I've started largely using this site in a read-only fashion. The SNR here now is too low and I'm too busy. Found my time better spent in more focused offline and online communities.
On the one hand there's the Bluesky moderation service. By default if you use the official Bluesky apps/bsky.app experience (the Bluesky AppView) you are automatically subscribed to moderation decisions by the official moderation service.
On the other hand, you have user-led behavior. One of them is blocklists. There are large blocklists run by individuals or groups that try to keep track of right leaning accounts that many users subscribe to in order to shut those voices out. As is easily observed, there's lots of conflict as to why a given person ended up on the list. On top of that there's a general practice on the network where users pile onto perceived ideological opponents by hate posting at them, occasionally with death threats. This ends up pushing away most of the right oriented users and continues to enforce ideological rigidity on Blueksy.
The asymmetrical social dynamics of the network are largely what create the ideological bias you observe. From what I can tell the core team's focus has been moving away from Blueksy and more to the ATProto layer itself. My thoughts are that Bluesky itself is probably a lost cause from an ideological melting pot perspective and that you'll need a new ATProto app for that, but this raises the question you asked, why not Mastodon? (The alternative could be to have the core team bring on some celebrities and pay them to post but due to the nature of the existing community I'm not sure that'll go super well.)
? The correlation is trivially demonstrable. You can probably ask an agent to pull the relevant datasets for a state, run a linear regression, and demonstrate this. It's the entire reason traffic crash statistics in the US are normalized per mile.
Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.
This site has gotten a lot more popular and so it's a lot easier to rise up in karma these days. It's really easy to get lots of upvotes and downvotes in pretty much any of the controversial/political threads on the site because they get a lot of attention, a lot more than the more technical or sedate posts. My guess is the mods don't have the time to look at as many of the comments anymore just because there are so many.
> These buildouts have been receiving scrutiny and often refusal across the US for some time now.
Yes but the crux of your reading of my comment is you think I'm trying to downplay the opposition to buildouts. Do you know how much opposition there actually is? Is it geographically concentrated? Is it demographically concentrated?
What I've seen is the usual tech skeptical online publications have made a big deal about this issue, the usual pro tech sources say nothing about it. Anti tech politicians have run photo ops in anti tech publications, and pro tech politicians have done the same. Big newspapers like the NYT have run the occasional article about opposition but have largely left the issue alone.
> But none of that stands counter to the reality that there is currently broad community pushback across the US and that it is indeed the associated political processes that determine what is and isn't allowed. The populace is well within its rights to deny the construction of datacenters regardless of if such an outcome is a wise course of action.
Is it broad? Has anyone shown how broad it is? I sure haven't seen a march on DC about it. Before the YIMBY movement organized, this is exactly how housing issues used to be covered on progressive media btw. Protests of 30 people in a community of thousands used to get amplified to galvanize anti-housing support. To some extent this is the job of media, to give editorial voice to sympathetic concerns, but as someone now involved with housing politics I've come to realize that the truth of the scale of opposition to local builds like this can has a lot of incentives around every motivated actor to inflate their support. Community surveys are the only thing I've seen that works and even then advocates will show up to meetings and shout at the opposition claiming that the survey results are rigged.
As far as the "associated political processes" this depends heavily from state to state and county to county. Opponents to UC Berkeley's student housing tried to block housing by claiming humans are noise pollution. This only works because California has CEQA. Residents of Texas could not sue on those grounds.
If you ask me, the fact that we're playing politics to litigate building shows we're lost. We can't leave every piece of infrastructure to the vagaries of the masses. As usual the rich and politically well connected will win and the poor will lose. Building needs to be ministerial.
See this kind of response is why online discussions of the topic become so silly. What is "broad nationwide"? What is "large portion"? How large should a "large portion" be? We have a history of blocking housing because of local opposition, should we use the same model to block datacenters? How much "stake" should they have in the matter? These are all hard questions and I'm not sure a comment section and polarized social media communities are the right place to think about them.
This is a complicated issue. Datacenters don't just depend on energy, they also generate noise, use water, but also generate some jobs and have fewer of the externalities (such as big trucks that load and unload regularly, and less water usage, no chemical usage, etc) that come with the usual light industrial uses. Most of these comments are just ways for people to vent and at best confuse the issue and at worst set them back, IMO at least.
My comment in this chain was glib but it was responding to a comment whose purpose was to vent or express disapproval, so I don't think I brought the conversation down. That didn't stop me from picking up downvotes of course.
> The tariffs I understand (even if they really don't make sense in this particular case) but the permitting I do not. Do you have more information or links?
Take a look at [1]. The current admin felt that NEPA reviews were taking too long for utility grade energy projects and put in a cap for NEPA review length that does not apply to wind and solar. The article goes into how long utility scale solar projects can take to go through NEPA.
> In rural but populated areas wind is generally installed on someone else's grazing area for a small fee. In truly unpopulated areas (ie desert) access to land isn't usually an issue since there's approximately zero demand for it.
The challenge then is bringing the power to the datacenter, which often involves transmission lines, which goes back to permitting.
> I don't recall seeing Columbus as being significant on any US backbone map. More likely they just want to be close to each other. Someone must have started that ball rolling.
AWS us-east-2 (2016) and GCP us-east5 (2022) are both in Ohio. Not 100% sure they're close to an IX but my guess is there's existing infra to route onto.
> Building a facility that uses megawatts of energy in an old farm field in the country, and having long lead times to get it installed, isn't really indicative of "deindustrialization" is it?
Sorry I think my message might have gotten a bit conflated. I meant, in the offshoring that happened in the US in the late '90s-early '00s, the US ended up losing industrial demand. Obviously consumer demand increased in the meantime but we've been living on a mostly stagnant energy supply for a long time.
You're right. Of course political approval tends to involve a few more people than a couple dissenting commenters on a ratioed HN comment thread, depending on the regime in question. Pretty sure the entities in question had business licenses as well.
Elon has mentioned this in interviews and the S-2 for SpaceX calls out permitting challenges as a reason for moving to space. Elon being Elon, I don't really believe him but this is what he claims at least.
The reason is because permitting and building a natgas generator is the easiest among the energy production methods in the US. Datacenters need to be close-ish to Internet Exchanges to be cost competitive when lighting up network capacity. Solar cells are expensive (Chinese tariffs or domestic production) and permitting is tough. Nuclear is still a permitting and cost nightmare. Wind requires a lot of land. Hydroelectric is considered an environmental dead end after the ecological effects of the Hoover Dam. Geothermal is still unproven. Transmission lines moving power between generation and consumption is a permitting nightmare.
In that world, natural gas just makes the most sense. The US hasn't build generation capacity in any meaningful way in decades. We've deindustrialized over time so it's been relatively okay, until a new form of industry (datacenters) starts putting pressure on the whole thing.
In the past I wrote a version of HN that uses modern CSS rather than tables that populates stuff from the API. There I built a little blocklist of my own that prunes a comment tree the moment it encounters a blocked user (inspired by posts from another HN user, arjie.)
I've been thinking of making a purely algorithmic filter for myself but at that point I might just ditch the fake HN interface and make something. I've been thinking of building atop Mastodon/ActivityPub clients.
As an update to myself, the comments did eventually sort themselves out. I guess the initial "reaction" commenters and voters are just more interested in participating than in SNR. Good opportunity for me to finally start blocklisting users, and I'll probably block some of these large, reactive thread authors.
Okay (I disagree because most privacy policy discussions on HN go in the exact same direction and turn into outrage threads but this is a reasonable disagreement since not all of these discussions do), but model naming of all things? Come on. This is low level reaction slop and it's obvious.
Seems like Fable is doing a lot better on SWE-Bench-Pro and FrontierCode than GPT-5.5. Given how most folks I talk to and people instead online keep mentioning that GPT-5.5 was better than Opus, I'm curious what the experience now is like.
I think the community on this site these days, much like other comment sections on the web, just read the headline and make a low effort comment. Regression to the mean I guess.
That is 1000x better than griping about the privacy policy, capacity issues, token costs, and how trendy the names are for the new models (???). The bar is on the floor and I just want it at my knees.
> Let me spin this a different way: Because there are no notifications, HN users need to frequently come back and check. This is "positive random reinforcement" and is one of the most powerful mechanisms known for creating and maintaining addictive behavior. It's the same principle that slot machines and loot boxes use.
I personally fall victim to this. On days I just browse the site I only refresh a few times a day or maybe just once in the afternoon. If I write a comment I constantly refresh and spend way more time reading the site. It's one of the most negative patterns for me on here.
> But don't confuse "great audience" for "better social technology".
I'd go further and say that this framing itself is a bit toxic. Nothing about the interests in this site make the audience "great" simply different and more relevant to you. There's an underlying "the nerds are better than the pleb normies" that suffuses this entire discussion that I find hilarious given how low the average comment accuracy is here for non tech things.