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Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

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Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#91

Post by quickthrowman »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #49
DoctorOetker wrote: post #47

Please do hang your datacenters in space so as not to piss away your waste heat in our rivers, soils or atmosphere. Go to the bathroom upstairs, don't use our ecosystem as your latrines if you can direct it straight to the CMB.

I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%. Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

> Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.

Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#92

Post by rkuykendall-com »

gosub100 wrote: post #77
rkuykendall-com wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who recognize there is a problem and would support collective action to fix it, and there are those that don't. As long as you are in the first group, there's nothing else you can individually do to make a difference.

What if I was in the first group, but abandoned them after being lied to? Told how important it was for ME to take public transit and drive an EV, only for AI to march in and consume multiple nation's worth of energy. That's not "collective" , that's "rules for thee but not for me".

Well yeah, I agree, collective action would be actually collective. I'm not gonna try to prescribe something like taxes or infrastructure changes, but stuff like that.

You're just describing individual action, which like you said, isn't gonna do anything.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#94

Post by DoctorOetker »

quickthrowman wrote: post #91
DoctorOetker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%. Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

> Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment. One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

>One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.

This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy.

> Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#95

Post by DoctorOetker »

delaminator wrote: post #67
DoctorOetker wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare soda cans with computational results, we can't teleport soda cans up and down cheaply, but we can cheaply beam data up and down.

Yes I can, on utilitarian grounds. We do it all the time, sending data centers to space is not zero cost externality.

Please continue:

1. humans use soda cans, that people could do without for 100k years

2. ???

3. Don't put datacenters into space?

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#96

Post by DoctorOetker »

Rexxar wrote: post #69
DoctorOetker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%. Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

Maybe because your tone is needlessly aggressive and lot's of people don't want HN turns into Reddit/Twitter. There is enough people raging on everything on all social networks maybe we are here hopping to have more civilised discussions.

Or maybe because people don't know basic physics principles, and dislike "reality based communities" from forming in their midst?

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#97

Post by quickthrowman »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #94
quickthrowman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment. One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

>One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error. This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle…

Welp, turns out I should verify information better. I thought 6kW seemed high when a 1 square meter solar panel that is ~25% efficient can generate 250W of electricity. My apologies.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#98

Post by rsync »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #49
DoctorOetker wrote: post #47

Please do hang your datacenters in space so as not to piss away your waste heat in our rivers, soils or atmosphere. Go to the bathroom upstairs, don't use our ecosystem as your latrines if you can direct it straight to the CMB.

I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%. Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

Let me explain to you that I downvoted this comment because you complained about your downvotes.

Please don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#99

Post by bigbadfeline »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #76
bigbadfeline wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one way to resolve this - datacenters to build their own energy generation, not connected to the grid, just local. Otherwise, they'll muddy the water to no end until they manage to saddle the rest of us with their energy costs.

The muddied water is just supply and demand. If a datacenter increases demand for electricians, natural gas, solar panels, copper, whatever else, then the price will have to go up. The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply. The demand is still there, connected to the grid or not. The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways (and less resil…

> The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.

That's not the question, we aren't discussing trivialities like what change of supply is necessary for satisfying increased demand, that's like discussing "is water wet" or "do you need more or less water to satisfy your thirst for water".

The real question is Who is going to pay for building the additional supply?

Residential and other prior customers have already paid the capex for the existing supply and now you want them to pay the capex for enormous amounts of new capacity which the AI corps convert exclusively into their own revenue.

The public is already paying through the nose for new semiconductor capacity because the same scam-geniuses cornered the RAM, GPU and related chips market and they are mercilessly scalping it too, again at the expense of the public.

> The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways

In a perfect world it can, in this world it makes things more unstable and far more unfair when large new consumers use it for their exclusive revenue extraction while pretending that the new capacity is somehow benefiting everybody instead of just them.

> The muddied water is just supply and demand.

Indeed, "just supply and demand" is the mud in the eyes.

Re: Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

#100

Post by keeda »

keybored wrote: post #64
keeda wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, there are many interplaying dynamics here that are impossible to unravel. This is why I called it "napkin math", because figuring out the full ramifications of this change is a pretty large economic problem that nobody has figured out! For instance, I think operating at this level of productivity is unsustainable ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038 ). As discussed in detail by the recent "AI…

What I gather from your analysis and gleeful exclamation marks is that I should start rioting now rather than wait.

Hah, interesting, I intended my exclamation marks come across as surprise or emphasis rather than glee!

If it helps better interpret my posts, these days my frame of mind is "We're living in very interesting times" in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...

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