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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.)
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
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.
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