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

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

#461

Post by ipdashc »

ben_w wrote: post #308
magicalist wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I wonder why it had to be built near so many people

I can't read the link either, but at a glance, the first one wasn't. It's in clearly industrial land a long way from any houses, with its closest neighbors as far as I can tell being a steel mill, a few existing power plants, and a wastewater plant.

The second one is practically right in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods, and for that, yeah, I want to know as well. I'm guessing the land was cheap, industrial-zoned, and near a substation?

(Not to excuse what Musk is doing in either case - it's fucked and has wide ranging effects. But I think it's important to clarify the first because I've seen a repeated trend of people acting like a new DC is going to be built in the middle of a peaceful picket-fence neighborhood, and then you look it up, and it's actually being built on top of a former steel mill a mile away from the nearest house. It gets annoying.)

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

#462

Post by rpdillon »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #458
rpdillon wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad" Why is that childish? Bubble data-center economics is bad, we have the history to prove it, this isn't the first bubble. Do you have real arguments against it besides calling it "childish" which is itself childish? > I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our…

You're assuming a bubble. I get it.

But do you really think we have more datacenters now, or even an equal number, to what we'll have in the future?

It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales. I don't know where the conversation goes when folks just talk about how useless it is and how compute is bad.

Take two steps back: do you really think we're at peak compute? If not, shouldn't we focus on how to scale in a sustainable way? The rhetoric doesn't foster that inquiry. That's my issue here.

Every single critique has said "slow down to do it right". That's similar to the DEI fallback of "Do the work". It's not that the goal is wrong, it's that it takes no effort to demand something vague like that, because it requires no thought. What forwards the discussion when implementation matters is the specifics: what do we want folks to do differently. If gas turbines in data centers are causing noise pollution that affects quality-of-life (which is absolutely appears they do - it's really bad), that's not a call to ban the idea, but rather the implementation. I see that distinction too often being dismissed in these discussions.

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

#463

Post by rpdillon »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #459
rpdillon wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters. The Trump administration pulled a bunch of ocean sensors, whose data was aggregated in the cloud, in an attempt to save money. Except, those sensors were not only providing research data on changes in ocean currents, but helping fisheries make predictions about…

> I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters. These things were with us and worked better before datacenters even existed. Datacenters are a mere convenience which is now used to force monopolization of compute while subjecting society to extremely risky, but unnecessary dependencies and centralization.…

That's not the proposal, and is utter fantasy. I'm engaging a hypothetical here -- none of what's being discussed is even close to reality, in the sense that it won't be implemented. There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't.

What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy. Theoretically possible, practically impossible.

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

#464

Post by bigbadfeline »

rpdillon wrote: post #463
bigbadfeline wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters. These things were with us and worked better before datacenters even existed. Datacenters are a mere convenience which is now used to force monopolization of compute while subjecting society to extremely risky, but unnecessary dependencies and centralization.…

That's not the proposal, and is utter fantasy. I'm engaging a hypothetical here -- none of what's being discussed is even close to reality, in the sense that it won't be implemented. There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't. What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy. Theoretically possible, practically imp…

> What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy.

And strawmen, don't forget the strawmen... can you stop doing that for a second? You're just underlying your lack of arguments.

> There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't.

We moved from "don't resist or else" to "resistance is futile"... what else is new?

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

#465

Post by archagon »

thegrim33 wrote: post #212

If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like th…

Go outside and talk to your neighbors. This is not a problem technology will solve.

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

#466

Post by fulafel »

whimsicalism wrote: post #405
fulafel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Democracies in EU are doing a lot more.

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

#467

Post by archagon »

vmchale wrote: post #297
Ydarbleoj wrote: post #284

These comments are full of the "but you participate in society" fallacy. Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.

Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem. If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...

Individual consumption is but a blip compared to industrial resource utilization.

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

#468

Post by ben_w »

watwut wrote: post #431
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…

[flagged]

We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%.

Of the two, use of air con in the US is a bigger source than current data centres, and in the middle of the range of extimates for how many new data centres will actually get built over the next few years.

It would of course be much better if both AC and DC (in both senses) were powered by renewables, but y'all elected someone who thinks they're a woke Chinese scam or something, possibly because one got built near a golf course in one of his foreign properties, possibly as a favour to the people who gave him that new aircraft for his "library".

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

#469

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#470

Post by watwut »

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. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....

This ceased to be true lomg time ago. AI datacenters are not related to that chain.

For that matter, tech is not about satisfying a bunch of small customers either. Enshittification would not be a thing if it was.

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