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.
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.
You’re not wrong, but those already exist and are less bad for society than data centers.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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
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greedy psychos have really turned AI data centers into the dark satanic mills
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.
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.
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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.
There is a sampling bias in that.
Good thing the wealthy elite ignores what 99% of people say.
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.
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.
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.
[insert Top Gear “Oh no! Anyway…” meme]
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
-Datacenters
Ironically, one wouldn’t exist without the other. Our local anti-data-center group’s website is hosted on a cloud server (namecheap). Maybe it’s NIMBY—or maybe they just don’t realize they are supporting the very infrastructure they oppose.
Its not the same kind of infrastructure. We have had hosted cloud servers for decades now, but these datacenters are purpose-built to run AI, with millions of graphics cards.
They can use more power than a city, and they use enormous amounts of water. And they seem to be loud. There has been news about people in their houses getting noise pullution around the clock, sometimes a low vibration humming noise which goes through the walls and prevents them from sleeping properly.
I dont think there is a single advantage for people living near a datacenter. Noise and increased power bills.
A web hosting data center and a Slopware data center are 2 completely different animals.
And where are they going to host a site? On a napkin? Fewer people have access to the hardware needed to self host today due to the ridiculous prices of hardware.
