I like to see articles about the hidden systems that make so much of the modern world work, I think it's a positive thing to allow common people to have that pe

I like to see articles about the hidden systems that make so much of the modern world work, I think it's a positive thing to allow common people to have that perspective if they're interested. However, when I do see stories about datacenters and the like, I just really sort of despair, to be perfectly honest. I see how little the industry has changed and innovated since the 'modern' datacenter crawled out from the legacy telephone switching centers. You still see the marks (read: scars) left on the old in the new: same sized racks in width, asinine cold and hot aisles shuffling hot air around blown about by fan after fan after fan screaming away endlessly until they throw their bearings. The energy moved about among so many different interfaces, air/water/air/refrigerant/water/air and around and around and back again. It's the same feeling as railroad gauges echoing the ancient wheeled carriage ruts in the hard dirt because we can't be arsed to make anything better. You'd think that with all of the developments of omg distributed computing that every tech dweeb loves to bandy about that they're experts in that there would be a stampede to, you know, actually make use of some new technology, moving the data and compute closer to the user (and don't talk to me about edge facilities, they're just more of the same), reduce the blast radius of the idiocy of centralization, pare down the eye watering waste of facilities like this. But no, it's still client-server everything, maybe put a copy in another region if you're feeling kinky, but the promise of decentralization and distribution hasn't really materialized. Such a large percentage of people now have phenomenal power they carry with them at all times, but they're just dumbed-down gateways to these huge black holes of resources because the control needs to remain held in the same hands as the capital that continues to build them larger and larger. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in an ideal world that uses the technology that it develops in a sane way, these places really shouldn't exist anymore, like another comment suggested. The fundamentals are all there, it's just the incentives are so out of whack it's comical. Build bigger and bigger facilities and collect more and more data and fritter away cycle after cycle and maybe you'll increase your year-over-year by a couple dozen basis points. And since the demand is so insatiably fueled by this feedback, nothing will change. You could have minuscule neighborhood nodes scattered around a city that sips resources in comparison that does all of this in concert with the portable supercomputers we all carry, each benefiting a small handful of people at once but the beast must. be. fed.