Right, they hate data centers. And at the same time they use their beloved SlopGPT for every simple question they could basically answer with five minutes of research.
Social pressure demonstrably doesn’t work for negative externalities of this scale. We need a systemic solution.
Aren’t people commenting on tgese things when they’re really against or for? How is that indicative of the general population?
I’d say the balance is more to the negative - I think people are more likely to comment on things they feel badly about than those they like or feel neutral.
What sucks is there will be a day when we actually want more data centers - you know, in a responsible way that is respectful to the people - and we will still have a bad taste in our mouths and will not trust it.
Thanks tech bro capitalists, you ruin everything you touch.
The amount of data center the average person needs can fit in a shoebox. Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever. We don’t need gigantic warehouses.
Everyone can just run a little server in their closet or whatever.
I’m not trusting the average person to not let it turn into a botnet.
You’re not wrong, but those already exist and are less bad for society than data centers.
To be fair, I trust the average person more than I trust the people currently building data centres.
People already have phones that can get turned into botnets so I don’t think it’s a new problem.
Hell, just have them host services on the phone with peer to peer networking.
Also, I want most of the services they want to move to the cloud to still work when the net is down.
I may want to use a computer to watch my media library or play a game that I already own with out an active internet connection and ID card. Or, just use a word processor or tax program, or image editor.
Sorry, please provide your ID to log in to the cloud to do basic daily tasks, citizens. This is for your own good, trust us.
A couple weeks ago my internet went out and it was great that my Plex server still worked on my local network.
It’s been a heavy rainy season here, lots of wind, power and net issues.
Meanwhile, the LAN works on a UPS, solar, and no Internet.
(Sure is nice being able to put on a movie or music playlist, and work on documents, or sort though old vacationphotos when it’s a rainy day with out a cloud failure blocking it.)
We were out after the hurricane last month and it wasn’t until two weeks later that I realized we could have all been watching movies off my generator. 🙄 Oh well. I did have 5 houses running refrigerators and chargers off that crappy genny, so there’s that.
I think you’ve vastly underestimated how much digital media people consume…
But setting that aside, there are real efficiency wins from scale. I am a self-hoster, I have a fleet of machines I manage with Nix, I run local LLMs and do real work on consumer gaming hardware, i’m a huge fan of federated and distributed peer systems. I am 100% for that. The cloud is just somebody else’s computer. And I’m saying we also need the gigantic warehouses. Absolutely.
The issue is zoning and environmental concerns and the effect on communities and strain on public infrastructure. All issues worsened by the AI boom and incentivized by capitalism.
There’s a way to do datacenters right and its been done before. You just need legislation and enforcement. The problem isn’t datacenters: the problem is that the same people putting up datacenters are the same people who own your politicians
The average person, but not the average (non AI) business.
There’s no way I could take our R7725s with dual 300 watt threadrippers and fit that in a shoe box. And we’re a small company.
Yeah, but even then it’s going from a shoebox to a closet.
A closet with some pretty hefty air conditioning. We tried a closet and that won’t cut it.
Plus what’s a datacenter but one big airconditioned closet?
Auditable access control and security, private connectivity to vendors and partners, advanced fire prevention, a formalised process for access for vendor support, delivery docks for full rack unit appliances, separate circuits for power, space for cable runs, 24/7 concierge.
Rolling your own datacentre is ludicrously expensive when you can just rent half a rack of space, this would kill small businesses and major corps would just take the hit and pass it on to consumers.
They usually have raised tiled floors where you can lift a tile and duck under to do some cabling.
It’s a big closet you need to build a new building for, hurting animals I like a lot more than people.
What if we put the closets in empty offices and let people work from home?
We already did that and the early internet was wildly power inefficient and unreliable. I’d rather have a million websites in one DC than a million server closets splattered all over the planet.
This post brought to you by this DC:
The power efficiency ran us afoul of the Jevons paradox, and more distributed outages is better than fewer universal outages.
Everyone hosting their services on their own hardware is the web infrastructure equivalent of getting everyone to smelt pig iron in their backyards. Some amount of datacentres are necessary for the functioning of a modern internet.
The problems we’re seeing at the moment are a result of artificially inflated demand driven by AI bullshit disrupting supply lines of hardware that could actually be useful to people, the lack of environmental planning, and the condescending refusal by datacentre builders to engage with the reasons communities are opposed to their projects.Sure, we could do that. But we’d need even more computer hardware that we don’t have, so it would be more expensive, and energy use would be less efficient so there’d be even more environmental impact. Just spread around to every house rather than in one centralized easily-protested spot.
Sam Altman was incredibly tone deaf and it was a stupid thing for him to say out loud when he said RAM was better off in data centers, but in some significant and important ways he was right. Computer equipment is much more efficiently utilized when it’s in a data center.
I say this as someone who’s super into running local models myself. I do it because I believe the autonomy and privacy are worth trading off the extra cost in hardware and electricity. If I just wanted to use AI to get something done and didn’t care about that I’d be paying for API access instead.
And of course lemmy finds this take to be controversial. 🙄 Just commented that we already did the millions of server closets thing and it was an inefficient, unreliable mess. Any purists here need to punch out now, you’re using a Cloudflare DC to read this.
We should improve society somewhat.
Not that I disagree with you, but what are you referring to by the millions of server closets thing?
Every website and corporate IT infra was run out of a local closet, or a mini data center in some cases. The cloud consolidated all that and is more energy efficient, secure (according to user setup!) and reliable. Going back to everyone doing their own thing would be awful, but given AWS pricing, I’m not sure why small corporations aren’t already moving back inhouse.
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I’d really like libraries to get into the data center business. Not for profit but simply to serve the needs of their customers:
- Providing some way to store a small amount of data.
- Small businesses could use reasonably priced compute for their needs.
It really comes down to who is running the center and for what reason. We don’t want to invest in AI data centers. But I think the people would support library data centers where price gouging isn’t the incentive for its creation.
That is a fantastic idea - one to bring to your local representative if they don’t resent your existence. Frame it in terms of helping the elderly store their photos etc, you’ve got a winner
Thank you for your vision and optimism. It can be hard to see a happy ending from here sometimes.
Hugs, internet friend. I know a beautiful world is possible but it sure seems difficult in times like these. Take care of yourself!
It will probably work out since most of these AI companies will go under leaving the data centers they built unused.
We will probably not need anymore for 70 years or more
Or maybe this is juat wishful thinking
Like windmills, solar panels, and everything else corpo lobbyists said were bad because they were leashed to their oil barron daddies.
Yeah, regular data centres have existed for a while and don’t come with a fraction of the drawbacks that come with AI data centres
Amazon and Google’s cloud businesses are probably loving this because it soft locks out any new future competitor to that business
Been talking about AI backlash causing friendly fire. Over on Bluesky, people were enraged about a new DC going up because they assumed it was an AI hyperscalar. Nope, it was the size of a large Walmart, in an industrial park outside of town, with a large water supply available. The owners are the state university and Sandia National Laboratories, not tech bros, and they listed some laudable (to me anyway) research goals.
Even with a handful of us explaining the situation:
“I don’t CARE! We don’t need no GOT DAMNED DATA CENTERS!”
“Including the one that sent me your message? AWS-US-EAST-2 needs to go?”
Pretty much the same way “AI” i.e. artificial intelligence as a whole has been tainted. Even something as inane as character behaviors in a video game, enemy AI, you have to put up signs and shit it’s not about genAI. Let alone talking about using AI in more serious manner like scientific research.
We won’t.
That’s why they want to change the name to data campuses.
Even with all their ai slop machines, Israeli back ai search optimization websites they can’t wrote enough fake news and AstroTurf on reddit enough to beat out the natural flow of information.
So they are going to try to switch to “super intelligence” or “data campus” so that their fake news outlets/web outlets they own can directly profit off the new wave of slopaganda.
This is oversimplified but ai is essentially just a predictive text model. If the 90% of the internet says ai data centers are bad, statistically the ai is heavily going to repeat those sentences it was trained on. This doesn’t make it right or wrong, we only like halicunations when they say something we agree with. Never can an ai present something as a fact, just by the nature of ai its always a hallucination.
So if we suddenly start telling everyone to call it super intillegence, and data campus and only all the major news outlets and Israeli ai astro turfing bots, and web articles go along with it then then only news about it will be positive. They suddenly own the narrative, and when dumb dumb investors go to google “super intelligence” they can no longer see the obvious public outrage that is actually hurting them.
They are resorting to bribing individuals to get data centers installed. We are applying pressure we just can never give up the fight, never stop calling it slop. Because your words to hit the bottom line.
You matter, you voice your vote your opinions matter and it hurts them now that more of the world is starting to collectively revolt around the epstine class.
If the 90% of the internet says ai data centers are bad, statistically the ai is heavily going to repeat those sentences it was trained on.
Don’t assume the billionaires who are in charge of training their AI won’t use a first iteration of an LLM to curate/filter the training dataset of the next iteration of an LLM.
The problem is that an LLM is not an inherently fair or impartial tech. It will mimic whatever it was fed during the training phase. So whoever controls the training phase, controls the LLM’s disposition.
In have a feeling much of reddits recent changes are to try to appeal to other ais as a cleaner source of data now that its “properly” being auto modded. Iirc reddit lost the Google contract it has for ai training data so they probably want to clean it up now. I also want to remind everyone that was the reason you couldn’t use third party reddit apps after that point.
Like a year ago now almost facebook was going through a similar issue with mass bannings and I remembered there was talk about a lawsuit. A lot of boomers got offended the ai banned their facebook account when the ai flagged family photos as csam and thought it was a legal threat. It was a really large number of people and their subreddit was normally dead was constantly active with non stop complaints.
I don’t known much about other social medias but I know once tiktok got bought out by Israeli interest it also got the same treatment and you can’t meantion Gaza or Israel at all. The whole issue with tiktok was Republicans accuse them of brainwashing kids with trends like tide pod challenge to make them stupid, while their native version in China only promoted education and self improvement for their children. It was also some how a security risk because facebook could not just buy them out like they did with Instagram I guess. Basicially palantir wasn’t getting its fair share of data, and too much info that’s bad for business can exist on it.
That along with the required photo IDs getting forced globally, socialist revolutions happening every where I feel as if its pretty clear that we are not going to be allowed free speech or freedom of information. Its not even that far fetched anymore private equity owns hundreds of top YouTube networks/channels now, and if they’re not owned by old media all the other podcasts and whatever are literally limited hangouts, or the host just brings on CIA assets and grifters and let’s them brainwash people into scams.
Billionaires are gonna billionaire.
greedy psychos have really turned AI data centers into the dark satanic mills
Watch how this makes no difference in how many get built in the next fiscal year.
I really don’t think so at this point. Banks don’t want to invest. Hardware is being gate kept or simply isn’t available. It’s like going to track day and burning up your tires. You then have spam altman crying about ram because he’s been told about the logistics. Then don’t be surprised when microslop will use your computer passively–it will likely happen. Then the funniest part is there’s not enough c-sec people. I don’t even want to pursue a career in it and the line has shrunk.
Agree with all your points but none of those reasons are we supposedly live in a democracy and the vast majority of us don’t want these data centres.
Solid response. Most people know what they’re really being used for now. Like I don’t think I want drones flying around scanning plates or otherwise. I don’t want to share the water or power bills with this crap.
Then don’t be surprised when microslop will use your computer passively–it will likely happen.
We need a Free Software cooperative peer-to-peer thing to do that first.
I have a feeling it’s already being done.
One would hope that local politicians realize that approving an AI DC is a political death sentence. The hate is bipartisan.
Good thing the wealthy elite ignores what 99% of people say.
Good thing the wealthy elite ignores what 99% of people say.
/s
I’m willing to bet they don’t know what datacenters are, they just hate that their homes are building bulldozed and their communities are being destroyed. Yet, they don’t know what a datacenter is, or why they exist, or why they are being rolled out so aggressively, just that they hate datacenters.
There is a sampling bias in that.
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If only those dirty peasants didn’t buy up so much RAM for their personal computers. These poor, struggling data centers need more tax breaks so they can compete.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
-Datacenters
The non-negative commenters forgot to /s.
[insert Top Gear “Oh no! Anyway…” meme]
