The world would be a better place if anybody knocked on a door for non-exploitative reasons (without an appointment).

Back in my day this is how we’d tweet. Door-to-door, telling a lame joke about cornflakes.

I note that there are very few religious proselytizer killers/ings. Your door-to-door visitors are unlikely to be violent (but quite likely to be after your money and time).

Makes me think of this upcoming competition to find fossils that are not surrounded by the rocks that science expects.

I suspect a lot of people who believe (some subset of) the crazy nonsense are actually science inclined. But we (often/used to) teach science as about great people heroically defying the consensus and triggering a paradigm shift that changes the world. And that looks a lot more like vaccine denialism than pipetting samples for 50 hours. Some of the community spaces are clearly interested in thinking about the world, and there’s a self-isolating effect of asking someone

“Why is there a tree that’s fossilized across 5 different epochs of bedrock?”

and being told you’re a crank. Then layer on the grifters.

So yes; do remember to talk people through the facts before labeling them a conspiracy theorists, and focus on the shared amazement at how weird/complicated/nuanced the data is. Ask lots of questions!

Ah, that’s true. Though the majority of these are much closer to factory jobs (at least harder engineering degrees than CS) I think? Once it’s built you need security, a couple systems engineers, some folks to move circuitry and cables, and custodial staff. There are perhaps a handful of cs grads employed by a data center as I understand it. (Most employees are managing hardware; they lean towards electrical engineering?)

The hardware only needs software designed for it once in order to offer compute as a service, and that design can happen far away from the data center (and, the CEOs believe, possibly by an AI).

Everyone is trying to replace most support with AI. Why pay a person to be confused about your weird tech problem when the computer can do it for less?