I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.

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const_cast a day ago | parent | next [-]

To be completely fair, AI really does use more water than other typical compute tasks, because AI takes A LOT of compute.

No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second.

I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens!

Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.

	▲	Veedrac a day ago \| parent [-]
		The energy use claims are questionable, but I at least get where they're coming from. The water use is the confusing part. Who looks at a server rack and goes ‘darn, look at how water intensive this is’? People use water as a coolant in large part because it's really hard to boil, plus it's typically cheap because it regularly gets delivered to your front door for free. As to actual numbers, they're not that hard to crunch, but we have a few good sources that have done so for us. Simple first-principles estimate: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg... Google report: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15734 Altman claim inside a blog post: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Because it is ideologically motivated.

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bonoboTP 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Being ideologically motivated is not necessarily bad (understanding ideology as a worldview associated with a set of values and priorities). FOSS as a whole is deeply ideologically motivated from its origins. The issue is that there seems to have been a change in the nature of the ideology, leading to some amount of conflict between the older and newer guard.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

What change do you mean between older and newer guard?

	▲	2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	bonoboTP 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's not something that fits in a comment. The point is, ideology as such, is not something new in this space.

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Veedrac 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Gentoo should be able to be ideological without being stupid.