One almost milk latte uses more water than tens of thousands of Chat GPT requests, by the way.
That's not an exaggeration.
And plenty of anti-datacenter folks are sipping that every day.
Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
401–410 of 535 posts
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#402I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter ma…
>I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. It's both. As with VERY MANY things, the people making the noise about it have extremist views and only a vague idea of what they're talking about. You can't have a discussion about what the concerns are and how they're addressed with extremists. The legit concerns are drowned by people talking nonsense, exaggerating, or taking the concern to an u…
Reminds me of how Shake Shack got rid of all of their peanut butter milkshakes years ago because one single person complained that their child with a peanut allergy couldn't have them.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize. We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business
In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful.
We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone.
I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else might happen?
[flagged]
Unlikely. I'm not sure where HN is hosted, but I think it's a bare metal server in a colo, not a data center.
The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad", and then stretching the position to "data centers bad". I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud. Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there. We need the solar/wind equivalent for hosting. The problem is data centers have efficiencies at scale that we can't achieve with more distributed solutions, but I'm not a specialist in that particular analysis.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#405If only we had the same amount of concern about oil refineries and gas stations. https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in... https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...
Fossils use, production and trade needs to be rapidly ramped down to mitigate the climate catastrophe and resulting megadeaths on all fronts.
democracies will not vote for this. even in California, politicians run on policies like $500 gas rebates for anyone owning a gas powered vehicle
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one. It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answ…
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion…
> we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates
Jesus.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize. We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful. We are also assuming that economic value means s…
I think that low externality things people are willing to pay for should be presumptively allowed unless there is strong reason otherwise. We are much too involved in the 'legislating individual activities' and not nearly enough in the 'tax wealth and redistribute' side of things.
> We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
Post-2020, the internet is real life. Internet native thought has proven to be a powerful force in the physical world. I remember laughing at the absurdity of 4chan posters in high school. I will not make the mistake of taking internet ideology lightly again.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#408The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
Because "the water thing" is make or break for for the southwest, which includes LA, and LA's water system includes NorCal consequences, and California water issues include all-country impacts due to the farming there. If you haven't been paying attention to the "water thing," that doesn't mean it's not serious af.
California and Arizona use literally orders of magnitude more water for alfalfa farming than they do for data centers.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#409Earlier 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?
AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.
My building is leaky. The association won't fix it. How about this compromise, you set yours to 74 to compensate for my 68. Fair enough, or will you say I should move?
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please, elaborate on how hyperscale ai datacenters are going to help fill my belly.
maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing. maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures. AI helps with both of those things.
> maybe i'm working on software for supply chain routing.
We have supply chain routing software already. Humans wrote it, humans can improve it. Getting ai in the loop won’t change the realities of the supply chain, except maybe they’ll hire less programmers.
> maybe i'm making a commodity trading bot that more accurately prices wheat futures
How does that benefit me? Further financializing food production seems like a bad thing.
Not to mention all of what you’ve described could be run on a $1000 consumer GPU in a PC somewhere.