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Grok are the first models I am boycotting on purely environmental grounds. They built their datacenter without sufficient local power supply and have been illeg
by Shakahs 1y ago
Grok are the first models I am boycotting on purely environmental grounds. They built their datacenter without sufficient local power supply and have been illegally powering it with unpermitted gas turbine generators until that capacity gets built, to the significant detriment of the local population.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-gas-turbines-memphis/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-gas...
- nonethewiser 1y agoIt would be nice if they could get more power online faster.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoWell Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.
- jameslk 1y agoChina controls 80% of the supply chain for solar and has most of the rare earth magnets needed for wind. Since China is America’s bugbear and containing China’s influence is a bipartisan issue, this was a likely outcome whoever is in office https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex... Of course, renewables aren’t the only source of energy
- burkaman 1y agoWe don't have to guess what the most likely outcome might have been, someone else was in office 7 months ago so we can just look at what they were doing.
- jameslk 1y agoYes, moving away from China
- hkt 1y agoNot, one assumes, from renewables.
- kelnos 1y agoBut not at the expense of building renewable energy, as is the current administration's policy.
- jameslk 1y agohttps://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/14/fact-sheet-president-biden-takes-action-to-protect-american-workers-and-businesses-from-chinas-unfair-trade-practices/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement... https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-brace-higher-costs-biden-hikes-tariffs-2024-05-23/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-solar-builders-br...
- burkaman 1y agoWere they "cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant"? That's the "likely outcome" we're discussing.
- jameslk 1y agoYes, the US has been scaling back on China-sourced renewable energy supply chains since 2023 at least, with tariffs and by removing incentives Not exactly your wording at that time, but my point still stands that the outcome was going to be the same because the imports were heavily skewed towards China. This has all been in motion before this current admin
- declan_roberts 1y agoSolar and wind are not adequate power supply for a data center. You think data centers only run for 8 hours a day?
- GrifMD 1y agoThat's a bad faith argument and you know it. More power is more power. These projects weren't taking away from development of other power plants.
- gwbas1c 1y agoThat's what these are for: https://www.tesla.com/megapack https://www.tesla.com/megapack
- namibj 1y agoThey're VERY suitable for such trivially deferrable workloads as (much of) AI (specifically, LLM pretraining and other similar training).
- Jabrov 1y agoWhat makes you think it’s a deferrable workload? Companies don’t buy all that expensive hardware to just have it sit there inactive.
- namibj 1y agoYou're conflating two things that shouldn't be: (1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster. For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough. For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.
- sipsi 1y ago[flagged]
- nebezb 1y agoHow would you know that?
- greatwhitenorth 1y ago[flagged]
- asah 1y agoThere are nicer ways to say this.
- moshun 1y agoTechnology does not exist separately from society and culture, and in the last few decades has arguably made a lot of the world and society worse. I’m all for using the biggest lever I have to address harmful behaviors from corporations. Withhold your wallet, stay off their platforms and make your reasons known. I’m not sure what about that you’re upset with.
- jondwillis 1y ago>stay off their platforms I mean… this is part of GPs point. Here we are, playing on the lawn of private equitists, probably directly or indirectly working for the people that GGP was railing against.
- a1371 1y agoHacker News Guidelines are worth a read: ## In Comments Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic"
- curvaturearth 1y agoGo touch some grass
- mrcwinn 1y agoBy his own words, Elon is not an environmentalist and doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate. His concern is with the futility of relying on a non-renewable resource. He believes there is significantly more lithium than there is oil, I guess. In the end, incentives are all that matter. Do hotels care deeply about the environment, or are they interested in saving in energy and labor costs as your towel is cleaned? Does it matter? Does moralizing really get us anywhere if our ends are the same?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hkt 1y agoNot everyone is a nihilist.
- Havoc 1y ago>doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate Is it that or a belief that we can outrun the problem? i.e. mix of accelerationism and making humanity multi planetary
- tw04 1y agoYou do, and then at some point, likely during a late night ketamine binge, he went full redpill on twitter and decided the only thing that matters is “owning the libs”. If that means embracing fossil fuels, so be it. Destroy the “woke mind virus at any cost”. That being said, I think he is delusional enough that he thought allowing nazi propaganda on twitter would convince conservatives to start buying teslas and is completely lost at this point.
- behnamoh 1y agooh the irony... EV company CEO doesn't care about env...
- recursive 1y agoThat's just one facet of EVs that is severely overplayed in my book. They have plenty of other benefits, but for some of us the environmental aspect is a "nice-to-have".
- declan_roberts 1y agoElon needs to do the right thing and play by the rules of other data centers: green wash their energy with a fake green energy company /s The only player doing the right thing here is probably Microsoft which is retrofitting an entire nuclear energy plant. Everybody else is faking it to make you feel better. Elon just is skipping the faking it part.
- topaz0 1y agoThe only players doing the right thing are the ones that are staying out of LLMs entirely.
- njovin 1y agoImagine needing electricity and government contracts so much that you spend $250M to get somebody elected president, and the second thing your guy does in office is cancel all of the projects that could provide you with more electricity.
- qingcharles 1y agoAnd then he posts about it literally every day moaning about the lack of power, lack of solar, etc. All the things he bitches and moans about are things he caused by helping elect the orange fella.
- rikafurude21 1y agoIf thats the yard stick you should boycott everything coming out of china, which is pretty much everything, since they are one of the largest polluters globally.
- jamespo 1y agoif there's a reasonable alternative why not, there are plenty of reasonable alternative coding models
- zzzoom 1y agoNot even close https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
- maleldil 1y agoThat's per-capita. China is by far the biggest polluter overall, and it is still increasing. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=CHN~USA~IND~GBR&Count=Per+country https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=CHN~USA~IND...
- argsnd 1y agoDoesn't really make sense in my opinion. Why boycott a specific group of people for their collective emissions when their individual emissions are lower than many others? The latter is the important metric, else you're simply punishing them for having a large population.
- didibus 1y agoWouldn't you expect the country with the most manufacturing and one of the biggest population to also have the biggest pollution? I feel you'd need to adjust the sum total by something, capita, or square footage or be more specific like does a manufacturing X in China pollute more than an equivalent one in the US, etc.
- 1y ago
- cameldrv 1y agoYes, Elon is probably playing fast and loose with the rules, but his 150MW of turbines are right next to the TVA's 1100MW of turbines and a steel mill. Not surprising given that it's a heavy industrial area, it's about 4 miles from any significant number of houses. There are plenty of good reasons to hate on Elon, but IMO this ain't it.
- ceejayoz 1y ago“We dumped this nuclear waste next to the existing storage site! Totally cool, right?”
- topaz0 1y agoBetter late than never I suppose.