I worry people will think I'm being snarky here. I'm not.

It *does* astonish me in a sort of "how could you not know that" way but it's also a good reminder that there are, in fact, gaps in knowledge that are easy to fill and can change minds quickly.

It's why I'm always looking for 'em

"change is scary" is such a strong emotion that is makes people incurious about those alternatives.

My strongest evidence for this is the fact I keep having to explain you can charge electric cars at home.

It's a drug we can't quit

One hopes images like this, when paired with the knowledge that everything we burn ends up in that tiny slice of gasses, would help contextualize why we need to move away from energy sources we set on fire.

One hopes. Climate communicators should make some hay of this.

Talking about what’s happening with the low-information people in your life and not letting them laugh it off is an important thing.

I honestly don't know what I meant by that

Most people who are against the AI hype cycle right now aren't against things like local models running on your own machine and processing your own data using your own parameters.

They're upset with what's popular and what's causing all those data centers to get built.

Yes, I know that, but that's not the flashy stuff happening which is causing all the data centers to get built now is it?

The worst part about this conversation is that there are specific things people can bring up to negate broader points when I don't think it's appropriate to do so!

Well, now you are.

I was just talking to someone earlier about how one of the things with AI that bothers me is it reverses the trend of trying to make video encoding more efficient to reduce processing power and bandwidth usage.

It reads to me like anti-progress and is just one of the reasons I don't like it.

Ah, I see. You're still not addressing the very thing you missed in that post and instead are going to start arguing against a thing you have imagined other people are arguing.

Classic internet move.

You see some of us actually do think different data centers have different purposes.

(and it is only because of this misrepresentation that I replied. I'm a big fan of reading things and responding to the words that were written rather than the words you thought you saw)

I'm not excusing the hyperbole, but I do think you should read things closely and not respond as if they made a generalization when they did not

Which is why it's such a cool thing that they specified AI data centers in their post.

Did you miss the first two letters or did you think they said all?

Regardless, I started this out by trying to help other people explain why there is some fervent opposition to this.

I shouldn't have argued whether the opposition is valid or not because that wasn't really my point, but it ended up going there anyway because of course it did

I'm very aware of that, but I do think it's quite a stretch to compare those two things because one is a drastic change to the built environment and the other is some cables under the ground.

In other words, I think the people making that comparison are disingenuous.

But anyway, for real, g'night

Like, it's as simple as that. It's a reversal of a universally accepted good trend which is happening due to a speculative bubble and which the techbros are gleefully telling us will change the nature of our lives.

It's very natural for people to hate that! There's lots of reasons to hate that!

Okay, I said I wasn't going to reply, but look. Seriously, please engage with this notion:

People who run those sorts of things were spending a lot of time and effort to lower the energy costs for those purposes. Efficient computing used to be in vogue!

The fact that it's not right now is bad!

The fact that you used the word sinister here really tells me that you don't understand what I'm trying to argue here.

So at this point, just gonna stop.

The question is the utility of that! The actual utility to humankind weighed against the cost of constructing and powering a datacenter!

Perhaps a lot of people that are mad about new data centers getting built understand this!

They're not simpletons.

I sure am hoping the problem solves itself!

But if it does, then we're going to have a lot of data centers that got built which didn't need to be built. Which is, coming back to the start, waste.

And I mean, are you seriously going to argue against the idea that a lot of this compute power is speculative?

Because if you are going to argue against that, then we are thinking about this in wildly different ways.

Well the great irony is the reason I don't agree with you is because you are not engaging with the new reality of the situation here because you believe, at least I think you believe, that all new compute is good and all new compute has a purpose.

That's just not how many people think.

Having followed news about what the actual cost for using these AI tools are going to be once it stops being subsidized, I am highly confident the energy requirements are indeed bonkers.

But again, I feel like you don't even need to go that far. You just have to see the aberration for what it is.

And so, while I understand why you may think these arguments are disingenuous, I think you can only arrive at that conclusion if you deliberately avoid considering what exactly is happening with the power used by these data centers and who benefits from that.

It is, though. You just keep missing the point. I think you are intentionally missing the point because I just explicitly explained this right here and yet you are deflecting from it.

Everyone could identify the utility of the power used by a data center up until this very moment.

Yes, sorry.