This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Good thing the wealthy elite ignores what 99% of people say.
There is a sampling bias in that.
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.
One would hope that local politicians realize that approving an AI DC is a political death sentence. The hate is bipartisan.
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.
I’d really like libraries to get into the data center business. Not for profit but simply to serve the needs of their customers:
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.
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!
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?"
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not that I disagree with you, but what are you referring to by the millions of server closets thing?
Like windmills, solar panels, and everything else corpo lobbyists said were bad because they were leashed to their oil barron daddies.
We won’t.
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
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.
Unfortunately it's slightly less negative about the AI ponzi scheme in general.
They got greedy - bought everything, from memory, electrical equipment, to whole governments, in search of money, forever soiling an emerging new tech with the need for greed
Honestly LLMs never provided any value in the first place, it degrades everything it touches. Even if it costed $0 it's still a misinformation machine trying and failing to replace laborers.
That's a greed problem, primarily. Misinformation,platform engagement metrics, job degredation, all part of greed.
No, I think this is just a completely useless technology. Using humans will always be better than this and we have an overwhelming abundance of humans.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
-Datacenters
Ngl, this means nothing. People that hate data centers talk more about it online than people that don't hate them.
If you were to ask people in a proportionally chosen group whether they are against data centers, the result would be pretty different I presume.
... but they'll build them anyway because the American regime could not give less of a fuck about the American people... and sadly, that's exactly how Americans like it
No, most Americans do not want it that way the election system is just set up so a minority often gets to select all the politicians.
That and the constant negative press about our politics discourages people from voting by making them think they can't make a difference, so voter turnout is embarrassingly low.
The irony is that if everyone who thought their vote didn't matter actually voted for a candidate, they would win by a landslide.
The irony is that if everyone who thought their vote didn't matter actually voted for a candidate, they would win by a landslide.
I think turnout is low because it isn’t easy. Sure, there will always be people who care not at all, but the voting system is set up for a narrow window of time, on a weekday.
This setup reeks of both Jim Crow inertia and a blatant wish to reduce the number of working class voters. Tuesday and not Saturday. Why? Seriously.
In addition, they could easily make that day a holiday. They do not. Every day they do not shouts: we really don’t want you working class people to vote much.
One location I lived had early voting open for 4 days before voting day, closed or reduced hours on Sunday. Rural town. Little old ladies set up in the town hall to oversee it. This setup would improve voting, just have a 5-day spread.
Most of that isn't true in most US states. Mail in voting and early voting are widely available and I've never lived anywhere that the precinct wasn't open for at least 12-hours. Hell, there are 18 states like Washington where mail-in is about the only way one can vote.
Sure, that is one of the mechanism which led them there... but they have been so brain washed they would actively fight against things that would help them like Unions, universal health care, etc
You're not entirely wrong, I'd just be weary of any monolithic thinking, because that's one of the primary things that leads to the political climate that exists today.
Fair point... some days I am not resilient enough to fight off the bias and frustration
