Fuck silicon valley for putting the wants of the few ahead of the needs of the many. What a tremendous waste of money.

Are there any holes in the business plan that involves converting a dying social media platform thats already flooded with bots, troll farms and AI accounts into an entirely autonomous, isolated chamber of AI accounts, troll farm accounts and targeted ads? Zuck still fucks because of how horrible corporations are at applying KPI's that show accurate ROIs between different advertising platforms. They have no clue if their ad blitz on Twitter was more successful than the investment in YouTube ads or if it was all a result of the current state of the economy at any point in time. It would take decades before the corporate whores finally pulled enough ads for Zuck to lose a buck. Im thinking Enron style minus the investing all employee retirements fraud.

And energy. And water. And land. The list goes on and on.

Burn, planet, burn.

Y'know if I was the exec of a bloodsucking electricity company, I'd be explicitly putting something in my terms and conditions that commercial AI data-centre use of my company's supply is to be charged double or triple, and that undeclared use will be subject to heavy legal repercussions and surcharges.

There has to already be precedent for specific commercial uses of resources being treated differently from others. And if not, commercial versus non-commercial use may be a close enough precedent.

Likewise, if I'm the oil company or builder of power plants, generators and the like, I'd be putting a similar clause in.

This would then be one of those situations where desires align, however different the goals.

The planet is dying, we have pretty much given up on even pretending to do anything about it, and the rich are using the time we have left before mass die offs to get AI up and running early enough to perfect it.

Just a thought that occurred to me today. In better times I would dismiss it as nothing more than an amusing conspiracy theory but lately…

I know someone who just got hired at an unfinished Meta data center, ostensibly to do some low-level hardware monitoring and maintenance. His boss admitted that he accidentally hired people a couple months too early, so the first couple weeks have consisted of sitting around, eating free food and playing mobile games. Next week they're being flown to an active data center out of state, but they won't have much of their own work to do for another 4-6 weeks.

So these guys are being paid $25/hr, 40hrs a week, with a free lunch, and making no money for the company. I would expect any other company to find this unacceptable, but it's just a drop in the bucket for Meta.

Electricity companies already do this with demand charges and peak-usage pricing for commercial customers, and many utilities are actually starting to implement AI-specific surcharges because of the insane power density these facilities use (like 5-10x more per square foot than tradtional data centers).

Nah, my local bloodsucking electricity monopoly (SE Wisconsin) will be charging the new datacenters the lowest possible per kWh rate, and due to the huge expected demand just got approval to build new natural gas power plants that ALL of us government mandated customers get to pay for.

You know, for the demand that would never exist if we weren’t subsidizing the brand new datacenters.

It’s a complete scam.

Are they a contractor? $25/hr ~$50k seems quite low when Meta’s median salary is like $400k.