Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy. One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
321–330 of 535 posts
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#322If 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…
Turns out people have quite strong feelings about career -ruining and planet-burning tech advances. I think it's good that there are topics that elicit emotional responses. It does make the discussion a bit difficult, gotta admit that.
Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#323Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn.... This is how econo…
Some of them are doing this at their jobs, but there are also tons of people pushing slop to open-source projects, vibe coding useless or redundant apps, etc.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? Another commenter said the concerns about heat/water were because they were being built next to their houses, and I responded to that. I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. I was not asking…
> I am specifically asking this person why they are touting water usage and not noise pollution as the main problem. You are lying here. > it's all people seem to care about. You were specifically asking why what "all people seem to care about" is "the whole data center heat/water thing," and when somebody told you that's this is not the only thing people care about, you immediately lied about what you just said. Eve…
> The idea that current data center water use is as much as 1% of all of the leaky pipes in the US is not a statement of its insignificance, it's a statement of its massive significance. You might as well say that all of the shootings in the world are only 1% of all of the deaths from heart disease.
Google what fallacies are. You should start with False Equivalence
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it. I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people . It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything. You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.
Eating meat fills my belly. Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. A data center costs my community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people. Can you spot the difference?
Data centers also generate local tax revenue. In fact, across industries, they have the best tax revenue to tax resource burden ratio, using very little government services while paying significant property tax.
And the environmental damage, whatever that is, is negligible relative to other industries. Their only output is some noise pollution nearby and whatever emissions are produced in the power plants that give them electricity. All industries require electricity in proportion to how much economic value they produce. So unless you want degrowth and no industry, you're going to have energy consumption.
In fact, rising energy consumption is a sign of a growing economy. That's why China has seen its energy consumption grow far faster than any other major economy while its economy has also grown far faster.
They do use water but their water usage is mininscule compared to agribusiness, or even fast food restaurants and golf courses. And the potable water usage can be brought down. They just use the water for cooling. So they could use treated wastewater or recycle the water they use. Newer data centers use these more water efficient cooling systems. So water usage is not a major long-term concern. Not one that justifies crippling this key emerging industry.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#328I 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…
We’re building data centers in the U.S. at an unprecedented and increasing rate [1]. Is it so hard to imagine that something which was fine at one scale may begin to cause issues at some massively higher scale? If I drink one glass of wine per day, it’s probably fine. If I drink three bottles per day, I’m gonna start having problems. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/monthly-spending-data-cen...
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about. The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at…
I feel like this has to be reiterated every single AI discussion. Anytime someone points out something it enables, someone has to go “well that existed before” as if the scale is somehow 1) irrelevant and 2) not orders of magnitude larger. If you gave me one night, a pot of coffee, and few scruples, I could probably dump hundreds if not thousands of fake posts on the internet. Hundreds would easily break through and…
This DC buildout is massive? Yep. So massive that it merits substantial public opposition? Citation needed on that part. And any citation that compares current or projected DC activity with past DC activity is missing the point.
Two concrete examples: the above graph showing a multi-fold increase in construction expenditures is useless, because it gives no indication of the absolute significance of the current level. It tells me very little. For a better example, here's a graph of RAM prices over the past year and a half: https://whereismyram.com/us/price-chart. Here, we can see that data center buildout is big enough to massively affect the global market for an important commodity, and we can translate that into some sort of understanding of how this affects ordinary people.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#330If 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…