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.
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.
>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.
They also didn't say whether or not they like electric lightbulbs. Or hot showers. Or clothes. Or the wheel.
One tylenol is good at reducing my fever. 20 tylenol will likely damage my liver and might even kill me.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".
Turning off the datacenters would be horrible. We would literally be forced to go outside and touch grass. I wouldn't want to live in such a world.
What else might happen?
We stop being subjected to patronizing thought experiments by geriatric HN user accounts.
If you have a point be a grown up and make it. We aren't your grandkids or doggy here for a Milk Bone.
Unlikely. I'm not sure where HN is hosted, but I think it's a bare metal server in a colo, not a data center.
The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad", and then stretching the position to "data centers bad". I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud. Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there. We need the solar/wind equivalent for hosting. The problem is data centers have efficiencies at scale that we can't achieve with more distributed solutions, but I'm not a specialist in that particular analysis.
> The childish behavior is disagreeing with how datacenters are being deployed and reducing that to "more is bad"
Why is that childish? Bubble data-center economics is bad, we have the history to prove it, this isn't the first bubble. Do you have real arguments against it besides calling it "childish" which is itself childish?
> I'm begging the collective here to consider what they are really asking for, because our society, from the government down, is built on the cloud.
You're begging "the collective" to stop worrying and learn to love the bubble... or else? OK, or else what? If everything is already "built on the cloud" there's already enough cloud to go around, built at a normal pace, without bubbles and without incurring huge debts, deficits, circular financing and what not. See, the how can be done better.
> Finding a healthy way to provide compute is important, and "data center bad" doesn't get us there.
That's a strawman, which you sneaked in here: 'reducing that to "more is bad" and then ... to "data centers bad"'
The issue is, and always has been - the bubble way of doing it as bad - slow down and do it properly. Either way the public isn't going to get the benefits of the build-out, at least try to reduce the negative externalities to an acceptable level.
You're assuming a bubble. I get it.
But do you really think we have more datacenters now, or even an equal number, to what we'll have in the future?
It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales. I don't know where the conversation goes when folks just talk about how useless it is and how compute is bad.
Take two steps back: do you really think we're at peak compute? If not, shouldn't we focus on how to scale in a sustainable way? The rhetoric doesn't foster that inquiry. That's my issue here.
Every single critique has said "slow down to do it right". That's similar to the DEI fallback of "Do the work". It's not that the goal is wrong, it's that it takes no effort to demand something vague like that, because it requires no thought. What forwards the discussion when implementation matters is the specifics: what do we want folks to do differently. If gas turbines in data centers are causing noise pollution that affects quality-of-life (which is absolutely appears they do - it's really bad), that's not a call to ban the idea, but rather the implementation. I see that distinction too often being dismissed in these discussions.
> It's like power consumption: it's going to scale, so we need to control how it scales.
I don't think your premise is obvious at all. Developed countries have stagnant or shrinking populations, and there is a general trend toward greater power efficiency over time. So why should total power consumption be expected to keep increasing?
The trend is crystal clear: not just more people, but more automation.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Your perception is its built on cloud.
How much if that is true and how much of it is carefully constructed propaganda? Implanted and reinforced beliefs to make workers hustle to ensure the server fields produce enough crop this quarter.
Most people on the planet are not tech people. Their world is not built on cloud at all but ensuring there is sufficient food and stuff to satisfy their biological needs.
It's asocial terminally online tech workers who think the cloud is akin to strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity; so essential they are fundamental forces of nature themselves
Hopefully you can get the obvious bias of your perspective; species of 8 billion is not propped up by a few million script kiddies
I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters.
The Trump administration pulled a bunch of ocean sensors, whose data was aggregated in the cloud, in an attempt to save money. Except, those sensors were not only providing research data on changes in ocean currents, but helping fisheries make predictions about yield. The administration backtracked because of this.
There is a similar story with weather forecasting, and farmers being able to manage their crops.
Let's not even get started on the economic impact worldwide of datacenters were not available to process stock and bond trades.
New technologies seem optional, but once society passes some tipping point in their adoption, they no longer are. AI isn't there yet, but cloud computing is.
I think I've given you far more than you're due in this conversation, so I'll stop here.
In short, I think you're being dismissive, particularly when you try to frame my position as "society is propped up by script kiddies". Seems like a deeply inaccurate way of summarizing my points.
> I think you're vastly under-estimating the extent to which power grids, water systems, and global supply chains and manufacturing rely heavily on datacenters.
These things were with us and worked better before datacenters even existed. Datacenters are a mere convenience which is now used to force monopolization of compute while subjecting society to extremely risky, but unnecessary dependencies and centralization.
You say we're already there? A good reason to start undoing it ASAP.
That's not the proposal, and is utter fantasy. I'm engaging a hypothetical here -- none of what's being discussed is even close to reality, in the sense that it won't be implemented. There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't.
What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy. Theoretically possible, practically impossible.
> What you propose is similar to proposing that we'll solve climate change by moving back to horse-and-buggy.
And strawmen, don't forget the strawmen... can you stop doing that for a second? You're just underlying your lack of arguments.
> There will be new datacenters, some communities will successfully resist, but many won't.
We moved from "don't resist or else" to "resistance is futile"... what else is new?
A strawman is different than an analogy.
But this discussion is quite tired. Thanks for your insights.
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