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In related current news: Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacenters-now-guz

• Muromec 3mo ago
  23 percent is a bit fucked actually
  • Laurel1234 3mo ago
    It's really fucked in the country with the most expensive kWh in all of Europe...
    • chvid 3mo ago
      Tax breaks matter more than electricity prices.
• amarcheschi 3mo ago
  One more datacenter bro one more datacenter bro please I swear bro one more datacenter and everything will be OK please bro
  • simianwords 3mo ago
    The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better. Pluralism? What’s that?
    • fallingbananna 3mo ago
      I know that market, and people for that matter don't care, but the environmentalist in me questions the word "needs" in the context of using AI.
      • amarcheschi 3mo ago
        I'd be more OK with it if prices weren't subsidized so much and people actually had to pay to ask opus how to pee, then maybe we would realize we don't need beefier models for everything
        • simianwords 3mo ago
          The fact is, you wouldn’t be okay with the real prices as well. All indications point to opus not being subsidised but having huge margins. GLM 5.2 is not subsidised - it is an Opus tier model that costs a small fraction. I doubt you would be okay and all problems would suddenly vanish.
          • ekidd 3mo ago
            GLM 5.2 isn't quite modern Opus tier, as seen in this comparison where Opus 4.5 scores 4/5 on some coding tasks where GLM 5.2 scores 0/5: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models But yes, GLM 5.2 is cheap. But the real standout on price is DeepSeek V4 Flash, which competes, more or less, with models in between Sonnet and Haiku. From third-party providers, it costs around $0.09/M, $0.18/M out, compared to $3M/in, $15M/out for Sonnet and $1M/in, $5M/out for Haiku. To get the price of DSv4 (Flash and Pro) so low, DeepSeek did a lot of innovative optimization work that will likely show up in other open weight models in the future.
            • ronsor 3mo ago
              I think GLM's problem is a lack of vision input.
        • 3mo ago
• insane_dreamer 3mo ago
  shocking how quickly we went from "how can we contain global warming to 1.5C increase?" to "we've (hopefully) unlocked a massive new corporate revenue source, screw everything else"
  • andrekandre 3mo ago
    its not shocking to me; in the end, those with capital get their way... whatever we all democracy nowadays has been lobbied and electioneered-by-money to hell and back with no end in sight
    • insane_dreamer 3mo ago
      yeah, it's the way of the world these days but what's surprising is the speed at which we collectively "forgot" that we are facing an potentially existential crisis. it wasn't long ago that Google had its emissions mitigation progress in the footer of its home page, it's been replaced with a "use our AI" link
      • andrekandre 3mo ago
        the news cycle has accelerated more and more over the years, and now peoples attention span is basically at the level of earthworms... i feel like mchluhan (medium is the message) and guy debord (society of the spectacle) were so prescient...
• Someone 3mo ago
  Similarly (https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/14/microsoft-data-center-uses-1-dutch-electricity https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/14/microsoft-data-center-uses-1-d...): “Microsoft’s oldest hyperscale data center in the Netherlands, a series of interconnected warehouses along the A7 in Middenmeer, currently consumes over 1 percent of all Dutch electricity […] At the end of 2024, data centers already accounted for 4.6 percent of the Netherlands’ total electricity consumption, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) calculated late last year. Grid operators expect this to grow to around 15 percent of all electricity used by 2030”