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Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site. Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing com…
A cryptominer is a "datacenter" in the same way that a chop shop is an automotive parts supplier.
It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the long run.
Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space. Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
I wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.
Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space. Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
> Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose. It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new…
Even if turned into useful work, the end result of that work is still ultimately heat.
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose. It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new…
Computational results do not contain stored potential energy. There is no such thing as energy being "used up" doing computation such that it doesn't end as waste heat.
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Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society. It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value. The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.
Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant. I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of…
That's a disappointingly common crypto industry lie. Cryptocurrency mining involves very little labor beyond initial construction; it's certainly not a major source of permanent employment.