Honestly, he doesn’t need to be the best to make it enjoyable. He seems like a generally chill guy and he goes back and breaks down his games. Fascinating to hear what he was thinking and why he did what he did.
The original piece by rolling stone describes Amazon's role:
- Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.” -
So even if the datacenter expelled pure H2O it would still be a problem by increasing the hydraulic head and speeding up the spread of the agricultural runoff polluted water that already was in groundwater?
Or rather, a hypothesis disguised as an explanation. It ultimately said these nitrates come from farms, and this new datacenter is exacerbating it. The root cause is still the farms, though.
An explanation is just a theory that accounts for the facts. A hypothesis is a theory that accounts for the facts while also providing falsifiability and testability
.
They didn't provide any accounting from facts. Did farms usage of nitrates increase? We don't know. Are there more or less farms? All we know is that they assert the datacenter now exists and since then nitrates have increased. It doesn't account for all the variables nor provide a likely explanation for how this could be true; it is only a possibility of many.
> Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold."
I don’t get it. Is sex trafficking driven user growth really so significant for Meta that they would have such a policy ?
The "catching" is probably some kind of automated detection scanner with an algo they don't fully trust to be accurate, so they have some number of "strikes" that will lead to a takedown.
There is always a complexity to this (and don't think I'm defending Meta, who are absolutely toxic).
Like Apple's "scanning for CSAM", and people said "Oh, there's a threshold so it won't false report, you have to have 25+ images (or whatever) before it will"... Like okay, avoid false reporting, but that policy is one messy story away from "Apple says it doesn't care about the first 24 CSAM images on your phone".
Of course it's not. We could speculate about how to square this with reason and Meta's denial; perhaps some flag associated with sex trafficking had to be hit 17 times, and some people thought the flag was associated with too many other things to lower the threshold. But the bottom line is that hostile characterizations of undisclosed documents aren't presumptively true.
We don’t know. But as you read from the article, Meta’s own employees were concerned about it (and many other things). For Zuck it was not a priority, as he said himself.
We can speculate. I think they just did not give a fuck. Usually limiting grooming and abuse of minors requires limiting the access of those minors to various activities on the platform, which means those kids go somewhere else. Meta specifically wanted to promote it’s use among children below 13 to stimulate growth, that often resulting in the platform becoming dangerous for minors was not seen as their problem.
If your company is driven by growth über alles à la venture capitalism, it will mean the growth goes before everything else. Including child safety.
Reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams is eye opening here, and it's pretty close to exactly that.
> I think they just did not give a fuck.
It's that people like Zuck and Sandberg were just so happily ensconced in their happy little worlds of private jets and Davos and etc., that they really could not care less if it wasn't something that affected them (and really, the very vast majority of issues facing Meta, don't affect them, only their bonuses and compensation).
Your actions will lead to active harm? "But not to me, so, so what, if it helps our numbers".
