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Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

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Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#281

Post by pesus »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #162
pesus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the issue is the "reassurance" is identical to propaganda and manipulation. It definitely doesn't help that the companies having to "reassure" people have aligned themselves with so many others that have been pushing propaganda to manipulate others for some time now. Nor does it help that many of the same companies that need to "reassure" people are also actively doing the opposite - see the billboards bragging…

Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information. If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty no…

Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.

> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.

Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#282

Post by whamlastxmas »

georgemcbay wrote: post #123
rcpt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most everybody isn't affected by data center build outs.

Some people have empathy for those who are, even if they are not. I don't live anywhere near SpaceX's methane monstrosity in Memphis, but I still think it shouldn't exist because of the negative impact it has on the people who live near it. And I still think Anthropic became fully complicit by renting it out.

What negative impact is that? For context there are only five houses within half a mile of xAI's data center, the building for which has been there for decades, and any homes in the area have been living by the existing giant natural gas power plant next door to the data center for 20+ years. It's really not introducing anything that hasn't been there forever

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#283

Post by Gormo »

IshKebab wrote: post #230
runtime_terror wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious peoples criteria to determine this or is it just "vibes"? Like I get it looks a lot like apps built with AI but weren't LLMs trained on real website and a metric ton of website templates? Is it possible they used a template or other UI library?

They're heuristics but yes there are some clear tells. For prose, Wikipedia has a great list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing For code, I haven't read as much slop so I'm not as sure but one big tell is an unusual number of basic & unnecessary comments. And if it's version controlled, hilariously long commit messages with multiple sections.

Almost everything on that list seems invalid, at least as a simple checklist criteria. All of the tropes involved are ubiquitous in ordinary semi-formal writing, which is why the LLMs are using them in the first place.

It's more reasonable to suggest that a mismatch in tone or register between the style of writing and the venue it's being published in could be an indicator of AI, and it's possible that people misidentifying these tropes as being AI indicators per se may themselves be suffering from a filter-bubble effect, e.g. someone who doesn't typically read long-form writing might only be encountering conventions of long-form writing in AI-generated content, and misattributing them to AI in itself.

That itself isn't such a great criteria on some sites where you have different userbases who interact with the site in different ways. For example, Reddit has a large "old guard" userbase that treats it like a traditional message board, with longer-form and more in-depth discussion, along with a lot of more recent users who treat it like Twitter, and expect everything to be short and informal. Users in the latter group misidentify posts by those in the former group as AI more and more frequently.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#284

Post by kennywinker »

nickpp wrote: post #261
kennywinker wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can eat animals off a feedlot. I can’t eat anything that comes out of an ai data center. Why are you ok with spending $100 on groceries but not $100 on poison?

Software running modern farming runs in datacenters. For example, AI checking images from drones monitoring health of crops, then directing drones with treatment. Software ate the world, now the world eats software.

Nah. Not buying it. Nobody needs ai checking or drone-based pesticide dispersal. Sure maybe those tech are used here and there, but not widespread enough to say that I am eating stuff that only exists because of datacenters that haven’t been built yet. In top of that you can run all the image processing you need on a $500 consumer GPU, and afaik crop dusting drones are human operated for the most part

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#285

Post by Gormo »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #53
luxuryballs wrote: post #47

I don’t get the issue with the data centers, maybe instead of looking at just the data centers they should look at all the rest of the land in the US along with it and see how truly small these things are.

Nobody is complaining about the acreage used. The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community. If they were just purchasing 100 acre lots of land and letting it sit vacant I don't think anyone would really care for the most part.

> The objection is power and water consumption and any other externalities imposed on the local community.

That seems a bit bizarre, since people opening new facilities are usually responsible for paying for their inputs with their own funds -- if merely increasing demand for power or water is itself generating externalities, that implies that there's a much more fundamental economic problem that needs to be resolved.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#286

Post by scarab92 »

andyreagan wrote: post #275

I'm not sure why but my reaction to this is pretty negative. This page must be hosted from a data center as well...they could add a star to the map for their own hosting? How much electricity does their site use, etc? I've seen counters like this before, I think, about the electricity a site uses based on the weight of the page, etc.

I don’t care about the hypocrisy as much as the entire anti-datacenter Luddite movement being based on anti-intellectualism to begin with.

Datacenters provide very high utility with very low per capita externalities. There’s really no reason to care this much about them.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#287

Post by Gormo »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #80
dyauspitr wrote: post #56

Opposition data center is stupid. We need as many data centers as possible. If you actually want to make a difference how about you mandate that they all come with their own solar and battery power packs. When the hell did the left become so regressive?

No one is stopping them from building out their own renewables and if they were doing that while also _fully_ accounting for water usage and any other externalities I don't think there would be much (if any) opposition to them. But that's really expensive so they (by and large) aren't doing that so there's opposition. Seems normal and expected to me.

If water usage is an externality, there's some other and more fundamental problem going on, since under normal circumstances, users of infrastructure are expected to pay for what they are consuming. Opposing data centers themselves, rather than whatever is going on that's artificially turning them into uncompensated externalities, makes little sense.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#288

Post by runtime_terror »

hunterpayne wrote: post #182
runtime_terror wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't the parent post implying objections to datacenters is just "populist brainrot"?

The stated reasons are "populist brainrot". They aren't scientific or based on reality at all. What has happened is the AI folks have made themselves very very disliked. Saying you are going to take everyone's jobs will do that. So whatever they try to do, people will oppose it. It doesn't matter if the reasons are based in reality or not.

Sure, lots of people parrot the water wasting and it's often not true, but it came out of truth.

There are communities that are on water restrictions where datacenters have no such restrictions (and pay less).

It's also true after some datacenters opened the local aquifers were polluted.

Then there are legit concerns about noise, air quality from LNG generators, etc

Plenty of very legitimate reasons to dislike them, and each community likely has a different set of concerns.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#289

Post by runtime_terror »

aschla wrote: post #166
runtime_terror wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't the parent post implying objections to datacenters is just "populist brainrot"?

The average person's inattention to nuance could be labeled as "populist brainrot" in this case, and the cases of poor zoning could be used as examples of the issues with datacenters that the average person does not evaluate with the proper attention to nuance.

Sure, the water use is often a simplified argument against these data centers, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons but they are in fact more nuances and context dependent based on the specific location.

Re: Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

#290

Post by Gormo »

davkan wrote: post #276
Gormo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People objecting to buildings existing on account of the possibility that other people might do things they don't like inside them are in the same category as horse paste connoisseurs, in my opinion.

That’s a a ludicrous comparison. Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories? Regardless that’s not even why people are rejecting them. People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise. And with almost zero upside for the community. The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charl…

> Not liking what people do in a building is the same as believing in baseless conspiracy theories?

Yes. Obsessing over what people you have no relationship with are doing in their own facilities based on loose-associative, emotion-laden reasoning that leads you to believe that they are somehow harming you is 100% the conspiracy-theory mindset.

> People are rejecting them because of what they do outside. Drive up power costs, take up space, use up water, raise the heat, make noise.

No, that doesn't seem correct. These qualities describe essentially all activity, especially economic and commercial activity. Every office building, factory, warehouse, school, hospital, housing complex, power plant, water plant, etc. also does exactly the things on your list.

Any opposition to data centers that's statistically greater than the baseline opposition to any economic development (which perennially comes from certain quarters) can be reasonably attributed to worry about AI technology particularly.

> The fact that they’re owned by unlikable charlatans training a product that takes away jobs just makes it easier.

The fact that they're owned by unlikable charlatans is also a driver of motivated reasoning and conspiracy theories.

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