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You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you

You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.

Symbiote 2mo ago
All of those are the old, smaller scale.
- somehnguy 2mo ago
  Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
  - kennywinker 2mo ago
    I have a small home server setup. It’s stores all my data, and i can transcode video and stuff on it no problem. I put in a GPU to run some local LLM stuff. Now the whole thing generates enough heat and noise that I notice it if i sit near the cabinet it’s in. Scale matters.
  - Symbiote 2mo ago
    Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing. AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers. Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere. Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.
Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy. One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
- rpdillon 2mo ago
  Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
  - Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
    But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive. So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
    - Sabinus 2mo ago
      >If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission. Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.
      - DrewADesign 2mo ago
        So if I build a heavily protested foundry that spews carcinogenic lead smoke into a residential neighborhood, it’s not my fault and the operation of my foundry is unimpeachable. It’s the government’s fault for not stopping me from doing it. Since the people affected are responsible for compelling government to limit business, businesses are not responsible for anything. Privatize the gains, then socialize the losses, then blame the government for not stepping in, and ignore the company actively undermining the public’s leverage in the process. Ok, got it. That makes complete sense. It’s decidedly not nihilistic justification for doing obviously unethical things in pursuit of profit.
kraquepype 2mo ago
We could do all of that before the most recent datacenter build outs. Existing datacenters at the scale we were used to were just fine for what was expected of them.
DrewADesign 2mo ago
Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.
kennywinker 2mo ago
We had all of that before the current wave of hyperscale data center buildout. So what NEW benefit do i get from all this?
pibaker 2mo ago
How many racks do you think a niche, text only forum is going to take up?

Symbiote 2mo ago

All of those are the old, smaller scale.

somehnguy 2mo ago
Can you elaborate on the scale difference?
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  I have a small home server setup. It’s stores all my data, and i can transcode video and stuff on it no problem. I put in a GPU to run some local LLM stuff. Now the whole thing generates enough heat and noise that I notice it if i sit near the cabinet it’s in. Scale matters.
- Symbiote 2mo ago
  Racked servers pre-GPU used about 1kW each at high load. 5-10kW for a rack (20 to 40 servers) was common, much more than this would be a special thing. AI use has driven this to 20, 50, 100kW per rack or more. Supposedly 1000kW for the hyperscalers. Extrapolate to the whole building and you have a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere. Instead of being similar to light industry, the hyperscale AI datacentre is using as much energy as a large steelworks.

Ydarbleoj 2mo ago

You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy. One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.

rpdillon 2mo ago
Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water we will have, how much less expensive electricity will be, and what other problems might arise.
- Ydarbleoj 2mo ago
  But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive. So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
  - Sabinus 2mo ago
    >If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission. Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.
    - DrewADesign 2mo ago
      So if I build a heavily protested foundry that spews carcinogenic lead smoke into a residential neighborhood, it’s not my fault and the operation of my foundry is unimpeachable. It’s the government’s fault for not stopping me from doing it. Since the people affected are responsible for compelling government to limit business, businesses are not responsible for anything. Privatize the gains, then socialize the losses, then blame the government for not stepping in, and ignore the company actively undermining the public’s leverage in the process. Ok, got it. That makes complete sense. It’s decidedly not nihilistic justification for doing obviously unethical things in pursuit of profit.

kraquepype 2mo ago

We could do all of that before the most recent datacenter build outs. Existing datacenters at the scale we were used to were just fine for what was expected of them.

DrewADesign 2mo ago

Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.

kennywinker 2mo ago

We had all of that before the current wave of hyperscale data center buildout. So what NEW benefit do i get from all this?

pibaker 2mo ago

How many racks do you think a niche, text only forum is going to take up?