• Novamdomum@fedia.io
    338·
    4 months ago

    Imagine complaining about the water a data center uses in Texas but being totally fine with the billions of gallons it uses to cool it’s two nuclear power stations. Yes I looked it up, yes it’s a ridiculous hypocrisy and yes it would be lovely if people stopped falling for clickbait like this.

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      Not even close to the same thing. And the fact that you think they are is what’s wrong with the world.

    • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      Except nuclear power plants are a net benefit to society as a whole.

    • belastend@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      20·
      4 months ago

      Yes, AI is as necessary as providing power. They are certainly the same. Let me just refrigerate my food using AI. Oh shit. The power is gone.

    • Cait@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      18·
      4 months ago

      You are missing the point that it’s millions of gallons daily, just for AI. You know the thing that actively makes our lives worse for no reason at all

      • Novamdomum@fedia.io
        232·
        4 months ago

        I’m sorry it’s making your life actively worse and I’d love to hear exactly how, because for me it’s done nothing but improve my life in so many ways. It’s got me over writers block so many times, helped me work through tricky problems of all kinds, taught me all sorts of excellent drawing, singing and music creation skills, helped me make sense of societal and political issues that I would not normally have understood and answered questions with a total absence of ego that I would never have had the nerve to ask before for fear of sounding stupid.

        Hegelian dialectical materialism? It walked me through conversationally until I got it. The feasibility of someone being rich enough to build a rocket and just leave earth forever? It laid everything out in incredible detail (the resources required, it turns out, would be mindbogglingly insane).

        AI hating is dumb and that’s a hill I’ll happily die on.

        (Edit: fixed my atrocious spelling)

        • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
          31·
          4 months ago

          You could have already done all of this with the internet itself…I dont understand why people think they need llms. Hell, you could have done all of that just from books, no internet needed. I feel like people are as lazy as they’ve ever been.

          Also, you totally trust everything you learned. Thats not smart, being that its literally a corporate owned propaganda machine thats purpose is only to sell you ads to make the rich richer. Why do you think they are putting billions into it? Its sure as FUCK not for betterment of humanity.

          • Novamdomum@fedia.io
            14·
            4 months ago

            “Also, you totally trust everything you learned.” Never said I trusted it. You just exaggerated something I said so you could argue the counterpoint.

              • Novamdomum@fedia.io
                24·
                4 months ago

                It’s not a conversation though is it… but I think you know that. There’s so much bandwagoning against AI at the moment. It’s just sad and unfortunately, quite predictable.

                • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
                  3·
                  4 months ago

                  I think I use AI more than most people here.

                  It’s okay for simple stuff. But the amount of times it has given me blatantly wrong information or impressive looking solutions that are needlessly over complicated and broken is incredible.

                • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
                  1·
                  4 months ago

                  You’re not unique because you love llms, it actually is something less intelligent and people with psychopathic tendencies tend to like as well. Ask your little chat bot to look up some studies on it if you like.

        • haloduder@thelemmy.club
          11·
          4 months ago

          Something tells me all of the stuff you’re creating with the assistance of AI is garbage.

          Not even because you’re using AI to do it, but because what most people create isn’t impressive and I doubt your skilled enough to be an exception.

          You might think AI is helping you and making you better, but that’s probably because you’re not put in actual positions where your performance is measured and matters.

          For me, AI is only useful for consolidating search results into a response. It’s wrong more often than its not, and to make use of what it says in any meaningful capacity requires knowledge that AI can’t give you.

        • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
          4·
          4 months ago

          Taught you bullshit. You put in a prompt and got shit out. You don’t care shit. Did you go and fact check everything it told you? Because guess what they make shit up constantly.

        • breecher@sh.itjust.works
          19·
          4 months ago

          Considering the odd strawman comparison to nuclear power plants you started your argument with, I suspect the level of understanding of Hegelian dialectical materialism you have learnt from the AI, is probably not as advanced as you seem to think it is.

          Also every single one of your examples describe situations which could have been solved by other means (and it would even require you to exercise that brain of yours a bit as well, an added bonus no doubt).

          What does your precious AI say to the fact that people are being forced to save water so a corporation can mindlessly waste it on their profits instead? That seems to me to be the core of this subject, something you not only breezed lightly over but in fact completely ignored in favour of your personal anecdotes.

  • ansiz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    101·
    4 months ago

    I don’t get the news about these data centers guzzling water, where is the water going? If it’s for cooling, but that doesn’t destroy the water…

        • InputZero@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 months ago

          Yes but that’s expensive. It’s a lot cheaper to just draw from the municipal supply and discharge it.

          • ansiz@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            4 months ago

            I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don’t most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?

            Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area

            • InputZero@lemmy.world
              2·
              4 months ago

              In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That’s why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It’s possible but it’s not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you’re done with it with cheap cold water.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
        14·
        4 months ago

        Evaporative cooling is one option, yes, but not the only one. Do we know what method these data centers are actually using?

    • Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      They use adiabatic gas coolers on their refrigeration systems. Basically there is a perpetually wet piece of media that air runs through before it gets to the refrigeration coils. By running through that wet media you precool the air basically down to the current dewpoint by evaporating water and therefore you’re cooling the refrigeration coils with colder air which leads to more efficient opperation and reduces the size of the gas coolers required. From what I’ve seen a lot of these datacenters are also switching to CO2 based refirgeration systems which are generally better except the low critical temp of CO2 mean that their efficiency starts to drop quickly once the ambient temp gets much above 80F. Using adiabatic coolers mostly removes that shortfall.

  • MissJinx@lemmy.world
    5·
    4 months ago

    don’t be selfishn, Microsoft AI will be used by the whole world and only few people will need this water to shower.

    S/ hahahha

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
    18·
    4 months ago

    My country is int he middle of a data center boom, fuelled by the usual royal and political, uh, inputs. We also have seasonal droughts, which often result in water rationing and angry people upset at the mismanagement of our resources. Wonder which will give way first.

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
    11·
    4 months ago

    Oh, and THEN, the AI will ask you to go take a shower if you’re feeling dry, dirty or thirsty. I mean after telling you why taking a shower is good, why people take showers, which celebrities took showers the past week and asks if you want to ads taking a shower to next week’s reminders.

  • bluelander@lemmy.ml
    39·
    4 months ago

    Texan here: we barely get to vote on shit at all. And they’re gerrymandering to make it even harder.

    I’d call Texas a clown car but it’s too big to qualify.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      The estimate of the majority Democrats would need to retake the Senate is something like 70/30, based on the degree of gerrymandering.

      And the math just gets worse every time maps are redrawn.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        How strong is Fair Maps Texas? Assuming it’s sincere in its effort to redistrict Texas fairly, Maybe they need more brickthrowers saboteurs sign wavers and clerical volunteers.

    • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 months ago

      After Civil War 2, Texas and parts of Mexico would end it with a treaty as a single independent country with their own shit stains to live with.

  • Gammelfisch@lemmy.world
    51·
    4 months ago

    LOL! The Red Run Deregulated Texas Oblast does not surprise me with this kind of shit. If it dries up, the fucking red voters can stay and find the fuck out.

    • pressanykeynow@lemmy.world
      7·
      4 months ago

      There’s only one obvious answer to that question in a capitalism world. Because it’s cheaper than other places. Why is it cheaper for the corporations in the driest places where common people need to stop using showers is also obvious.

    • bitwolf@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      24·
      4 months ago

      I always rant about tech moving to Austin.

      They need low heat, reliable power, cheap / fast internet, and an abundance of water.

      Texas is literally none of those things.

    • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
      9·
      4 months ago

      Industrial cooling is all about evaporating some liquid into gas. For evaporative coolers, that liquid is water and works best if the air is dry and water is plentiful (the absurd part). If you don’t have water or the air is so humid that evaporation is difficult, the liquid is expensive refrigerant which must recycle back into liquid in a closed loop with a gas compressor that pumps the waste heat into the air through forced convection heat exchangers (big fans blowing air past hot refrigerant-filled pipes), all of which consumes a lot of energy.

      Ideally, we’d live in a post scarcity society in which huge arrays of solar panels would provide electricity to run closed-loop refrigerant plants that would consume zero water to cool our data centers.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 months ago

      Because that usually means it’s hot and sunny so things grow well if you can get water to it.

      It’s easier to get water places than make it warmer or sunnier in the optimal water place.

      Edit: sorry this was me thinking about the alfalfa sprout comment above. Makes zero fucking sense for IT.