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I agree with you that despite all his qualifiers, disclaimers, and tone, FdB is hopeful that this will happen. It's also a lucid piece, even if he should have reached out for some insights from people with expertise in data center security to explain why his scenario is implausible.
Is it written in a manic euphoria? Maybe, and his history adds reason to think it might be. But I don't think that's a reason to disregard it. Madness might have a place in civilization (pace Foucault), and the modern tendency to pathologize madness is as much a way to defend irrational aspects of a broken world as it is to "cure the patient." Maybe we need the insane to say things the rest of us are too scared to point out, being too well-incorporated into modern society and economy to risk our comfortable place. FdB was rightly cancelled, but that gives him a bit of a superpower: having been cancelled, he is now uncancellable.
As far as his personal health, all we can do is hope either that he's fine or has a good support structure. I hope he has people who are invested in his well-being and are willing to act on it if he starts to decline.
Tech is very redundant. That is why it works so well . Amazon data centers are all over the world so if one fails, websites still work.
You could nuke Council Bluffs and Google would shrug. The idea that someone could shutdown Bard by shoving down a bunch of server racks is delusional; Google's initial reaction to a nuke would be crafting the right PR release and figuring out how to get a big tax write-off for it. FdB is more invested in heroic myths than coming up with an objective, materialist understanding of tech power.
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He’s a doctrinaire Marxist, and it’s hard not to notice that Marxist predictions have not, in fact, happened. Of course he’s going to push the predictions out as ‘well Marxist principles will happen when X, no Y, no Z’. This is predictable if stupid. When you add in that Freddy is mentally ill, you get lengthy screeds like that.
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Absolutely not, his analysis is cogent and perceptive. I'm not approaching this from the perspective of "should we dismiss this out of hand as the ramblings of a disturbed man?", but rather "regardless of the virtues of this piece, is its publication cause for concern about deBoer's well-being?" Maybe it's not my place to ask or wonder. Presumably if he really was on the verge of a manic breakdown, his partner would have clocked some much more obvious red flags long before he pressed publish on this post.
People who disagree with someone on the Internet have a hefty incentive for motivated reasoning in thinking the person to be disturbed.
Also, you're probably not particularly concerned over his well-being in general. If he posted that he had a physical illness you probably wouldn't even send him a get well card.
I explicitly stated that, in spite of finding this article concerning, there was much in it that I agreed with. deBoer has posted dozens of articles whose theses I've disagreed with, often explicitly telling him so in the comments section - this is the first to make me concerned that he might be having a bipolar relapse.
Correct. The obvious difference being that a person going into a manic episode or a psychotic break may pose a risk to themselves or those around them, and may not even realise that they're ill.
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Descriptively, if there were a prediction market for "will FdB be institutionalized by the end of December 2024," I think this would marginally up the price.
But really there's nothing to be done. Neither of us knows him or has even met him (presumably), and the idea that his audience should be invested in his well-being is just another manifestation of the detestable parasocialism infesting the world. I know in my own life there's probably at least a couple people teetering on the brink, and I might have actual ability to help them in some small amount: speculating on FdB's mental state should be understood as entertainment, not as something helpful (which isn't to say it's bad to speculate, just that it's not a form of constructive engagement with the world).
I hope so, but I suspect that's overly optimistic.
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