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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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What kind of data centres.
Because I have to tell you, 90% of the people who Have Opinions on datacentres have only ever fucking heard of them in the context of "AI" and they are very very misinformed on what DCs are and what they do. Equating all DCs to LLMs is like equating every single power generation source to a coal burner
tl:dr: outside of LLM shitfactories they literally underpin your modern life.
No, they don’t underpin it at all. We had no issues running socials et al and private servers fit business or any other data storage needs for that matter.
There’s not a single, valid reason for these other than a small set of individuals controlling as much information as they can and collecting data on individuals.
That’s without even mentioning LLMs.
As for me selectively using AI for anything, I never have and never needed to.
I have yet to see anybody raise and explain a decent rationale for these. The only ones I have identified are bad.
I think the reasons for opposing them are valid.
There are data centres in every city and there has been since the 90's. You could even argue that telephone exchanges before this filled a similar niche for us.
A regular data centre hosts basically everything on the Internet. Web sites (including this one), databases, storage, email, as well as the network switches and routers that underpin the entire Internet. They are necessary infrastructure and aren't controversial because they are more efficient and better for the environment than every company still having their old server room.
These LLM servers are all about processing. They are far louder - think of the fan noise when your computer gets busy. It's like that. All the time multiplied by thousands of servers. They generate a lot more heat. They have much bigger power and cooling requirements.
Fucking what
What do you think ISP infrastructure runs out of
Do you know what a colo is
Sit down
Good lord
This is exactly what i meant. You have irrevocably tied llms and datacentres in your head
What did ISPs run out of "before then" ? They have always run out of datacentres. I literally used to work for a dialup that ran its core kit out of a DC back in the day. A datacentre is basically just a server room on steroids. ( I hope you know what a server room is.) They are literally used by Telcos to hold the infrastructure you make calls on and likely used to post that extremely silly comment. They hold the equipment that flung the POS payment from your bank to the coffee shop you used this morning .
Ironically they also hold the equipment used to host and serve the wikipedia page you could have looked at that would have told you that datacentres do not just serve llms, but have in fact been around since the nineteen forties. (How farkin' old do you think chatgpt is? )
So while you may be so wedded to your anger that you decide rampant ignorance and stupidity are the route to go, reality doesnt back you up. The water gobbling pollution shitter that is an llm DC is a very different beast from most, and you've literally turned yourself in to a blithering idiot bleating all thing bad for no good goddamn reason.
Thanks for the compliment.
Their own servers. Which is what I said. Not a valud reason and thanks for expanding on what I said.
And you added nothing here either. I said this existed previously. So, not valid.
Nope, just opposing these data centres, like most of the population because they aren’t needed.
As for businesses renting space in these data centres to store their data, you’d have to be pretty fucking stupid not to be running your own servers and handing it over to these arseholes.
Perhaps you should get out and meet some people, touch some fuckin grass Taleya instead of focusing on insults that only make you look like an idiot.
My friend, I do not think you know what you are talking about here
I couldn’t care less what you think.
Not a single thing mentioned is new. The only things new are purpose built data centres whose goal is to make money on data.
As for hiring space in these centres for your business, you’d be a dickhead to do it.
We don’t need them and given what harm they cause, both environmentally and towards society, there isn’t a valid reason to have them in Australia.
You’ve thoroughly proven you don’t know what you’re typing about, here’s a lollipop 🍭.
Only the federal government can make money, if anyone else does that, it’s counterfeiting and fraud. What they’re doing is accumulating money, and extracting profit.
A roundabout way of admitting your purchase order has been submitted, but you do you.
We’ve had them on this island for decades, they’ve been fine until this current fascist perversion tickled the generals of our elected neoliberal ‘representatives’.
My bar is, like any other infrastructure, that they need to be justifiable, and defensible against any legitimate critical scrutiny levelled against them. The hyper concentration of resource ingestion, consumption, and excretion intrinsic of the implementations currently proposed immediately negates them on this basis.
I’d prefer a distributed model. Pepper them throughout existing infrastructure (businesses, basements in apartment towers) to dilute their environmental impact. Require closed loop cooling systems, with exhaust heat captured and fed into secondary functions like preheating hot water. Scale can be built from the diverse meshed connections between neighbouring sites, and sites can be scaled back or shut down as required.
None of that should legitimise the inane push to build ‘AI’ infrastructure. Anyone advocating for that rubbish needs to be summarily dismissed, and ridiculed when they persist.
Yeah righto.
Yes, making money.
I was thinking more along the lines of important files that you sign confidentiality clauses on, but you do you.
Yes, and I agree with your bar, and I agree with your position on negation which was really my point.
Well, wasn’t that kind of what we were doing? Everyone hosting their own data servers, without the addition of holding data outside the infrastructure owner?
AI and LLM infrastructure isn’t just my concern and it isn’t even where my issue came from. It’s data security, the kind of people that tend to own these, what they might do with it and the environmental and social impact.
Outside this very small echo chamber I’m not alone either. Most of those I know professionally harbour the same concerns I do, and don’t believe they are necessary. I agree with Taleya that a lot of people automatically think AI and LLM. I don’t and neither do most of those I’ve worked and engage with.
Profit isn’t the origin of money, it’s an accumulation function of currency users. See MMT.
I’ll rarely advocate for going back to what existed before, but my concept is to build on that distributed deployment, but tie it together with federation and fibre to provide agency, efficiency, and resilience. A distributed data centre for lack of a better term.
Smaller, intentional, federated sites could address this, it needs a solid model to build a proof of concept upon.
I suspect something was lost or omitted in the thread to this point which masked a broader consensus, and I think there’s a lot of potential if our agreements can be realised less violently.
That isn't what this was about tho. @Taleya was talking about how people are conflating datacenters in general with the overpowered LLM ones. And you exemplified that pretty spectacularly.
You also seem to be a bit confused one what a server is vs a datacenter given some of your comments
And Taleya is probably right with that, which is why that wasn’t addressed. I didn’t agree with the underpinning of every aspect of our lives and while I may or may not be accurate with that, my concern isn’t generated by AI or LLMs, nor is it because I confuse the data centres.
It’s the building of more mass data centres which I don’t believe we necessarily need, and those concerns are based on the data kept, what it’s used for, what is done with data stored against the wishes of the owner and the environmental and social impacts.
That I may not qualify to work in an IT department doesn’t make any difference to this…I’m not alone with this outside these small echo chambers. Taleya might be right when they say people confuse the data centres but not here.
Mm, at this point you're shitposting or trolling. Either way there is zero good faith here.
School holidays must have started already
That was pretty pathetic as well.
Yeah, go outside Taleya, it’s a lovely day
Ok kiddo.