The 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?
When you have no arguments on your side you have to make them up.
Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
231–240 of 535 posts
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#232Earlier 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…
Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.
> 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 have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.
I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#233If 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…
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Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true. It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3. I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above…
According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of p…
> According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption
This would be a misquote, but you didn't use quotes. The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption.
> The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.
I could see why you would say that from this:
> “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges,
But that seems to be a mixture of some language difficulty and some intentional hyperbole.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#235I 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…
It's like literally any other change to society:
You either are able to convince people of its utility, or you are run out of town.
At the very least, a lot of these projects are done via less-than-open deals with municipalities and often receive tax incentives or structurings that are, honestly, not appropriate for multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporations to receive.
It very much feels like a far away elite exploiting an area in a way designed to prevent the locals from having a say about what they should receive in the bargain.
Throw in the fact that many people have concerns about the impact of AI on their employment prospects in the face of decades of flat wages and offshoring, and it's really no wonder people absolutely hate these damned things.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.
Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price?
Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#237If 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…
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Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#238If 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…
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 answer, it's good AI slop.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#239I 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…
There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.
Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.
Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#240I 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'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.