we ended up on the better timeline.

Prior to industrialization everyone was broke and people regularly starved. If the loom smashers had their way, we'd still be dirt farmers living in abject poverty.

Post-industrialization, same thing but the starving broke people are far away and speak a different language

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#78

Post by wk_end »

tock wrote: post #49
junaru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people will hear about this and subscribe to chatgpt pro in spite. You have to be special to think this is comparable to paint throwing on works of art or blocking public roads. Everyone outside tech hates AI.

Weirdly the only people I know who hates AI wholeheartedly is in tech.

Do you know anyone in the arts? Musicians? I see more AI hatred on average in those sorts of communities than in tech, where there's a pretty even split.

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#79

Post by inigyou »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #65
inigyou wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can't happen, because political positions are basically hereditary. Do you know what happened to every other hereditary political system?

I call baloney. What percentage of the US Congress and governors, say, are people whose parents were in Congress and/or governors? I have no hard data, but my gut feel is less than 25%. That's basically not hereditary. Anyone with hard data, step right up...

not literally parent-child hereditary but I mean the political class decides who succeeds itself

Re: 'We used acid to sabotage Microsoft hyperscale data centre construction'

#80

Post by inigyou »

Legend2440 wrote: post #74
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I watched Bernadette Banner visit a Loom Museum and try them out for herself. A few takeaways: 1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body 2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations 3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that th…

But also, it is important to remember that automating and mechanizing is what brought society as a whole out of abject poverty. It would be very short-sighted to look only at the jobs lost by the few weavers, and not the wealth gained by everyone else.

You mean the wealth gained by the ruling nobility of the time. As they said, the loom operators were worked to the bone for almost no pay.
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