Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 152 posts

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#81

Post by thegrim33 »

naturalmovement wrote: post #76
Hamuko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did our demand for social media apps suddenly blow up? Because our DC demand seems to be blowing up.

I'm curious how the HN zeitgeist hates datacenters so ferociously yet every third article posted to the front page is 800 comments beating off to a new Claude feature. It's mind-boggling.

Half the traffic on this site are real, intelligent humans (among whom opinion is split different ways on the AI topic), a quarter of the traffic is propagandists trying to destroy western tech/infrastructure/society (notice how China apparently doesn't have to stop AI development or datacenter development, only the West does), and the remaining quarter is real humans who have been utterly consumed by the previously mentioned propagandists and are parroting the same messaging.

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#82

Post by dheera »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #79
dheera wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, if democracy works, then there is no point in protesting, as you would just vote (or campaign and run for office) instead. Most large scale protests are in fact because democracy failed to give the people a voice, and decisions were made without the input of the people.

If democracy does not work, the consequences for that are broader than considering the pros/cons of data centers.

And those consequences are happening

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#83

Post by nfw2 »

sanguinesphinx wrote: post #66
energy123 wrote: post #58

The DCs are going up across middle income countries: industrial zones in South East Asia, India and Morocco, and also UAE/Saudi. Anger towards DCs are pertinent from a politics-in-rich-country angle, but it has no relevance on the overall trajectory of where we are heading. If DCs get banned in the US, there are still many middle income countries who want them in their special industrial zones, due to the FDI and emp…

Always with the threats. "You better roll over and take it, because those other countries are" How about the middle ground of ok, you can build the datacenter, but it's owned by the locality. They can lease it back to the builder for the privilege of being able to operate on their ground. And the lease is steep. No more second homes on the cape, or private italian schools for the kids.

A random people on hn, presumably not a data center manager, is not "making a threat" by talking about potential second order effects of data center policy.

No despicable data center apologist has ever suggested that communities shouldn't negotiate the best deal they can get to compensate for the incurred costs and externalities.

Why do you feel justified defining what terms a community can agree to when considering hosting a data center? Do you not believe the democratic right for them to self-govern.

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#84

Post by nfw2 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #81
naturalmovement wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how the HN zeitgeist hates datacenters so ferociously yet every third article posted to the front page is 800 comments beating off to a new Claude feature. It's mind-boggling.

Half the traffic on this site are real, intelligent humans (among whom opinion is split different ways on the AI topic), a quarter of the traffic is propagandists trying to destroy western tech/infrastructure/society (notice how China apparently doesn't have to stop AI development or datacenter development, only the West does), and the remaining quarter is real humans who have been utterly consumed by the previously…

This violates Occam's razor despite it being sort of an obvious thing I would do if I was ccp

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#85

Post by sofixa »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #54
sofixa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the US government openly bragging about using AI for targeting in the Iran war, while also trying to pretend it didn't strike a school and kill a few hundred schoolchildren. (No we don't know if it was AI that made the mistake, and it's not like we're likely to get a proper investigation into it)

The school used to be a military base office. Acting on stale data is common for both humans and ML models.

And a wall between the two was built a decade ago. Considering it was hit on day one, obviously it was considered an important target, which makes it inexcusable that nobody checked it in a decade.

https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/4314de...

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#86

Post by piva00 »

nfw2 wrote: post #78
piva00 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not because of long-term employment, even very large DCs only employ about a hundred staff on-site.

A hundred is a lot bigger than five

Still very few for deserving a tax break based on potential employment opportunities. A DC simply doesn't help the local economy, it's very often a net-negative: it's very resource-intensive while not generating much in terms of economical activity for where it sits at.

In a sense it's purely extractivist consuming land, water, and energy without benefits to the community.

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#87

Post by stevetron »

Simply change the pricing so that the datacenters pay a higher rate to subsidize everyone else.

The handwriting was on the wall with this issue since the O'Bama administration: he had been convinced that putting all health care records in one central repository i.e. server famrs, and then unleash AI-systems on all that data, would come up with a cure for cancer. And at that time, there was an electricity shortage problem.

Another server farm is the one that the NSA built in Utah where the local power grid has been unable to keep powered-up. That's the one purported to have the backdoor on everyone's internet traffic kept. But some people prefer I go away with my foil hat.

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#88

Post by LocalH »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #80
LocalH wrote: post #72

I believe framing this as people being against "data centers" is missing the target. Data centers have existed for decades, ever since business started using computers. What people really have an issue with is data centers designed for AI, using far more power than prior data centers. Honestly, I think we should just ban "AI" of all forms and get it over with. Rip the bandage off before the wound underneath turns int…

This latest round of projects are often located within or next to communities too, where most pre-AI projects were more out of the way, increasing immediately visible impact dramatically via noise and air and water pollution.

I've been flagging nearly every HN post that has anything to do with AI, even negative. The quicker we get "AI" out of our zeitgeist, the better. AI isn't even a solid term, the term "artificial intelligence" is almost 100 years old at this point, and the definition has changed so many times that it's a useless term.

ELIZA was "AI". But it didn't have the same level of societal damage. HAL 9000 was "AI". Games have "AI" for decades. But "AI" today has been coopted by corporations who seek to lock people into their AIaaS. Local LLMs exist, and I have a few models on my computer for fun. Those models still probably used more power than I would like to be generated. But I will never, ever, ever use cloud AI to even so much as ask a question. If there is a long-term future in AI, it's in local models

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#89

Post by KennyBlanken »

mikestew wrote: post #12
Recurecur wrote: post #6

We should all keep in mind that foreign interests, primarily China, are astroturfing to drive resentment in the USA against AI and datacenters. National governments are largely viewing AI as a strategic capability. That’s not to say there aren’t downsides, but they vary quite a bit depending on location and grid capacity. I actually expect there will be major progress made on the energy efficiency and performance of…

We should all keep in mind that foreign interests, primarily China, are astroturfing to drive resentment in the USA against AI and datacenters. AI companies are doing a fine job of driving the resentment all by themselves, they don't need China's help. Whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant, these companies are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the public's view of them. They seem to think that they don…

Oh, they're trying alright. Google has been spamming Twitch with ads of teens and 20-somethings talking about how Gemini helps them study or "research" their paper, and the casting call clearly was for urban progressive LGBTQ types

Re: US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials

#90

Post by KennyBlanken »

Zigurd wrote: post #22
khriss wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should all keep in mind that foreign interests, primarily China, are astroturfing to drive resentment in the USA against AI and datacenters There hasn't been any credible reporting on this so far. It's far more likely people are just mad that they have to pay for the AI boom both literally via increased electricity rates and via increased noise, water shortage and construction related pollution caused by the dat…

If it were true that data centers are building "American dynamism" and China wants to suppress that, surely they would be building data centers the way they build trains. They're not. And that should make you go hmmm.

The Chinese are using AI in a fundamentally different way from the west.
Post reply on HN