I commented on that video the day it came out and I’m still having arguments with people on it.

There seems to be two common threads:

• claiming that data centers use as much water as a golf course and no more energy than any other big building “because they use new more efficient designs”
• comparing it to things that humans use to survive, like agriculture, refrigeration, heating and cooling

Both of these seem to be some right wing influencer or news casters talking points and they’re both insane.

The actual facts:

1. Retail data centers use about 6 million gallons of water a year. Yes that is almost the exact same as a golf course.
2. Hyperscale data centers (the data centers that AWS, GCP, Azure, etc run on — the ones built, owned and operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — use 200+ million gallons a year. This is a fucking order of magnitude larger than a retail data center and IT’S STILL NOT HOW MUCH AI DATA CENTERS USE.

We don’t have numbers for AI data centers because they’re hiding them, but just from energy usage alone the water usage will be more, because that’s what the water is used for.

3. Yes, new designs exist…but they don’t solve anything. Those new designs trade off water for electricity. Either they use more electricity or more water. Unless the design is completely renewable energy they are using just as much water (guess what power plants use to cool their systems?!?!?)
4. The majority of new AI data centers are not using these new systems, so it’s literally just a red herring to stop your argument about water usage.
5. Agriculture is used to keep people alive. If you deleted LLMs from the planet right now, nothing would happen. People would go back to their daily lives. You can’t delete food from the planet.
6. I had a sixth but I can’t remember it. If I remember it I’ll put it here.

If y’all want my sources I can post them, just wanted to jot all this down quickly between meetings.

Uhh what? db0 hates ml and grad. They’re almost the complete opposite of tankies.

This is honestly a wild post.

If your jokes aren’t funny without putting fake forced laughter behind them then they shouldn’t be said.

Dodecahedron.

They are to the rest of the world.

Please do explain or link sources to what you think are “security holes”.

use the library. I don't mean go to the library, I mean use it for free things. for example I can go to like 20 different museums for free through my library. disc golf is free at almost every disc golf course on the planet. parks are free, walks are free. bouldering is free. There's a ton. it's all about your imagination.

Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.

That’s not what it does.. you fell for all the rage bait exactly like OP said.

wait.. so to get this straight, you were paying Redis, a company that creates an open source project, for their offerings in order to keep funding them. When they changed their license so that their business wouldn't be cannibalized by AWS (who was modifying Redis under the hood, not contributing it back to the community, and then pricing it lower) instead of continuing to pay Redis who's license change wouldn't have affected you at all, you instead started paying AWS for a project they started in order to avoid paying for open source code they were using.

you do realize this is a walmart situation right?

I think you mean American owned. Amazon is only a partial owner, whereas anti-consumerism is incredibly American.

Really weird that the article doesn’t mention that the campus is 4 times the size of both apple and Microsoft’s campuses combined. It just mentioned it being larger. But 4 times is crazy.