This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What sucks is there will be a day when we actually want more data centers - you know, in a responsible way that is respectful to the people - and we will still have a bad taste in our mouths and will not trust it.
Thanks tech bro capitalists, you ruin everything you touch.
The amount of data center the average person needs can fit in a shoebox. Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever. We don’t need gigantic warehouses.
Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever.
I'm not trusting the average person to not let it turn into a botnet.
To be fair, I trust the average person more than I trust the people currently building data centres.
People already have phones that can get turned into botnets so I don’t think it’s a new problem.
Hell, just have them host services on the phone with peer to peer networking.
You're not wrong, but those already exist and are less bad for society than data centers.
Also, I want most of the services they want to move to the cloud to still work when the net is down.
I may want to use a computer to watch my media library or play a game that I already own with out an active internet connection and ID card. Or, just use a word processor or tax program, or image editor.
Sorry, please provide your ID to log in to the cloud to do basic daily tasks, citizens. This is for your own good, trust us.
A couple weeks ago my internet went out and it was great that my Plex server still worked on my local network.
It's been a heavy rainy season here, lots of wind, power and net issues.
Meanwhile, the LAN works on a UPS, solar, and no Internet.
(Sure is nice being able to put on a movie or music playlist, and work on documents, or sort though old vacationphotos when it's a rainy day with out a cloud failure blocking it.)
I think you've vastly underestimated how much digital media people consume...
But setting that aside, there are real efficiency wins from scale. I am a self-hoster, I have a fleet of machines I manage with Nix, I run local LLMs and do real work on consumer gaming hardware, i'm a huge fan of federated and distributed peer systems. I am 100% for that. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. And I'm saying we also need the gigantic warehouses. Absolutely.
The issue is zoning and environmental concerns and the effect on communities and strain on public infrastructure. All issues worsened by the AI boom and incentivized by capitalism.
There's a way to do datacenters right and its been done before. You just need legislation and enforcement. The problem isn't datacenters: the problem is that the same people putting up datacenters are the same people who own your politicians
The average person, but not the average (non AI) business.
There's no way I could take our R7725s with dual 300 watt threadrippers and fit that in a shoe box. And we're a small company.
I’d really like libraries to get into the data center business. Not for profit but simply to serve the needs of their customers:
It really comes down to who is running the center and for what reason. We don’t want to invest in AI data centers. But I think the people would support library data centers where price gouging isn’t the incentive for its creation.
That is a fantastic idea - one to bring to your local representative if they don't resent your existence. Frame it in terms of helping the elderly store their photos etc, you've got a winner
Thank you for your vision and optimism. It can be hard to see a happy ending from here sometimes.
Hugs, internet friend. I know a beautiful world is possible but it sure seems difficult in times like these. Take care of yourself!
It will probably work out since most of these AI companies will go under leaving the data centers they built unused.
We will probably not need anymore for 70 years or more
Or maybe this is juat wishful thinking
Yeah, regular data centres have existed for a while and don't come with a fraction of the drawbacks that come with AI data centres
Amazon and Google's cloud businesses are probably loving this because it soft locks out any new future competitor to that business
Like windmills, solar panels, and everything else corpo lobbyists said were bad because they were leashed to their oil barron daddies.
Been talking about AI backlash causing friendly fire. Over on Bluesky, people were enraged about a new DC going up because they assumed it was an AI hyperscalar. Nope, it was the size of a large Walmart, in an industrial park outside of town, with a large water supply available. The owners are the state university and Sandia National Laboratories, not tech bros, and they listed some laudable (to me anyway) research goals.
Even with a handful of us explaining the situation:
"I don't CARE! We don't need no GOT DAMNED DATA CENTERS!"
"Including the one that sent me your message? AWS-US-EAST-2 needs to go?"
Pretty much the same way "AI" i.e. artificial intelligence as a whole has been tainted. Even something as inane as character behaviors in a video game, enemy AI, you have to put up signs and shit it's not about genAI. Let alone talking about using AI in more serious manner like scientific research.
Right, they hate data centers. And at the same time they use their beloved SlopGPT for every simple question they could basically answer with five minutes of research.
Social pressure demonstrably doesn't work for negative externalities of this scale. We need a systemic solution.
That's why they want to change the name to data campuses.
Even with all their ai slop machines, Israeli back ai search optimization websites they can't wrote enough fake news and AstroTurf on reddit enough to beat out the natural flow of information.
So they are going to try to switch to "super intelligence" or "data campus" so that their fake news outlets/web outlets they own can directly profit off the new wave of slopaganda.
This is oversimplified but ai is essentially just a predictive text model. If the 90% of the internet says ai data centers are bad, statistically the ai is heavily going to repeat those sentences it was trained on. This doesn't make it right or wrong, we only like halicunations when they say something we agree with. Never can an ai present something as a fact, just by the nature of ai its always a hallucination.
So if we suddenly start telling everyone to call it super intillegence, and data campus and only all the major news outlets and Israeli ai astro turfing bots, and web articles go along with it then then only news about it will be positive. They suddenly own the narrative, and when dumb dumb investors go to google "super intelligence" they can no longer see the obvious public outrage that is actually hurting them.
They are resorting to bribing individuals to get data centers installed. We are applying pressure we just can never give up the fight, never stop calling it slop. Because your words to hit the bottom line.
You matter, you voice your vote your opinions matter and it hurts them now that more of the world is starting to collectively revolt around the epstine class.
If the 90% of the internet says ai data centers are bad, statistically the ai is heavily going to repeat those sentences it was trained on.
Don't assume the billionaires who are in charge of training their AI won't use a first iteration of an LLM to curate/filter the training dataset of the next iteration of an LLM.
The problem is that an LLM is not an inherently fair or impartial tech. It will mimic whatever it was fed during the training phase. So whoever controls the training phase, controls the LLM's disposition.
In have a feeling much of reddits recent changes are to try to appeal to other ais as a cleaner source of data now that its "properly" being auto modded. Iirc reddit lost the Google contract it has for ai training data so they probably want to clean it up now. I also want to remind everyone that was the reason you couldn't use third party reddit apps after that point.
Like a year ago now almost facebook was going through a similar issue with mass bannings and I remembered there was talk about a lawsuit. A lot of boomers got offended the ai banned their facebook account when the ai flagged family photos as csam and thought it was a legal threat. It was a really large number of people and their subreddit was normally dead was constantly active with non stop complaints.
I don't known much about other social medias but I know once tiktok got bought out by Israeli interest it also got the same treatment and you can't meantion Gaza or Israel at all. The whole issue with tiktok was Republicans accuse them of brainwashing kids with trends like tide pod challenge to make them stupid, while their native version in China only promoted education and self improvement for their children. It was also some how a security risk because facebook could not just buy them out like they did with Instagram I guess. Basicially palantir wasn't getting its fair share of data, and too much info that's bad for business can exist on it.
That along with the required photo IDs getting forced globally, socialist revolutions happening every where I feel as if its pretty clear that we are not going to be allowed free speech or freedom of information. Its not even that far fetched anymore private equity owns hundreds of top YouTube networks/channels now, and if they're not owned by old media all the other podcasts and whatever are literally limited hangouts, or the host just brings on CIA assets and grifters and let's them brainwash people into scams.
Billionaires are gonna billionaire.
greedy psychos have really turned AI data centers into the dark satanic mills
Aren't people commenting on tgese things when they're really against or for? How is that indicative of the general population?
I'd say the balance is more to the negative - I think people are more likely to comment on things they feel badly about than those they like or feel neutral.
There is a sampling bias in that.
If only those dirty peasants didn't buy up so much RAM for their personal computers. These poor, struggling data centers need more tax breaks so they can compete.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
-Datacenters
