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

Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

asmedigitalcollection.asme.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 535 posts

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#301

Post by DrewADesign »

fourseventy wrote: post #248
kennywinker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reas…

Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#302

Post by compass_copium »

api wrote: post #240
compass_copium wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a hobbyist IT enthusiast, not a professional computer guy, but from my point of view there's a big difference between a bunch of servers hosting something people want, like Netflix, and a warehouse full of GPUs running around the clock to make Lobster Jesus or whatever. It's also a proxy for people's feelings on AI--essentially the only way people have to fight back against the new technology that makes eternal g…

You really think Lobster Jesus is what most of this is doing? It's doing code, analytics, training, research, operating services. The silly slop stuff is a small rounding error of usage.

Ah, the job-killing stuff, right. Don't forget selecting Iranian girls' schools as targets for missile strikes, AI is doing that, too.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#303

Post by rpdillon »

Ydarbleoj wrote: post #282
mr_00ff00 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say this and then use AI for literally everything they do.

[flagged]

This is a copy-pasted comment from elsewhere in the thread, which I've already responded to. A bit much calling others "incredibly lazy".

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#304

Post by ben_w »

DeluluDon wrote: post #258
ben_w wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…

>Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, In what country do you not have an electric bill?

It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#305

Post by ben_w »

jplusequalt wrote: post #278
ben_w wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…

Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?

Training is part of why there's two orders of magnitude range in the estimates. However, I believe yes, they do include energy production impact.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#306

Post by kennywinker »

vmchale wrote: post #291
kennywinker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

> A data center costs my community No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level. > further enriches a few already rich people. Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantiti…

Listen, I am no meat advocate. I just see a very clear link between the resources required to make meat and the benefit to the person eating the meat. Where data centers cause local and global harm, while not benefitting the locale or the globe. Which is why people don’t like them.

And it’s not like non-meat is fine - the corn industry uses a blinding amount of water, as do almonds, etc.

We have a finite budget for water usage, and i’d allocate that to non-meat food > virtually anything else > meat > data centers > golf courses.

> No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers

I’m not entirely sure of the scale of pornhub’s operations, but i feel like one large ai data center uses more resources than all of pornhub’s data center usage around the globe. But maybe i’m wrong there, and the hub was just flying under the radar.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#307

Post by ares623 »

kennywinker wrote: post #146
WarmWash wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?

The datacenter means I don't have read/write YAML anymore. Checkmate. I would burn the world than ever deal with YAML again.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#308

Post by ben_w »

magicalist wrote: post #276
ben_w wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…

When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result. Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do…

Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it.

I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#309

Post by whimsicalism »

bryan0 wrote: post #237
Nicook wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

This is technically explicitly a rule violation. Yes, yes we've been hearing it for years but it is much more true in the past 2-3 years than anytime in the past imo.

Frankly, it's a shame that the only high quality discussion I can find is on gross platforms like 'the everything app' or more obscure forums.

Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

#310

Post by ipdashc »

whimsicalism wrote: post #288
ipdashc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK. Like others…

i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn.... This is how econo…

> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.

Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before?

I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever.

On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.

Post reply on HN