Imagining that information exists in some pure unvarnished state (like a pristine mountain lake), until it is polluted by some bad actor (big bad logging company).
The metaphor doesn't work at all. It just more "the truth is under attack"
Exactly what I thought when reading this. And that's the moment I stop taking the (probably somewhat valid) claims seriously. This reminds me of the arguments against streaming we had a few years ago, that confused compression/decompression, completely disregarded local caching and calculated as if all network infrastructure in the world was just being used for streaming.
As much as I love a good satire, my experience with the Internet makes me worry that a group of true believers are going to latch onto this campaign and treat it as real, and people playing along with the satire will just be contributing to them.
Scott Alexander is one of the writers of the article I was talking about https://ai-2027.com/
To me as well that article reads as fan fiction, but it's no good that when reads like this are taken as truth they become hyperstition (is that a word in English? At least in italian it is. It means self fulfilling prophecy).
I wasn't talking about the original post, sorry for derailing the conversation
Go after computer games instead. There are millions of gamers around the world wasting electricity just for fun. You could generate several images and pages of text with the energy it takes to run a modern game for just a few seconds.
This is the quality satire we need. Every glass of water you greedily consume to keep your meat engine going could be delaying the singularity. Would you do that to humanity?
Some here seem to think this is satire. Well, Sam Altman want us all to funnel 7 trillions of $ for AI, so, we[0] will have to make some sacrifices to satisfy his grand vision.
[0]common folks, because of course you don't want to tax or stop subsidizing the "job creators" (i.e. rich people).
I've wondered this for a while, why does AI use so much water? Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain? Most computers I've seen use a closed loop and consume no water past the original filling up
> Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain?
basically yes. Closed loop systems require more energy and are more expensive investments. The main concern for data centers is Total Energy / Energy Compute.
Sure. While lowering the recharge rate on the aquifer, the river flow, etc. Instead of being re-used downstream, it's re-used downwind. Snow melt original destined for the over-allocated Colorado might instead end up in the Mississippi.
All that irrigation water pumped out of the ground in the southwest falls back as rain too. While the land subsides, plants can no longer reach water, and towns have to build deeper wells.
Yes - it's going into the air. The water isn't removed from the water cycle, but the problem is that fresh water was removed from the upstream part of the cycle before it could be used by the land. The term is water diversion, where downstream ecosystems, agriculture, and other users are deprived.
In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate it and condense it, producing fresh water and salts as output.
There can be very little difference between taking fresh water from a major river that dumps into the ocean vs taking from the ocean. For example, if you took 0.001% of the flow of the St. Lawrence river and run it through an evaporative cooling tower you're doing very little harm and perhaps benefiting the local ecosystem through increased rainfall. If you took 50% of the flow it'd be a problem, but the St. Lawrence is massive.
People think water is scarce, but there are still parts of the world where water is abundant, where flooding is more of a concern than fresh water scarcity.
Combine with Quebec's cheap electricity, and it seems an ideal place to site data centers.
Agreed, but I think some people on HN might actually feel threatned by such awareness. I wish there could've been a more constructive discussion around resource consumption rather than a war on "green propaganda".
How will that work, practically though? Could we perhaps contain human bodies in efficient gel filled bio-pods, effectively turning them into biological batteries?
That will be very boring for the humans thouhg. Perhaps a virtual reality simulation will keep them satisfied.
Let me know when you can start working on a neural jack interface to a brain.
It's not like a water-cooled computer that just uses water for heat transport. In a datacenter, I believe it's generally just evaporated off and lost to the atmosphere. This allows you to dump the energy into the vapor's latent heat.
So yeah, it's treated fresh water that is then lost. (It's not great, but I think the electricity waste is more compelling.)
The short answer is “yes, saltwater ruins nearly everything thing it touches in fairly short order”. PVC pipe? Okay, that’s probably fine. Pumps, sensors, and a lot of other things aren’t quite so tolerant.
An iPhone can write a whole email in a few seconds using a local model.