341–350 of 425 posts
Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…
Comparing water usage of AI to agriculture and cities is a little misleading. The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking. Agricultural water usage is required because we have to eat to live. Don't compare something optional to something mandatory. Instead, compare AI water usage to that of optional things in a city, such as car washes and water parks. O…
There's some irony here with my local situation (in Calgary, AB) where one of the main feeder mains is in critical disrepair - as a result there've been a couple major pipe failures, and a planned maintenance shutdown, each instance resulting in multi-week-long periods where the overall water treatment capacity of the city is greatly degraded.
Throughout it all, car washes have remained fully open, and the city has been reduced to begging people to keep their showers to 3 minutes and to not flush their toilets so much. (Lest the system gets under-pressurized, resulting in boil-water advisories and insufficient water for (sub)urban fire emergencies.)
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> and those are regularly treated as sacred They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstr…
Can you explain the issue from a more basic level for people who don’t know? what i’m imagining is that, like, an aquifer might connect over a very large area and every property owner in the area has the right to extract as much water as they want from it? Leading to a tragedy of the commons situation that states are unable to regulate for some reason?
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This site, if not overly wasteful, fits onto a single 1U server. A single car is more damaging than such a server.
HN does untold societal damage.
A Night at the Roxbury comes to mind. Except, way less cool.
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> This is the endgame of postmodernist and constructivist thinking that exalts narrative and story as the ground source of truth. In some ways what we are seeing is a return to religious and superstitious thinking where sufficient belief in a dogma or a pantheon is enough to reify those narratives into consensus reality. I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" o…
> I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era. At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion. > There has never been a prior time in…
You won't hear me claim otherwise.
> This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information
That seems unlikely to me as I didn't say anything about "power" or "wisdom".
> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions. Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantag…
> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country. Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes th…
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How many gallons of water are you assuming are in that burger patty? Because, while cows do drink water that falls from the sky and lands on fields where it was going to land anyway, they also urinate most of it back out. Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty. To be clear I think y…
Cows drinking isn't the major pie anyways. Cow feeding on Alfalfa which has been grown and irrigated with huge amount of water is the problem.
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> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on. Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone…
> We don't do this for gasoline No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year. > Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because so…
I don’t really get the water concerns in datacenter cooling. Even if a lot of water was used for cooling with every prompt (which he argues against here, but, even if )… water “used up” by cooling just comes out a little hotter, right? Maybe evaporated. Then it’ll come back in the form of rain. This isn’t an industrial chemistry process that leaves some toxic waste in the water. Or an agricultural one that puts water…