Calling this a green move is somewhat misleading. I think the author pretty much read the marketing copy on Bloom’s website, which doesn’t present the full picture.
tl;dr: This is a great step towards building infrastructure which can bridge the gap between fossil and renewable fuels, but as the technology stands this currently cannot be a renewably-fuelled system. This is important but the article buries the lede as to why: it helps to smooth our transition to renewable hydrogen when it becomes available.
Bloom bills their cells as “low or no CO”, which is kind of true. I’m going to focus on the effects on CO2 emissions here, but Bloom also talks about reducing water consumption and particulate emissions, which are very valid benefits. The article states that the data center will be powered by natural gas, with the hope of transitioning to hydrogen in the future, so let’s talk briefly about how fuel cells interact with natural gas.
Solid oxide fuel cells perform internal steam reformation of natural gas (DOE source), where if air is used as the oxygen source, methane and water are converted to H2 and carbon monoxide (DOE source). Yes, that does decrease the amount of CO2 produced, but CO is an objectively worse byproduct. The only realistic thing they can turn it into is CO2 via a water-gas shift reaction (which is standard for methane reformation), so a fuel cell still produces one CO2 per methane oxidized. These do decrease CO2 emissions, but only because they also slightly reduce the amount of methane which must be consumed to generate a certain amount of electrical energy, not due to a fundamental difference in how they process carbon.
Now, moving to hydrogen is a great goal, and that flexibility in fuel is the real progress story here. However, if they’re talking about moving to hydrogen in the near future, the only technique currently capable of generating H2 on an industrial scale is the same steam-reformation process which is happening in the fuel cells when they operate on natural gas. Unfortunately, we simply do not have any renewable methods for making hydrogen currently (98% of all hydrogen produced in the world is via coal gasification or steam-reformation of methane).
A small caveat to this is that if the data center was able to source biogas from a fermentor, this would help in at least closing our carbon cycle, i.e. only recycling carbon which is already in the carbon cycle.
Don’t get me wrong, building this datacenter with fuel cells is a worthwhile thing to do, but not for the reasons that this article (or the Bloom website) suggests. It does not substantially reduce CO2 emissions, even if it is run on hydrogen. However, the important thing that it does do is reduce the barrier for switching to green hydrogen when it becomes available, which is super important! The biggest issue when renewable hydrogen becomes practical will be the infrastructural expense of transitioning to an entirely new fuel source, and we’re currently not prepared for that transition–this is a step in the right direction.
Thanks for coming to my TED rant! Hope this is helpful or interesting to y’all.
I guess what that slide meant was not what the author thought.
Well, yes, Android is a "massive tracking device", but Google Search is not the culprit. Android apps were able to collect user data easily because they didn't have to ask for users' permission (and even today, by using an old Android API iirc).
So, no, I don't trust Apple, but that slide is probably irrelevant.
Nope, the required API to have your app in the Playstore constantly rises, and if you don’t comply you get kicked. The current API version is something around 26, and definitely has the permissions model integrated.
They’re also adding an API version check on devices, which will affect old apps that have gotten around the store checks. Only affects devices that can upgrade to 14, but it’s a solid step.
Ah! I just configured yesterday my router to block all the Apple tracking requests (via DNS)… My Android don’t have Google, so they are technically wrong, there is no Apple OS with no tracking (as it is closed source).
The first thing that we all need to change is letting rich corporations decide what’s legal and what’s illegal. If using an alternative frontend can be considered illegal, then these corporations are guilty of crimes that would get them guillotined.
As much as I hate ads and hate the concept that I would be forced to view them, these kind of legal wranglings freak me out. It seems quite possible that a ruling in my favor here would be used against me somewhere else. Courts and lawmakers don’t understand technology and don’t realize the effects laws have. And frankly, the rest of us don’t have much idea, either.
I’m not sure how this one could be problematic; you just decline to consent to your browser being identified when you click into the site, or not decline if you want that feature for whatever service needs it.
It’s not saying it’s illegal to collect at all, it’s just illegal to collect without consent.
If that is successful, I would expect youtube to switch to simply checking if the ads were actually served to the user. That wouldn’t require checking for adblock on the users computer. Of course the adblocker would just download the content and not display it if they did that.
Either that or merging the ad into the video stream itself. This would make it un-skippable, but would also be unblockable without stream processing (there are commercial skip options for ffmpeg and similar encoders, so not completely impossible, but much more work and more likely to mark real content as a commercial as well).
Since they target ads demographically and ads change frequently, that would be a mess… The encoding, storage, and tracking would be a Big problem.
If they go this route, it would only make sense if they build a new video codec that allows for linearly splitting content at key frames so they can concatenate the ads with the video in a single file at runtime.
But then couldn’t ad detectors just start playback at the key frames?
Even if it works, it would still be a Big Deal since re-encoding all of YouTube would be Hard. I guess they could just use the codec for all newly added material. Playback might suck on older devices, too; idk if they use h264 (that has dedicated hardware decoders)?
It’s not that expensive. You can mix or overlay stuff over a video stream fairly cheaply. Sure, it will be a hit overall for their bottom line but they’ll do it if they have to.
They can also turn on DRM for all videos on the platform. Currently it’s only used for paid videos and it’s very hard to bypass.
I don’t think that inlining ads into the stream would be expensive, because of how adaptive streaming formats work. There are probably other reasons why they haven’t chosen this option yet.
This seems simple for one stream, but scale that up to how many unique streams that Youtube is servicing at any given second. 10k?
Google doesn’t own all of the hardware involved in this video serving process. They push videos to their local CDNs, which then push the videos to the end users. If we’re configuring streams on the fly with advertisements, we need to push the ads to the CDNs pushing out the content. They may already be collocated, but they may not. We need to factor in additional processing which costs time and money.
I can see this becoming an extremely ugly problem when you’re working with a decentralized service model like Youtube. Nothing is ever easy since they don’t own everything.
So what you would do is to generate the manifest files (HLS/DASH/what have you) on the fly to include the segments with ads. Since adaptive streaming is based on manifests, that stitch together segments of video files that together make up the underlying content in different bitrates, you can essentially just push in a few segments of advertising in-between the segments representing the underlying content. This isn’t particularly hard to do, and you’d get the full benefit of the CDN for the segments, so there’s really no issue.
or merging the ad into the video stream itself. This would make it un-skippable
That's not true. Besides the point that people can skip any video content manually anyway, I already use a Firefox addon called "SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip sponsorships", which is configurable and works for other sites as well. The skip points are community maintained, but with the help of AI it should be easy to detect ads automatically. The point is, there are already tools to help with skipping video encoded content.
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