Cryptocurrency mines have been doing outside-air cooling in desert climates, at ungodly scales, for a long time now.
At least a decade of that "long time" involved ordinary servers stuffed with GPUs (not ASICs) -- first for Bitcoin, then for Ethereum (until ~3 years ago).
Yes I've run many here in Canada - but you still need to keep intake air very clean and they will absolutely rust out or short from dirt ingestion if filters and humidity are out of check. They're also designed with higher tolerance to temperature than servers.
The amount of dead antminers I've seen from snow ingestion is honestly concerning.
Yeah sure, you need good air filters. But bag filters are cheap. Even at the small scale of a $5m datacenter the cost of good air filters is a rounding error.
> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
> This is what killed Usenet,
You've got to be kidding!
The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".
Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.
The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.
At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
We like self-checkout because there's hardly ever a line.
An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
Bitmessage is/was awesome, but it fundamentally doesn't scale.
Every user has to attempt decryption of every message sent by any sender. Later they cobbled on some kind of hokey sharding mechanism to try to work around this, but it was theoretically unmotivated and an implementation minefield (very easy for implementation mistakes in the sharding mechanism to leak communication patterns to an observer).
Bitmessage would be great if we had something like Schnorr signatures (sum of (messages signed with different keys) = (sum of messages) signed with (sum of keys)) that could tell you if any of the sum of a bunch of messages was encrypted to your secret key. Then you could bisection-search the mempool.
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