You are posting on a website that is hosted in a data center right now. You use data centers at your job to send email, share documents, run software. When you go home and watch netflix, that video is streamed to you from a data center. All of the internet, your phone, and modern digital entertainment and life is run through data centers. My guess is that you don't seriously want to turn all of that off because 'reasons'.

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Ydarbleoj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.

One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.

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rpdillon 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Not at all. The post being responded to completely failed to acknowledge any value brought by data centers to the general populous. That's disingenuous. To force the point: run me through the scenario where we turn off all the data centers. Consider how much more water will be have, how much less expensive will electricity be, and what other problems might arise.

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Ydarbleoj 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

But that value is subjective. If my tap water is brown as a result of a DC, I may not agree with your positives. If my neighborhood is humming all night because of a DC, again, I might not have the ability to see what you see as positive.

So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.

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heylook 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They also didn't say whether or not they like electric lightbulbs. Or hot showers. Or clothes. Or the wheel.

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mawadev 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Turning off the datacenters would be horrible. We would literally be forced to go outside and touch grass. I wouldn't want to live in such a world.

	▲	rpdillon 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What else might happen?

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DrewADesign 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Extremely resource-hungry GPU data centers have a much deeper impact on the surrounding area. The only data centers power hungry enough to install local turbines for power before the LLM craze were GPU-based crypto miners, and living next to one of those also sucks pretty hard. One person I saw interviewed described the sound of the gas turbines like having a clogged shop vac in your house 24/7. If you look into it even briefly, you’ll see that you can’t honestly equate their impact to standard CPU server farms.

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kraquepype 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We could do all of that before the most recent datacenter build outs.

Existing datacenters at the scale we were used to were just fine for what was expected of them.

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Symbiote an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All of those are the old, smaller scale.

	▲	somehnguy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Can you elaborate on the scale difference?