5 ms·
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial develo
by parpfish 9mo ago
Do data centers create that many jobs? Especially if you break it down by jobs per sqft, I can’t imagine it compares well to any other type of industrial development
- infecto 9mo agoThey bring in temporary construction jobs but once running they provide no meaningful jobs.
- parpfish 9mo agoIf we just want to front load a bunch of construction jobs, I vote for some megalithic stone structures. Let’s give something to the archeologists 5,000 years in the future.
- irishcoffee 9mo agoThey neither directly create many long-term jobs or use copious amounts of water. If we haven't collectively established at this point that LLMs, data centers, "AI", "the next industrial revolution" are created and controlled by the wealthiest people in the world, and said people don't give a fuck about anything but money and power, we're hopeless. The elite don't care about jobs, or water. At all. If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. We have regulations on top of regulations in all corners of the US because of the "Safety" boogieman. I wish we had the same riots about LLMs that we do about other things. If this isn't the biggest evidence yet that social unrest is engineered I'm not sure what would be more convincing.
- bayindirh 9mo ago> use copious amounts of water. If you're in Europe and/or using completely closed loop systems, then yes. Your only water use is humidifiers, and maybe the sprayers you use on drycoolers in the summer months. On the other hand, if you use water spraying into air as heat absorption system or use open loop external circuits, you're using literally tons of water. Source: Writing this comment from a direct liquid cooled data center.
- basket_horse 9mo ago> If I were wrong, the whole charade would have been shut down after LLMs convinced people to kill themselves. I hate this argument, and every time I see it in the news it feels like propaganda to me. Everything has risk. People have been committing suicide off google searches for years. There are thousands of fatal car crashes a year. Does that mean we should just abandon progress and innovation? Seems like a fragile argument made by people who dislike LLMs for other reasons
- irishcoffee 9mo agoPropaganda? Did people kill themselves at the direction of an LLM or not? That's like saying ICE outrage is propaganda, and is, at best, insulting to the memory of those lost. Brushing this point off seems more like propaganda than acknowledging it does. LLMs are neat tools. They can do some neat things. Dynamite is also pretty cool, and it can do some neat things. How many more people need to get "blown up" by LLMs before we un-brainwash ourselves? At least one more I guess.
- basket_horse 9mo agoComparing chatGPT to ICE and dynamite is reaching… my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable. What about the people who were planning on committing suicide and were talked out of it by LLMs? Are we counting those anywhere? If it’s truly causing a suicide crisis I would imagine the rate of suicide would be spiking. Is that the case?
- irishcoffee 9mo ago> my hunch is that most of the people who who killed themselves at the direction of an LLM were already mentally unstable Your hunch is "meh, couldn't be helped?" :(
- basket_horse 9mo agoYes, exactly
- engelo_b 9mo ago[dead]
- jauer 9mo agoUnlike enterprise datacenters, systems inside these datacenters are tightly coupled to compute system design to eke out PUE, so network cabling, electrical, and cooling to a lesser degree gets reworked every 3-5 years. On a campus with several data halls this means that there’s work for those trades well beyond initial construction. Sure, you don’t have the steel and concrete work happening that went into the shell, but it’s more than a handful of operations people. From the 00s to mid 2010s I did fiber splicing in factories from Kenosha to Beaver Dam and even then they were fairly well-automated to the extent that I’d see just a few people on the factory floor moving carts of metal between machines or handling shipping and receiving.
- m4ck_ 9mo agoAside from the initial construction, you need a few shifts of dc techs (for remote hands, running data cables, escorting vendors), electricians, and security. Not much else really needs to be done onsite.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoYou might have an electrical engineer on staff for planning and management but most of the actual work (and plumbing, HVAC) will be contractors hired as needed.