Wait, I thought we should be putting the brakes on AI development, via government intervention (aka regulations). Now it’s the opposite?

53 megawatts “during peak electrical demand” or “last year”?

Because timespans matter. 53 megawatts is the rough average annual power consumption of 5 households. So if that’s the datacenter’s annual power usage… they’re not using that much power after all. On the other hand, if that’s the monthly usage, that’s more in line with compute/data center usage. And if it’s daily use… 😬

Same with the water. 13 million gallons is about 260 thousand bathtubs worth of water. That’s basically what a town of ~300k will use in one night for bathing only. So for annual usage it’s not that bad. For monthly usage it’s passable. For daily usage… again 😬

Eh, no, customer retention isn’t inherently evil. After all that’s the goal of every company, to essentially “outbid” competitors for as many customers as possible.

There is actually a country level list of problem gamblers that the companies HAVE to ban. Problem is, these gamblers will find ways around the law to satisfy their addiction.

I do agree with the rest, regulation really needs to pick up. unfortunately most governments like the money they can make on gambling too much…

Had to account hop as fedia.io is down…

The intent isn’t necessarily predatory. To explain it from business/product side, it boils down to two options:

• we keep the user’s account and they can easily log in once they’re back and continue spending money through us
• or we can delete the account at which point the user will think “hey if I have to re-register anyway, why not go to a competitor”, losing out on that business

Remember, that level of any corporation operates on a KPI based approach. They don’t see people, they don’t see individuals, they see profit per user, they see user retention after a long term break, they see user losses to competitors because “their company has features X Y and Z, while ours don’t”.

That’s why regulations are a joke. These very same people will go on about how preventing gambling addiction and general negative effects of gambling is good, then do the polar opposite. This is a big part of the reason why I left. Zero accountability of the people who make the decision while us peons were forced to do biannual compliance training and other BS, even though we never interacted with customers…