Destroying a Community with a Gigantic "Clogged Vacuum Cleaner"

Post by dgacmu » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #40

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over time, improvements have been made in compute density, because more compute density means more money. Higher compute density means higher thermal density, which means more powerful cooling is needed. Server cooling solutions follow a management triple constraint: cheap, effective, quiet, pick up to 2. Because loudness does not incur additional costs (due to negative externalities), "quiet" is the point of the tri…

Blockchain has higher compute density. Nobody was bitching when the miners built out their datacenters.

Post by ElevenLathe » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 2:49 AM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #22

protocolture wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenters are fine, its gas turbines making the noise. Whats crazy tho is people repeating this as if its true of all datacenters. Whats even crazier is fringe australian politicians WHO LIVE NEAR DATA CENTERS importing this and claiming all datacenters in australia are noisy (because some terminally online seps were complaining about it) without so much as going down to their local and testing the hypothesis.

What I find interesting is that having lived in the southeast US for decades now, there is never any shortage of a story where someone buys a house near a race track. Not long after that, they complain that the race track is loud for several days in the week. Generally what follows is lots of posturing by local politicians and judges. Inevitably the race track shuts down within a year or so, usually because it isn't…

Post by protocolture » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:16 AM UTC

ElevenLathe wrote: post #43

sidewndr46 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is that having lived in the southeast US for decades now, there is never any shortage of a story where someone buys a house near a race track. Not long after that, they complain that the race track is loud for several days in the week. Generally what follows is lots of posturing by local politicians and judges. Inevitably the race track shuts down within a year or so, usually because it isn't…

A race track is a normal business trying to make money, so its operators rationally fold rather than almost certainly losing money even if they win in court. An AI (or crypto mining) datacenter is fundamentally a financial fraud (or most charitably, in Mr. Greenspan's immortal phrasing, a result of "irrational exuberance") that has taken physical form. Nothing about it is rational, and their operators are happy to wa…

Post by margalabargala » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:34 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #26

luk212 wrote: post #11

This feels less like a data center problem and more like a basic failure to price and regulate industrial externalities...are crypto mining or ai compute socially useful? Up for debate, but what isn't is that neither should make a surrounding neighborhood unlivable. Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound. Any facility like this should have to prove it can operate within a certain ac…

You really just need the noise ordinance to have more teeth... instead of just a perpetual fine, you need to be able to shut them down if they continue to exceed the noise threshold.

Post by margalabargala » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 3:38 AM UTC

guessmyname wrote: post #3

Make John Stewart, Chief Marketing Officer of Hyperscale Data, live in one of those houses for a month. See how he likes the sound.