ya idk how I got this url either

call me Edil, I like tigers.

[pingo1387]

having a headache while hydrated is so unfair. you were supposed to protect me.

[dogpuppy]

[mandywondering]

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

[dietspam16]

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

[koiagain]

Frantically screamingWAIT WAIT WAIT As tumblr refreshes and the Most beautiful piece of fan art i’ve ever seen DISAPPEARS

[boobachu]

[dogpuppy]

[blackhole-ntp]

I'm starting to feel like some of you guys don't actually have that good a grasp of what a data center is or what it does

[blackhole-ntp]

"We need to get rid of data centers" says the tumblr user who has a career doing gig work via cloud apps

[jv]

Well, I know pretty well what a data center is, and you are wrong.

You don't need data centers to serve Tumblr. Or your gps maps. And for sure not to use a gig jobs app.

You need a server, indeed. That server is basically a computer that needs to be somewhere with a good internet connection. If the site or app has a lot of usage, you may need several of them, rarely more than the lower two figures. That's it.

"the internet we know" doesn't rely on data centers. Data centers, as we know nowadays, basically were invented by Amazon, who started selling them "as a service" maybe 15 years ago. Before that, companies used to, well, have their own servers. Often in their own office buildings. Sometimes in MUCH smaller facilities dedicated to host servers.

But the modern concept of data server? That is needed mostly for data mining and selling processing power as a service, so shitty startups can try to invent the next torment Nexus without needing to hire people who actually know how to work with physical servers nor spending big money on hardware.

But most of the apps and websites you use everyday? Any shitty laptop could very well be used as their server and support a couple of hundred concurrent users without breaking a sweat.

Honestly, they are just needed for the worst parts of the internet.

[blackhole-ntp]

Favourite parts of this post:

Read "gig jobs using cloud apps" and thought I meant Uber Eats

Unironic Torment Nexus reference in a serious discourse post in 2026

Implication that companies running their own data servers locally is a more energy efficient model than renting cloud VMs

"The Internet you know could run off of your laptop"; ??? 80+% of all user Internet traffic is HD video streaming via YouTube, Netflix and Tiktok etc - no, you don't get to dismiss that in the tags! The average Internet user watches almost two hours of such footage per day. Each of these services is shifting anywhere up to an exabyte of data daily, and literally all of this traffic is processed via data centers and routed over services hosted on the cloud. Like buddy, what the actual fuck are you talking about

[blackhole-ntp]

At this point the primary function of the Internet is to serve streamed video and to a lesser extent other multimedia content. Like, that is just what the system is now.

Sure you can say it's a blight on society and we should dismantle the internet as experienced by its six billion strong global userbase, but if you think that you should say that outright instead of pretending you could swap that out for a Dell laptop running bulletin board software in the basement and that nobody would notice

[jv]

Sorry, but this "internet traffic is mostly HD video streaming" state is a very recent development (recent as in "5 to 10 years ago), so no, I don't consider it part of the core internet experience.

Should billions of people get their internet leisure usage disrupted just because of the energy needed so they can watch hi-res videos while they commute? Yes, yes very much so.

This is like saying you can't be against fracking or against running oil pipes through protected nature areas because people are used to cheaper oil prices and preventing that would make it more expensive.

Companies running their own data centers _was_ more energy efficient. The magic of "the cloud" is called scale: 15 years ago, a peak of usage meant that your service was going to be unavailable until your engineers purchased and installed some very expensive hardware that may not have been needed anymore once the peak was gone. Nowadays, "the cloud" makes it trivial, and cheap, to be over scaled by default. Even services that haven't launched yet are running servers that will handle millions of users just because it costs the company less than what they spend on pizzas for the developers. The Internet, in general, may be over scaled by one or two orders of magnitude nowadays. So yeah, a company running their own server (singular, believe it or not, 90% of the internet services would run perfectly fine in a single PC) would be way more energy efficient than what they do now

[megpie71]

In a lot of ways, modern data centres are an example of computing heading back toward the model of computing that was around when the internet was originally launched back in the early 1980s - large central computing facilities built around mainframes, generally owned by governments or large corporations (because they were the only ones which had the money to purchase them), the power of which was made available to users via "dumb terminals" (that is, machines with very little native computing power) connected to the central machine via network. Certainly today's laptop computers and palm-sized devices (phones, tablets etc) which are primarily designed to ensure local users aren't storing stuff locally (not enough storage space - use the Cloud instead) would qualify quite easily as "dumb terminals" - and the fact the network that connects them to the main supply of computing power is wireless doesn't make them any less dependent on that central processing source.

Of course, once you've been around enough businesses (and enough government departments and agencies) for long enough, you start realising these things run in roughly a twenty year cycle - first everything centralises, and everyone thinks it's wonderful for about the first five years but after that it's a process of finding faults with the system; then everything decentralises, and everyone thinks that's wonderful ... for about the first five years, at which point people start finding faults in the system, and start suggesting centralising things again; and around and around we go.

Give it another decade or so, and we'll see everything heading back out to personal machines, and individual firms owning their own servers, because they will have discovered the problem with large data processing facilities (namely: any server you can't personally threaten with a hammer is not your server; any data on a server you can't personally threaten with a hammer is no longer your data, and you have no effective control over what other people choose to do with it; and, enshittification will happen to the data centres the same as it's happened to everything else, as the profiteers try to extract the maximum amount of money out of the system).

A lot of the newer internet services may well wind up crashing as a result. Most of the older ones that run the infrastructure (which were written to run politely in kilobytes of computing space, rather than gigabytes) will carry on blithely shuttling bits from one end of the internet to the other.

[ralfmaximus]

The cycle thing is very true. But now it's overlapping cycles.

We're already seeing "run AI as a local service on your phone!" stuff from Google while at the same time Microsoft is trying to get everyone to login with a Microsoft account to use their local PC.

[hotvampireadjacent]

Um

[ralfmaximus]

It's 2026.

You can have delicious peaches AND 9/11 conspiracy theories.

[perfectday1972]

i do wonder how mamdani would have solved a problem like the green goblin

[damejoansutherland]

side benefit of communal all-gender restrooms is that they may be our best chance to shame cis men into washing their hands

[damejoansutherland]

i was in a communal all-gender restroom today and as i was washing my hands a middle-aged man came out of one of the stalls, started to make for the door, clocked me standing at the sinks, and changed course to wash his hands with a real hangdog look on his face

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

[deramin2]

Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

The Klamath River Runs Free

The Klamath River Runs Free

[supreme-leader-stoat]

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

[autistic-reptile]

sorry I saw a post about AAVE and got fired up and had to make this

[fagcrisis]

do you guys remember the magnus archives

[fagcrisis]

one of my mutuals got death threats for saying martin slapping jon awake that one time was not abuse

[fagcrisis]

multiple people were cancelled to the point of social ostracization for shipping two characters, just because jonny fucked up the timelines and one of them might have been a lot older. or not. they couldve been the same age

[fagcrisis]

people called each other racist for being negative about a character who was not canonically a poc

[fagcrisis]

people accused jonny sims of faking his height on twitter and it got so bad he had to tell them to stop on a stream

[fagcrisis]

@astral-circuitry I FORGOT ABOUT THAT.... they were trying to cancel that man over absolutely everything. like the episode that was based on the grenfell tower fire and everyone decided it was problematic

[fagcrisis]

some good ones from the notes

[tiktaalic]

Arugula is some crap they found on the ground for real

[creepymutelilbugger]

thats because its plance. there are others as well

[doginprogress]

hewwo?????

[minotauri]

[louder than everyone] MAN I THINK IT DEPENDS!

[standwithdaanes]

the democratic modernity framework has helped me a lot with coming to terms with the importance of participating in what democratic structures exist under state control while also believing wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as a "democratic state."

[standwithdaanes]

essentially

"society" is understood as the complex, diverse total of people, communities, cultures, inherently connected to one another through overlapping relationships of both conflict and solidarity.

"democracy" is the self-governance of society through voluntary participation and collective consensus. society governs itself directly; people discuss issues and proposals directly with each other through communes, and come to collective decisions that shape their community's collective life. for larger-scale societies, democracy flows upwards from local communes to federations of communes through delegates, whose role is only to communicate the decisions of local communes, not to make decisions on their behalf. ideally, the system of federated direct democracy is built to explicitly include and facilitate the participation of women, queer people, various ethnic groups, disabled people, children and the elderly, etc. which make up society (which, again, is defined by its diversity).

states are best understood as, at their core, "economic monopol[ies] that [are] based on surplus product and value." they are centralized institutions that sit on top of society, and control what society produces (like food and other material goods).

societies can exist, thrive, and self-govern without states. but states cannot exist without societies to leech off of. the state exists in tension with society due to its extractive relationship with it. this is why states are defined by their use of "ideological tools, instruments of coercion, and the art of administration" in order to control society's worldview and justify the state's monopoly and power.

however, in practice the relationship between the state and society is complex. the pluralistic nature of society inevitably causes resistance to state oppression and these acts of resistance can force the state to make concessions in order to appease society. this is not the same as true liberation, but it is an important part of the dialectic relationship between the state and society/the commune. Öcalan uses the narrative of "two rivers" to describe this relationship: state civilization is a force of centralization, patriarchy, exploitation, and hegemony, while democratic civilization is a force of pluralism, egalitarianism, liberation, and mutualism, and the back-and-forth conflict between these two rivers is the driving force of human history.

as a result, there can be no such thing as a "democratic state" as democracy means society governing itself, and state cannot be equated with society (equating the state with society is the basic idea of fascism). however, there can be "state plus democracy," where society has forced the state to establish some democratic structures which allows society some influence over governance. this is not truly democracy - society's self-governance is constrained institutionally, culturally, materially - but neither should we disregard them as a whole. when understood properly, in the context of the relationship between the state and democratic society, we can see these structures as hard-won sparks of democratic civilization that we need to fan into flames, rather than idealizing them as "democracy working as intended."

[vampigeon]

It's as good a theory for all this nonsense as anything else I've seen.

[mollymerula]

we need to normalize a tradition where nonpartnering aros are like "hey, i'm officially never getting married, please come to this party and give me whatever kitchenware you would have bought me for a wedding"