Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

wpr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 383 posts

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#281

Post by basket_horse »

irishcoffee wrote: post #224
basket_horse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragil…

Propaganda? Did people kill themselves at the direction of an LLM or not? That's like saying ICE outrage is propaganda, and is, at best, insulting to the memory of those lost. Brushing this point off seems more like propaganda than acknowledging it does. LLMs are neat tools. They can do some neat things. Dynamite is also pretty cool, and it can do some neat things. How many more people need to get "blown up" by LLMs…

Comparing chatGPT to ICE and dynamite is reaching… my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable. What about the people who were planning on committing suicide and were talked out of it by LLMs? Are we counting those anywhere? If it’s truly causing a suicide crisis I would imagine the rate of suicide would be spiking. Is that the case?

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#282

Post by tzs »

rkomorn wrote: post #221
bluedino wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3 acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about 1-3/4 acres

Not sure if serious because you're converting from football fields to acres, but the acre is another unit that non-Americans generally don't use.

Acres are still widely used in the UK and Ireland for measuring rural and agricultural land. The legal documents for the land will use hectares, but lots of people and documents will use acres outside of legal documents.

India has has a substantial number of acre users.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#283

Post by MattSteelblade »

fouc wrote: post #112
MattSteelblade wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.

there's no repair involved. imagine a series of throwaway satellites on an orbit that essentially leaves them close enough together for effective mesh networking, and probably on an orbit that slowly takes them away from earth. the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal. and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they av…

It sounds like you're describing Google's proposal, which I believe is at least feasible (though likely uneconomic) unlike, say, Starcloud's. I don't think you are correct about the orbit, though; Google's proposal lists the satellites at 650 km, which would give them approximately 20 years in orbit without boosts. They list estimated life at 5 years given radiation concerns, so they almost certainly would purposely deorbit them earlier.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#284

Post by [deleted] »

rkomorn wrote: post #221
bluedino wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non-Americans, an American Football field is about 1-1/3 acres, a little smaller than a football/soccer field at about 1-3/4 acres

Not sure if serious because you're converting from football fields to acres, but the acre is another unit that non-Americans generally don't use.

[deleted]

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#285

Post by e40 »

slfnflctd wrote: post #134
e40 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that data centers have to be built near homes (or anywhere people live or work) is absurd. The US is huge and vast amounts of open spaces.

The people who work in the datacenters don't want a long commute. Also, in a remote area, the third parties the owners require for continual maintenance will be fewer, take longer to respond, likely cost more, and may be less qualified than those you can find in a more populated area.

What? A 5 minute drive is miles, and that's plenty far enough. They are currently being built within 100 meters of homes. It's absolutely insane.

EDIT: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=Qa9ot70MylFp6qkE

Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#286

Post by phil21 »

zug_zug wrote: post #125
emsign wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers raise electricity bills and use too much ground water. Due to the AI bubble more data centers need to be built in areas that cannot support these facilities, deregulation, investor and political pressure ensures this, i.e. corruption. The last remaining spots are near residential areas. So people are pissed because of: * noise pollution, infrasound from HVAC travelling long distances making people sick *…

Yeah, if you're going to spend 100 million building a datacenter you should be required to add equivalent grid production in the area. It has drastically increased our electricity prices where I live.

Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.

Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.

So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.

The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.

If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#287

Post by 5upplied_demand »

jeffbee wrote: post #200
state_less wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they do…

> the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

The subtitle of the article tells us this is happening.

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

But it is a reactive measure. It has taken years for the impacts of these data centers to trickle down enough for citizens to understand what they are losing in the deal. Partially because so many of the deals were done under cover of NDAs. If anything, this gives NIMBYs more assurance that they are right to be skeptical of any development. The way these companies act will only increase NIMBYism.

> Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

Trusting large corporations to provide a full and accurate analysis of downside risks is also damaging.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#288

Post by bargove »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #273
emsign wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If they're shills (= people being paid to behave a certain way), then delusional doesn't come into it. However, such commentary on downvotes isn't productive. From the news guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, ema…

I would offer that the downvotes themselves are not productive...

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#289

Post by bargove »

coredog64 wrote: post #187
gosub100 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Less than agriculture " isn't the limit on what is too much. not sure how you decided that. Western states in particular struggle with their water supply and should not be wasting it on cooling transistors for people who are too lazy to think.

Wisconsin (the state FTA) is bounded by two of the Great Lakes and doesn't generally have water problems.

Ummm, I live in Wisconsin (since 1996), and that isn't how that works at ALL.

Re: Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

#290

Post by kjkjadksj »

upboundspiral wrote: post #269
dguest wrote: post #39

I'd like to hear the argument for why this is needed. I can imagine a number of reasons, but this is all I found in the article: > If I’m a company considering making strategic investments... I don’t want my competition to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, what pace I’m doing it at... You want to make sure everything is buttoned up and bow tied before that type of information is put into the public realm. I'm hav…

What I've come to realize is that the rust belt states have been in huge trouble for decades. They were living in "benevolent feudalism" when GM, Ford, etc all had factories there. The problem is that these companies effectively owned the cities in which they operated. And then they left. Since the Reagan years we decided to export everything that built our economy so the landlords in power could have even more profi…

What is surprising is that to me where you see datacenter build out hand over fist isn’t really in the midwest where one might assume due to low land costs. Surprisingly, the heart of the datacenter buildout seems to be northern virginia. Not exactly a cheap land sort of former one horse town.
Post reply on HN