So are you saying they should have voted for data centers? Because I don't want them to vote for data centers, even if they're a bunch of hypocrites about it.

[delayed]

You don't need to have the correct reason for making the correct decision. What rejecting data centers will do is slow down the obscene excessive demand for more memory being taken off the consumer market, even if just a little bit. It will force AI models to become more efficient within their resource constraints instead of sucking up all the air in the room.

Sure. But it's risky to let people make correct decisions for incorrect reasons, because they may react in very silly ways when their goals aren't achieved. If the populist tide turns onto memory companies ("stop making AI chips!"), and a widely supported protest encampment blocks Micron's new fabs, that's going to increase your memory woes more than datacenter moratoriums helped them.

Reserving judgment until you've actually researched a topic is the third option.

"Yet you participate in society, curious! I'm very intelligent."

I think in this case that’s not exactly right. TikTok isn’t exactly foundational to our society, you can get by without it.

Smart phone or other things this sentence is usually trotted out for not so much.

Tiktok isn't. But how many people can get by without using any service that depends on datacenters?

Many people. I bet I could. You only need cash.

pretty sure the traffic lights you use on the road rely on data centers. sames goes for the buses and trains you may or may not use. The weather report too.

Pretty sure in Europe I can just walk or bike to places. I can use my local AI to get the weather report by just looking at the sky.

A ridiculous gotcha on a site where every other article is about using AI to automate your job, solve frontier math problems, or port old video games to new platforms. So to be clear nothing is our fault here. It's all just about the billionaires "making us" use AI for all these things?

Companies do mandate AI usage from the top, no?

Who mandated people reversing and porting old games for fun in their home?

If my government just decided to give me personally $1B taxpayer money without strings attached I'd 100% accept that in ecstasy. So if I say "spending money this way is not fair" I'm a hypocrite???

One of the nice things about living in a rich country is the ability to externalise certain costs.

Just not latency.

at least you're honest about it

I enjoy eating meat, but I don't support everything thea meat industry does, does that make me a hypocrit?

The fact that I enjoy social use social media and AI, even though I have complicated feelings about the ethics of the companies building them, including the impact of expansion of data centers. This doesn't have to be all or nothing!

The city I live in is currently struggling with the issue that decades ago they banned ugly cell towers, but it turned out that resulted in a lot of dead zones for cell coverage in town, and now people are complaining about that.

I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about democracy lately. The average voter will ask for a grab bag of contradictory things and then complain about attempts to deliver any one of them. My local subreddit wants cheap housing but also wants to preserve farmland and maintain historic buildings and welcome more immigrants at the same time.

My gripe is less with democracy and more with the ad-driven economy that has taken over.

The competition is so intense that in order for media to survive now, it needs to relentlessly farm clicks/views. So a story about a datacenter being built near a migratory goose pond carries way more value than the story about the pond actually is a Walmart parking lot runoff pit.

There is like this business game of whoever can fear monger and misinform the most without outright lying wins, and being honest and truthful gets you punished.

[delayed]

Obviously the solution is to make the cell towers less ugly :p

this but unironically

Exactly. We need a word for this common mixture of naïveté, hypocrisy, and small-mindedness.

We live in a system wherein our survival is gate kept by oligopolistic technology, energy, and health insurance corporations.

One can very much oppose the expansion of data centers while also using Claude all day to build software, because if you don't, you will lose your livelihood to someone who will. The problem isn't the technology, it's how it insanely disempowers workers in the labor market vs capital.

Until we have a durable solution for that along with the externalities that data centers impose on their localities, there is nothing hypocritical about using LLMs while voting to bring them to heel in the interest of the many over the interests of the few.