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I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a p

I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.

simianwords 1y ago
Because it is ideologically motivated.
- Veedrac 1y ago
  Gentoo should be able to be ideological without being stupid.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Being ideologically motivated is not necessarily bad (understanding ideology as a worldview associated with a set of values and priorities). FOSS as a whole is deeply ideologically motivated from its origins. The issue is that there seems to have been a change in the nature of the ideology, leading to some amount of conflict between the older and newer guard.
  - simianwords 1y ago
    What change do you mean between older and newer guard?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      That's not something that fits in a comment. The point is, ideology as such, is not something new in this space.
const_cast 1y ago
To be completely fair, AI really does use more water than other typical compute tasks, because AI takes A LOT of compute. No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second. I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens! Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.
- Veedrac 1y ago
  The energy use claims are questionable, but I at least get where they're coming from. The water use is the confusing part. Who looks at a server rack and goes ‘darn, look at how water intensive this is’? People use water as a coolant in large part because it's really hard to boil, plus it's typically cheap because it regularly gets delivered to your front door for free. As to actual numbers, they're not that hard to crunch, but we have a few good sources that have done so for us. Simple first-principles estimate: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg... Google report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15734 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15734 Altman claim inside a blog post: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.

simianwords 1y ago

Because it is ideologically motivated.

Veedrac 1y ago
Gentoo should be able to be ideological without being stupid.
bonoboTP 1y ago
Being ideologically motivated is not necessarily bad (understanding ideology as a worldview associated with a set of values and priorities). FOSS as a whole is deeply ideologically motivated from its origins. The issue is that there seems to have been a change in the nature of the ideology, leading to some amount of conflict between the older and newer guard.
- simianwords 1y ago
  What change do you mean between older and newer guard?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    That's not something that fits in a comment. The point is, ideology as such, is not something new in this space.

const_cast 1y ago

To be completely fair, AI really does use more water than other typical compute tasks, because AI takes A LOT of compute. No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second. I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens! Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.

Veedrac 1y ago
The energy use claims are questionable, but I at least get where they're coming from. The water use is the confusing part. Who looks at a server rack and goes ‘darn, look at how water intensive this is’? People use water as a coolant in large part because it's really hard to boil, plus it's typically cheap because it regularly gets delivered to your front door for free. As to actual numbers, they're not that hard to crunch, but we have a few good sources that have done so for us. Simple first-principles estimate: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg... Google report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15734 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15734 Altman claim inside a blog post: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity