181–190 of 194 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
cement is responsible for 8% I heard
That's for all cement in the entire world , not one data center. This math is not hard. Plastic is roughly 5% of our emissions but you would not point at one straw and say it is worth 5% of all emissions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the factory exists to serve 10,000 houses? To be clear, I think you’ve got the right direction – free stuff for humans up to a point and then market rate for everyone/everything after that. I just think it’s silly to pretend that companies are polluting for shits and giggles. They’re polluting for us. I think that pricing pollution is the right way to go, I just know that the outcome isn’t going to be some ma…
They’re not polluting for us they are polluting to make money for shareholders. People buying stuff is just a necessary step (sometimes) to make that happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re not polluting for us they are polluting to make money for shareholders. People buying stuff is just a necessary step (sometimes) to make that happen.
A nonprofit, co-op, or government entity, serving the same customer the same product would produce an identical amount of pollution as the for-profit factory.
> There’s an acute water shortage in The Netherlands right now. When I open BlueSky, everyone is talking about water being increasingly wasted on cooling data centres. And for what? To generate more AI shit. Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nonprofit, co-op, or government entity, serving the same customer the same product would produce an identical amount of pollution as the for-profit factory.
Not true. The non profit might add a screen to catch pollution before it hits the waterway.
The decision by either would face the same trade off - an increase in costs that their customers/patrons may not care about or be willing to pay for.
The answer for both is the same - price externalities so that the decision to pollute less is economic rather than moral.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is too dismissive of the impact. Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down. The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude. To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers…
But delaying the opening probably means that the decommissioning date is also pushed back. The total life span is probably unchanged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and doesn't change anything It does change people that don't know about your cause against it, quite reliably as long as activism results go. For climate change, everybody probably heard about it, so yeah.
"there's no such thing as bad publicity" once again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's for all cement in the entire world , not one data center. This math is not hard. Plastic is roughly 5% of our emissions but you would not point at one straw and say it is worth 5% of all emissions.
You just pointed at all data centers though.
The buried ledes here are firstly that a concrete building is a one-time thing, where once it's built it is built and that's that. (The 8% of pollution is a yearly recurring thing from the production of concrete, but an individual concrete building is done polluting once construction is finished.) On the other hand, an AI data center contributes its pollution every year continuously forever.
Secondly, the matter of scale. Concrete took billions of buildings to get to its share of the pollution done. You will be hard pressed to find anything in the world period that can be produced at that scale without causing significant pollution. It's almost miraculous that it's only at 8% globally, especially when compared to AI data centers, of which there are only 12,000. You could build a dozen buildings out of concrete every day for the next 40 years and on a global scale you would not move the needle on how much pollution concrete is responsible for. Do the same with data centers and while the math is a bit harder you will wind up being responsible for ~30% of the pollution on Earth.
The environmental impact discussion is always incomplete because it only looks at AI in isolation. LLMs do exactly nothing by themselves, they are always used to facilitate some human endeavor, so we need to take a holistic view of the system. I had previously done some napkin math ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659 ) which found LLMs + humans are way more efficient than humans alone, but that analysis i…
> Right off the bat water usage is negligible. But at a minimum if LLM usage saves a human 13% time at a task, we're at breakeven i.e. the LLM resource consumption is compensated by the savings in human consumption. Anything more than 13% and we actually start conserving resources on average! That ignores the fact that the then-unemployed human will not change it's resource consumption in any way, because a human cod…
And if those resources had an environmental impact, and if you were truly concerned about the environment, why would you want to choose the option that expends more of those resources?
Think of it this way: if you had a doubt you wanted to resolve, would you drive to the library and spend hours or days scanning through reference material... or would you do a Google search?
That is essentially what the "environmental impact" debate comes down to, but nobody is talking about it that way. We can talk all day about the impact of AI on jobs and society, but the impact on the environment is a red herring, and a destructive counter-productive one at that, as TFA shows.