You’re posting on a website hosted in a data center. Lack of self awareness.

The data center hosting this website is already built, unlike the ones people are fighting against.

I'll grant the general public may not understand enough that they already rely on "datacenters", but there are reasonable arguments against gigawatt buildouts for AI, while still using technologies that run in datacenters in general.

This website is hosted on a single server. I was being hyperbolic sure, but we don't need the number of data centers we have by a huge margin, the primary reason they exist is because building software that runs on people's computers is not compatible with greedmaxxing.

First, this is just the standard "You're criticizing X, yet you use X. Checkmate" trope.

Second, there is an obvious difference in scale here which you're ignoring.

Third, a website that can run on a pair of servers doesn't actually need to be, and the world would be better off if fewer were.

Apart from water usage which can be solved by using recycled water or closed loop cooling i fail to see what all the hysteria is over. Communities dont own power production and if usage causes costs to increase then investment in more production will follow.

The level of vitriol i see in all countries over data centers is looking more and more as a proxy against ai.

You can really see how a terrawatt of ai compute in space will make alot of sense vs on earth.

They are also noisy, polluting, and first and foremost we should endeavor to respect the will of the people in a democracy. Of course on some level it is a proxy against AI, but more importantly it's a proxy against the stratification of society. The problem is the gap between rich and poor.

> Communities dont own power production and if usage causes costs to increase then investment in more production will follow.

Years of higher electricity price is good reason to be against. The communities gain nothing from those data centers, so it is a bad deal.

And yes, AI industry made an extraordinary achievment in making themselves hated. 10/10 success of their own marketing and PR.

They’re almost universally bad for communities so constituents don’t want their councils to approve them?. It’s as simple as that.

Your town gets worse basically forever so the rich can get richer. Queue “hysteria”.

In addition to what others have already pointed out, these scumbags are also actively choosing to build these things in areas that are in ongoing deep drought conditions (going on years now in some places) and trying to buy up water rights for more water than the entire population of the area already uses just to survive. Why do they want to build these things in the worst possible place they can put them? What's the logic behind that? Oh yeah. Cheap land and corrupt officials... Nevermind...

I kind of like having access to internet.

Which you have without this data center being built.

Oh I’m sure. But the comment I replied to talked about data centers in general not a particular data center. In general I like the internet. I assume you too in general like the existence of the internet.

The network infrastructure of the Internet barely takes more space than POTS did. And as for what’s on that network and actually using most of the datacenters, I personally don’t care for the Internet as it is today when compared against what we had 10, 20 years ago with significantly datacenters.

Internet with only network infra isn’t that useful. I bet you are also using websites and apps like hacker news.

> And as for what’s on that network and actually using most of the datacenters

Did you read the next sentence of my comment?

I preferred the intenet when it was far smaller than it is today.

How many data centres were there 20 years ago? I can’t think of anything I do online that I didn’t do then - talking on forums, shopping, watching video, listening to music.

Probably less? Yet you are using new services like hackernews etc.

No human wants data centers but lots of humans want to use services provided by data centers.

Also, towns can craft datacenter deals that produce public benefits. It’s expensive fixed infrastructure within their taxing jurisdiction.

The intersection of users and neighbors of AI data centers is probably much smaller than you think.

I can imagine a situation where this is true, like if it was used by some company to train an internal model or a model that never got released.

But even assuming the data center was only used for AI model training, more or less everyone who uses any electronics now either uses generative AI directly themselves or uses services whose employees use generative AI at work to create those services. AI is extremely popular and widespread now among many large and diverse groups of people.

Per polls, ai is pretty hated. And the distaste is growing with growing use.

A lot of ai usage is forced and unwanted. People dont perceive it as source of greatness, but as source of slop, cheap low quality and enshittification and crutially, existential threat.

Sure, people might not like AI by some narrow definition or choose not to use it themselves. But roughly every single service they consume or interact with is downstream of AI at some level now. The demand isn't just for chatbot usage and hasn't been for a long time.

That does not make ai "extremely popular". Instead, it is source of anger. That is what I called "forced to use AI".

The boom in datacenter construction is driven mostly by the AI boom and most of us are sick everything AI too. We don't want to read AI slop, watch AI videos, talk AI customer service or visit a vibe coded website.

Don’t forget getting targeted for scams by slopbots on forums and chat platforms

> Every day I wake up and it feels we're moving closer to torches, pitchforks and guillotines

The billionaires who are consolidating control over the media and social media would want nothing more.

Billionaires are providing much less value than we would have if random kids who lost the birth lottery were empowered to reach their potential to help society. We should not allow them to exist.

You keep saying this, care to explain?

I feel like I’ve just said this once, but sure.

Plenty of prominent billionaires have openly aligned with authoritarian over fairly-elected government. The fact that the media and social media properties they control promote divisive, pitchfork-y content doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.

In a violent revolution, even if successful, based on historic pattern, those billionaires would concentrate economic and political power. It was the fact pattern in the French Revolution. It’s been true for every post-WWII revolution too. It will probably get more and more true and people and assets become more and more mobile. The only exceptions were the pre-WWII Communist revolutions; that pattern ended with jet travel.