Imagine a steel mill trying to exist in America today...
Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
471–480 of 535 posts
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#472I 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…
Me not being able to buy memory or gpus is enough for me to be pissed off about it. Reversal of Personal Computing back towards centralized computing is bad and I am not happy about it. I also am not happy about the privacy and surveillance state capabilities. How much you care about these things might be subjective, but they are definitely real effects that are happening that are not a panic.
My thinking is most aligned with yours relative to all the other replies. Short term tulip bulb mania pricing on vidya game hardware is annoying and making me delay purchases. And my concerns for long term are about what all that heavy compute will be used for.
All the grug-brained politics and popular panic hysteria about power and water and heat for AI seems to me to be a transient thing, at least with regards to inference. The power requirements for inference will drop to practically zilch once models get etched onto dedicated hardware and the dynamic state requirments become optimized.
I want to know what the real plans are for all the general purpose compute and memory they are building everywhere. If inference is going to wind up being cheap or free, then that general purpose compute will in the best case be left unused and available for lease like dark fiber was after the over-buildout of the 2000's.
In the worst case, all that compute will be used for probably something awful like surveillance.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#473I 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…
> BUT , we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. Come on. That's a misleading way to minimize anything you don't want to deal with . What's the big deal with fossil fuels? We've been burning them for centuries, and the volume of of what we've burned is minuscule compared to the size of Pluto, yet alone the Earth ! Global warming must be just the lates…
Have you seen pictures of Los Angeles from space? It's a grey speck. I grew up in the smog layer, let me tell you it was disgusting and I'm sure it gave me respiratory disease. But from space, the smog blowing off every day looks like a tiny little fart because the world is huge.
I feel the same way about these data center arguments; it's a backyard issue at the moment. It's politics to hate on them, and that's cool, but the sky isn't falling. It's cringey to act like the sky is falling for any of these propaganda neurosis campaigns. Who is funding this particular propaganda campaign? It's not organic. In any case, I pass on this one.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#475I 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…
This post is quite hilarious to read, it has to be satire
I try to be a fun person. But, no it wasn't satire. I find this latest satanic panic to be so cringe. If you crave religion, I suggest you find a bible and get to know Jesus because the post-modernist stuff blows.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of those are the old, smaller scale.
Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing.
AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers.
Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere.
Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…
JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument.
AC and meat are bad for the environment but they deliver personal benefit. Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. That's it.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive. So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
>If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC
Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission.
Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't mean people want LLMs to replace their jobs so they can (hopefully) go on welfare, and to have ever more data enters built with that goal in mind.
They don't want them to replace their job, they want them to replace other peoples jobs.
Actually, no. Actually most people do not want everyone else to be jobless or suffer etc.
There are subgroups who enjoy harm to others, but most dont.
Re: Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages th…
JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument. AC and meat are bad for the environment but they deliver personal benefit. Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. That's it.
> JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument.
I'm replying to someone who themselves argued the analogies.
> Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives.
To the extent that statement is true, it applies equally to most primary and secondary economic activity.
Having a farm in your community has no appreciable personal benefit: for scale, the UK famously gets a lot of their sheep meat from New Zealand, as far away as it is physically possible to be.
An abattoir similarly has no substantial local benefit, but worse has much detriment owing to the psychological damage it does to the workers, leading to higher rates of arrest for violent criminal offences: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816...
Unless it's at the scale where it becomes a company town, having a factory, a warehouse, etc. these things are all heavily automated or mechanised and employ only a few of the locals as a percentage of the population. Putting anything that isn't service-sector in your community (i.e. schools, hospitals, shops, restaurants, hairdressers, etc.) is going to be of "no appreciable personal benefit" when considered in isolation.
Almost all primary (farming, fishing, mining) and secondary (manufacturing) comes with negatives (pollution, higher wear on the roads and utilities).