archagon

It’s not fine if it also has the side effect of damaging the community around the wiki.

> How exactly do I have a "vested financial interest in building out data centers"?

You work directly in AI: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...

> I'm relating an extremely normal take that you've managed to be scandalized by

It's extremely normal, and yet I'm not the only one giving you pushback. So maybe not as normal as you think?

> I oppose public comment processes for the same reason that everybody working in permitting reform --- especially for housing --- does

This article is about data centers specifically, but you've made it about All The Things Together, wrapped in a rant about the public comment process. You're saying that people don't see the "abstract upside of new development" and veto it for bad or selfish reasons. I'm saying that data center construction is a categorically different type of new development that has far fewer "abstract upsides" than the other things you listed and sees widespread pushback beyond the usual NIMBY crowd. The things you dislike about the public comment process simply do not generalize to this tempest of a situation.

It's quite deceptive to put data center protests and geriatric NIMBY activism into the same category, especially since you've got a vested financial interest in building out data centers. Data center pushback is far bigger than NIMBYism and only stands to grow bigger over time. It's already part of the conversation in top-level national politics.

In any case, your original comment is just a rabble-rousing rant with no practical call to action. "We should all be shifting to a mode where we more openly impeach" the public comment process? Oh, OK. Well, we won't be, and you'll only paint yourself as a villain in the public eye by saying things like this.

I'm not the one making fiery speeches against the proles exercising their first amendment rights to prevent buildout of infrastructure that will likely harm their communities.

I'm also not cynically and deceptively lumping "data centers" into the same category as "day care, or apartment buildings, or coffee shops." Think of the children! Think of the hipsters!!

You are not a social scientist. You are not an economist. You are just some guy on HN who's heavily invested in AI and has some sort of weird axe to grind against people who don't like it so much and plainly see that the "abstract upside of new [data center] development" — for them and their cohort — is nil or negative.

This is the sort of talk that goes in the speech bubble for a fat pig with a top hat in a 1950s political cartoon.

How embarrassing for this community that this gets ranked so high.

This comment is rage bait. You have absolutely no way of knowing this

Well, no: it’s a shorthand for “I don’t share your experience AND ALSO your experience is invalid.”

Is management engineering?

Great comment.

Also, I could be wrong, but I see two additional problems with the AI business model:

* AI accelerationists believe that generative AI will lead to compounding software complexity that opens paths to incredible economic growth. But there's a good chance it will mostly just expand breadth-wise, i.e. flood the world with mediocre code that follows well-trod paths and ships a lot faster instead of inventing new abstractions or reifying concepts that actually allow for compounding complexity. I don't think consumers want to be flooded with more software. I think they actively don't want this.

* Unless software development is forever "finished" in its current state, or unless actual general intelligence is somehow invented, the training work can never stop. If the money runs out, current models will still be useful for a while, but eventually the industry will lap the training data and model output will degrade.

AI is not an abstraction.

A company comprised entirely of management. I'm sure only great things will come of this.

I've seen devs who I once considered good veer heavily into architecture astronaut and/or "productivity hacking" territory with heavy agentic use, then invariably start posting like a hyperactive Linkedin marketing feed. I'm not sure what they're doing. I think they're building AI tools for other AI people to do AI things. It's certainly not reflected in consumer products in any way.

To be honest, I'm starting to get the feeling that heavy AI use gives you a form of brain damage. See also: https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-tan-...

Oh, well, I guess the managers at my last job were secretly "programmers" who were simply farther up the stack — all the way up to the CEO, evidently the greatest programmer of them all.

> At times like these I cant help but think of Principal Skinner. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!

Funny you think AI critics are the ones doing this. Here’s Sam Altman, literally today: https://fortune.com/2026/10/28/openai-ceo-sam-altman-gen-z-d...

Actually, I think that is the very obvious incentive structure of generative AI.

Cloners don’t give a fuck about anything other than profit. But they can pump out enough crap to drown out the legitimate games.

That is not for you to decide!

They keep claiming their agents are better than any programmer.

AI is not an abstraction, so any programmer who thinks they’re “moving up the stack” is fundamentally mistaken.

More likely the oligarchy will see them as an impediment to their trillion-dollar, world-consuming valuations: https://fortune.com/2026/10/28/openai-ceo-sam-altman-gen-z-d...

Which is actually much more dangerous.

You seem livid. Kind of bizarre.

Where is that gas pedal taking you, by the way? I can see where it’s taking people like Garry Tan: https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-tan-...

We also don’t need 20x the software. My feeling is that the software industry has not been supply-constrained for at least a decade.

AI is not for you. It’s for the owners.

Funny to see some people compare the AI rollout to the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution produced physical goods at scale, which eventually gave regular people access to things they could not have before.

AI produces intellectual labor at scale. Regular people do not need mass-produced content in their lives: there's already too much music, too much TV, too much software that only seems to get worse year after year.

Who needs mass-produced intellectual labor? The owning class. This is the only population segment that stands to benefit from this revolution. It's the reason every tech CEO is trying to shove AI down everyone's throats. It's the reason they're resting their feet on the table while everyone below them is starting to panic about the future of their careers.

I don't believe we will see compounding acceleration of anything other than spam and enshittification in this AI-laden world. This is not technology for building futures we can barely dream of: it's a gold-plated gift to the oligarchy and a fuck-you to everyone else.

"If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

How is your participation on that network in any way meaningful?

Stormfront also has influence, but I still stay the fuck away.

And even if Twitter is influential, you, Joe Random, will have no effect on anything by engaging with people there. All you are is fuel for the (attention) fire.

The big picture is that the vast majority of people are not on Twitter. It is a social network for extremists and the signal to noise ratio is extremely low.

So no, you "have to" do nothing of the sort. If something happens there that's worth reporting on, reputable journalists will write about it.

tl;dr you're OK with hanging out on Stormfront Social because some people on Bluesky and Mastodon are a little bit mean.

I wish we wouldn't mince words about this because that's really the long and short of it.

(The third option, of course, is to not use social networks run by Nazis as a basic matter of principle.)