Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers

Post by duped » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

wat10000 wrote: post #179

duped wrote: post #140

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> Whereas everyone here seems to assume it's to avoid NIMBY Literally every data center project that gets announced near me gets protested at council meetings, petitioned, and multiple series of reddit/bluesky posts about the project. It's hard to put into words for HN how deeply locals resent tech companies and AI. You could call it NIMBY, but the hatred is deeper than that. The sentiment is "you have enough money,…

It's pretty wild. People around me are complaining that their electric bill tripled and blaming data centers for it. No, your rates didn't triple in the last year. Your bill went up because you used way more electricity, probably because it's been ass-freezingly cold.

Post by irishcoffee » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

basket_horse wrote: post #281

irishcoffee wrote: post #224

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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?

Post by simianwords » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

cowpig wrote: post #143

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #109

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A scourge? I get some kind of valuable use from it almost every day. This criticism sounds completely out of touch.

You are capable of considering effects of systems outside of your immediate, moment-to-moment needs?

Post by simianwords » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #272

sixo wrote: post #240

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Certainly commensurate to the price . It's up to the companies to bring the cost under the price. AFAICT, fears of the marginal costs of LLM inference being high are dramatically overblown. All the "water" concerns are outlandish, for one—a day of moderately heavy LLM usage consumes on the order of one glass of water, compared to a baseline consumption of 1000 glasses/day for a modern human. And the water usage of a…

I don't think anyone has a single agreed upon number for the water consumption, with the higher estimates focusing on a lot of wider externalities and the lower estimates ignoring them, such as ignoring the cost of training.

Post by therealdrag0 » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

kakacik wrote: post #245

therealdrag0 wrote: post #149

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As they are currently implemented, I get daily value from them.

At what cost? See discussion here. And who bears the burden of that cost? Sure you can look away from child labor providing you the latest iphones or lithium mines for the same or electric cars destroying pristine tropical jungles and entire ecosystems, many folks do so very comfortably. Then some others don't. Different moral values and such.