11–20 of 137 posts
Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean say an hour’s drive from civilization, not the Arctic Circle.
> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever. 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.' 'Minor source.' I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those…
From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]
Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.
Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
[0]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/analyzing-air-pollution-health...
[1]: https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant...
[2]: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/identifying-sources...
There isn’t much the federal government can do here. Planning permission is very local in the US. If local officials don’t want a data center it isn’t happening. In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
This degrowth anti-technology mindset just does not make sense to me, and I think it's mostly astroturfed from TikTok.
At least were not at this point yet:
"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere. Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean sa…
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere. Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean sa…
> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever. 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.' 'Minor source.' I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those…
> The latest proposal applies to permits for a "minor source" of air pollution ... [the Vantage data center was estimated to contribute] between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages, the largest estimate for any single facility ever. 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.' 'Minor source.' I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those…
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere. Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean sa…
What I don’t understand is that the vast majority of LLM workloads are pretty damn latency-insensitive. Why can’t they build these data centers where there’s little to no opposition? Sure someone will need to maintain the data centers, but with trillions in investment lined up, surely they can just pay people enough so they’re okay with living in the middle of nowhere. Edit: When I say the middle of nowhere I mean sa…