Notices by Julian Oliver (julianoliver@mastodon.social)

Setting up a desktop system today for some remote work and in the 30mins before installing an adblocker I see how intolerable the www has become. On several sites the content was swarmed upon to the point of being almost imperceptible. Packs of autoplaying attention-leeches, popups of video with over-gesticulating wow-faced cruft, floating footers swollen with ticker-tape inanity.

The CO2e & cognitive-load savings provided by a simple extension like uBlockOrigin are not to be underestimated.

Yesterday an old friend asked me of the impact AI is having on my #sysadmin work, whether I was using it. I responded that it was not, & that using it would be unproductive as I'd lose so much time auditing deployments by an agent I cannot trust for slop, bloat & flaws.

What I didn't have time to add was that I already have v low carbon, 100% sovereign automation I can trust: shell scripts. I know exactly what they do, when & why, because I wrote them. Such value & confidence is irreplaceable.

Researchers found that writers using biased AI agents to auto-complete suggestions had their sociopolitical values shifted without their knowledge it was happening.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw5578

We worry about cognitive capture, what the LLMs of big tech are doing to our ability to identify and think through problems. We should be equally worried about them making a grab for our ethos, what we care about, and at population scales.

#ai #bigtech #ethics

Pleased to announce another edition of Cloudbreak, taking place May 28.

For those that don't know already, this is a 6hr fully-supported live training opportunity leading participants with no prior experience in system administration through the process of building up their own #sovereign & secured cloud server.

Hosted in the EU on renewable energy, the finished server also offers both Zoom & Google Docs alternatives.

Info & signup here:

https://courses.nikau.io/cloudbreak

#selfhosting

Cloudbreak registrations for the May 28 session close May 20 UTC 22:00./

This learning opportunity is for those keen to get their family, studio or small org off Google Docs, Drive & Zoom, while taking their first steps into deploying powerful applications on Internet infrastructure.

At the close of the 6hr session, participants each have a very private, data-sovereign, & low-maintenance server, running on traceable renewable energy in the EU.

No prior skills needed.

https://courses.nikau.io/cloudbreak

Six seats left on the May 28th edition of Cloudbreak

https://courses.nikau.io/cloudbreak

ICYMI the next run of the Cloudbreak training is kicking off on the 28th. We're taking sign-ups now. If you've been wanting to become part of the movement away from US big tech platforms, while taking your first steps into self-hosted and sovereign server infrastructure, this is probably your course.

https://courses.nikau.io/cloudbreak

Each participant is fully supported in building up a server all of their own. No prior comp sci or engineering experience needed!

#selfhosting

Oh yep, to stay in touch with these training opportunities as they pop up, you can join this list:

https://lists.nikau.io/subscription/form

My first coffee was coffee. My 2nd was watching a video of Eric Schmidt getting booed down for his vapid and culty AI speech. The kids are alright.

@dalias I host sensitive data on some jurisdictionally appropriate (for threat model) DCs, & for clients (usually NGOs), FDE or with strongly encrypted data partitions on bare metal, a good IDS, & administered over self-hosted VPN. In other cases I host at home or in studio.

Hosting on-prem has its own unique & considerable risks if doing at-risk work, especially if that work is in the jurisdiction you live in.

In such cases better OpSec is to host over the border, in a resistant jurisdiction

@dalias Big fan of on-prem, and decentralised/p2p topologies, & 20yrs ago I would've generally agreed we shouldn't need DC's.

But after launching projects that went large, incl serving ISOs and streaming etc, sites in the press, I'd need top business fibre at home to still have a pipe good for anything else. My rack Dell's and NAS at home are loud, and power hungry too. Having the capacity to on-prem and meet a large audience on a surge requires privilege (& good qdiscs skills!). 1/3

@dalias Hardly a closet, but I get your point! https://catalystcloud.nz/

A curious thing to read some writing "burn down the datacenters", on datacenters.

Regardless, while a healthy response to mega AI DCs, there are others, that probably shouldn't go onto the bonfire.

By example, a small locally-owned DC not far from me ensures all our elections are on sovereign infra, looks after a decent chunk of the public sector, is committed to low-to-no CO2e, low-ewaste & indigenous rights.

Small, ethical, sovereign DCs can & do exist, & point to a less awful future.

9GW indeed seems improbable, impossibly huge. Less so if off-grid, run directly on global warming as this article reckons?

"At full buildout, the campus would reach 9 GW, all produced on-site through a connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile interstate natural gas line that crosses northern Utah on its route from Wyoming to Oregon. MIDA executive director Paul Morris told county commissioners that the facility “will not take one electron” from the existing grid"

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-gw-utah-data-center-campus-approved

The Stratos AI datacenter in Utah got the go-ahead. 2x the size of Manhattan, & at 9GW, it will consume more electricity than Utah itself. It's also likely to directly imperil the Great Salt Lake, due to the absurd amount of water needed for cooling.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approves-datacenter-backlash

If you use BigAI, you are driving up demand for such computational obscenities, projects whose sole purpose is to mal-distribute wealth, power & control to those that already have far too much of it.

To use is to support.

Hmm, doubts.

Reading about Stargate (AKA the previously largest DC in the world), we can crystal ball the fate of Stratos.

Stargate was widely cited to have a ~5GW target. Following downscale, they were expected to have 1.2GW up by end of year, eventually 2GW, but then even those plans were cancelled:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openais-massive-stargate-data-center-canceled-as-firm-cant-reach-terms-with-oracle-operator-struggles-with-reliability-issues-meta-said-to-be-interested-in-snatching-excess-capacity

With Stargate as example, I'm choosing not to believe a 9GW single-site DC is actually buildable in any meaningful timeframe, nor worth the sprawling contingencies.

Looking back it seems there is a pattern with these AI DC announcements where the wattage consumed is itself the investor hook, as they translate it as AI workload capacity.

So while people that care about the wealth gap, water you can drink & not killing planets look at these numbers with disdain, for the oligarchs behind these things bigger numbers are better.

This post almost needs a CW.

I got as far as Core Beliefs and already started wincing. Truly sad to see such a great project become so very lost.

TL;DR upper management at GitLab has joined the machine cult and is taking the project with them.

"Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built."

Wrong way, turn back.

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

#gitlab

Delighted to report that Amazon has abandoned its plans to build a datacenter here.

The "lease-and-equip" model they're switching to is a lot easier to get rid of, when we eventually kick these digital imperialists out altogether.

I'll raise a sovereign glass of fresh water to that.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/594164/amazon-takes-45m-hit-abandons-planned-west-auckland-data-centre

#privacy #datasovereignty #imperialism

The mere proposition of embedding another nation's military automation deep within the public/gov/mil sector of our sovereign democracies seems immediately absurd.

Meanwhile Copilot, used throughout so many sectors worldwide, is to be heavily integrated into the US Department of War / Pentagon, and across the US military. OpenAI struck a deal with the DoW in Feb. Google's Gemini is already there.

The 'American Exceptionalism' people talk about is not assigned alone. We also give it to them.