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

What's slowing down the AI buildout

worksinprogress.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 237 posts

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#161

Post by ecshafer »

Shitty-kitty wrote: post #158
ecshafer wrote: post #95

The politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.

Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.

Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.

Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.

Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#162

Post by Shitty-kitty »

ecshafer wrote: post #161
Shitty-kitty wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.

Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built. Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence. Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.

The problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities. The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity. The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource. The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#163

Post by dghlsakjg »

michaelmrose wrote: post #116
dghlsakjg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home? We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination. We don…

How many is enough is a complicated thing though. You don't need there to be as many pumps as cars because there is enough everywhere that you know with certainty that you can find one any given time within 15 minutes and be refueled in 5. If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty. If you have some small numbe…

We could just look at countries like Norway where the internal combustion car is extinct and see how they do it. If you are going to nitpick that Norway has a lot of houses and is rich enough to install chargers in every apartment parking spot, then we can look at Hong Kong, or China, or Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or any of the countries that have mass EV adoption and a variety of conditions including incredible density.

These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.

> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?

Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car that has a power line (its actually pretty hard to find a place where this isn't true). The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.

> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.

Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".

> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?

It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#164

Post by dghlsakjg »

Macha wrote: post #151
dghlsakjg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home? We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination. We don…

I don’t have a garage, as is common in my country. Charging my car off a regular socket would thus require leaving a ground floor window open all night (undesirable from both a security and wildlife intrusion perspective) or installing a socket outdoors (at which point why not just get a charger?)

Sounds like my suggestion to use a high speed public charger is perfect for you since that's a solution that scales and makes it so people that don't have a garage can use EVs and keep their windows closed at night.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#165

Post by dghlsakjg »

lumost wrote: post #120
dghlsakjg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home? We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination. We don…

This math is bad and shouldn't be used as a justification. It presumes that every charger is always available, that variable battery conditions and traffic conditions make reaching that charger every time, and that drivers have time to drive to the fast charger and spend 30 minutes there every time their car has low battery. I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an i…

Sounds like lack of a good network of fast chargers is a real issue for you. I can understand why you're so frustrated.

If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.

In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger. My math works fine here. It works fine in China, and Nepal too. Is Boston still not electrified? Because lack of a grid would be constraint, but otherwise its a very easy problem to solve.

I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#166

Post by dghlsakjg »

nradov wrote: post #128
dghlsakjg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home? We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination. We don…

I live in the SF Bay Area and the local shopping centers closest to me have zero EV chargers. California is supposedly going to mandate that all new vehicles be electric in 2035 but that's obviously a ridiculous fantasy; the deadline will be pushed back or eliminated.

Which is why I'm advocating for them to get built.

I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.

Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#167

Post by michaelmrose »

nradov wrote: post #135
asdff wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It falls into the bin of "tragedies of the commons we could fix with current technology but fail to sufficiently fund and support in earnest" Really, when is the last time we overhauled our built environment and actually followed through with a comprehensive plan in the west? We couldn't even finish the interstate highway system in a time when we had seemingly great alignment towards it along with far cheaper costs.…

Public housing failed not because of insufficient funding or support but because a small fraction of residents were sociopaths and criminals. The authorities refused to take decisive action to quickly evict the troublemakers and so they wrecked the projects for everyone. Section 8 vouchers have been far more effective by enabling low-income people to rent housing from private landlords at market rates. There are some…

Section 8 in my state is a lottery to get on the list for housing which may or may not happen in a multi year time frame. It's mostly unavailable for the people that need it while some folks who have the ability to work live off it after they went through the expected multi year wait.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#168

Post by TwoNineFive »

h4kunamata wrote: post #46

1. People fighting back due to never ending effects caused by these massive data centers 2. Companies realising that they are burning half million to get nowhere 3. Circular investment scaring investors 4. And more recently, companies hiring people back coz the AI aimed to replace humans, created more problems than solved them 5. Memory cartel falling apart, again, they did the same thing during 2000s 6. China is mak…

> AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart

Premise perverted, FUD averted, false-victimhood denied.

A datacenter did not murder your family.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#169

Post by michaelmrose »

asdff wrote: post #147
nradov wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public housing failed not because of insufficient funding or support but because a small fraction of residents were sociopaths and criminals. The authorities refused to take decisive action to quickly evict the troublemakers and so they wrecked the projects for everyone. Section 8 vouchers have been far more effective by enabling low-income people to rent housing from private landlords at market rates. There are some…

That is probably an issue with low income housing overall. I don't think slumlord landlords are somehow immune to renting to gang members. When I talk about spotty coverage I mean, verizon says I have an LTE connection, and yet I get served with dialup tier experience. Not always, but often. This has been the case for the probably 15 years I've had a mobile data plan. I experience this nowhere near anywhere remote, i…

Neither public nor private parties are immune to renting from problematic people. There are a few important factors in determining trajectory from normalcy to abnormal

- Friction to evict for cause.

People are less willing to engage in action against tenants when it is difficult or expensive to evict. This is often less about well meaning protections for tenants and surprisingly more about reasonable process in county. If it takes 6 months to get on the docket to get the process started this is going to be more important than what you have to do when you get there.

- Financial cost and immediacy of impact.

Most places lose tenants at end of term and can find at least some new suckers. Turning your place into a shithole may take years to fully show its impact and in a tight housing market it may still be muffled by the sheer number of poor bastards who need somewhere to sleep.

- Incentive structure and distance from decision makers.

If throwing out the bums requires work pain and risk only from the peons who manage the place for the owners and failure to do so only hurts residents and owners then one may find that these enforcement actions never happen. A bureaucracy further increases distance between actors and decision makers.

If you consider these factors you might rightly conclude that a government project is maximally situated to fail at removing bad actors. Friction to evict those in need is going to be higher than almost anywhere else, front line workers are there for long term career trajectory, have little real power nor incentive and nobody but the residents really feels the pain. If you are running a house of last resort your vacancy rate is going to be low even if its a bad place to live.

None of this makes it impossible to run projects correctly it represents increased risk not destiny.

Re: What's slowing down the AI buildout

#170

Post by ericd »

vitally3643 wrote: post #91
ericd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how that generates anywhere near enough power, think about the potential energy of a bucket of water going up and down that amount over the course of a day.

Sure, but then multiply that by several million buckets. Tidal flows can represent a lot of water volume, way more than you'd expect

Seems way more material/capex intensive than solar/wind? Also, the sea is generally a brutal maintenance nightmare.
Post reply on HN