LillyLyle/Count MelancholiaRT'ed by William Gibson on Twitter:
and it's so very on the nose of the issue:
and it's so very on the nose of the issue:
viq@LillyHerself there's also the "please conserve water, don't take long baths etc", meanwhile golf courses and cooling for aforementioned AI.
Zoyd@viq @LillyHerself Similar to California when I lived there and they wanted us to conserve water when big agriculture sucked up the vast majority of the water.
@zoyd @LillyHerself I can at least somewhat understand "it's important if we want people to have food". "AI" is a solution looking for a problem at best, and golf courses are a toy.
@viq True. It is, though, just another example of where the system ignores the true solution in favor of corporate interests.
Baggins
LongwingGolf courses, absolutely, but Datacenters don't actually consume water. Most datacenters don't even have a water-cooling component. Those that do use closed-loop systems or natural water sources. The cost to a datacenter to _consume_ fresh water for cooling would be prohibitive.
Hate on 'em for what they're doing, sure, but the main thing datacenters consume is electricity.
@Longwing @LillyHerself I admit I don't have direct knowledge, or didn't even follow through on the articles I read, but a bunch mention "a query uses so much water", and that data centers being built/expanded mean less water available for people there, and a story where a city refused to tell how much power and water a Google data center was using/buying (at preferential prices of course).
Mighty Orbot@Longwing
Really, though, the problem is simply the water being taken away from humans, often in places where there’s very little water to spare to begin with.
@Longwing “Companies can either use traditional air conditioning to cool the servers, which is expensive, or use water for evaporative cooling. The latter is cheaper, but it also sucks up millions of gallons of water. A large data center, researchers say, can gobble up anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day — as much as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/25/data-centers-drought-water-use/
@mighty_orbot
I stand corrected. I'm accustomed to datacenters that use CRACs (industrial scale AC). Probably because my region is too humid for evaporative cooling to ever be effective.
I stand corrected. I'm accustomed to datacenters that use CRACs (industrial scale AC). Probably because my region is too humid for evaporative cooling to ever be effective.
Gorgeous na Shock!@mighty_orbot @Longwing This is worse than I thought. I thought the issue was returned water being too warm and causing algae blooms and whatnot. But it's actually ”this region is so dry that evaporative cooling works. So we'll just use the precious water (because it's so dry) to do that!”
So the water isn't even being returned!
So the water isn't even being returned!
Cifer@mighty_orbot @Longwing I suspect "it's expensive" means "it takes a lot of electricity", so it's basically lose-lose. Joy!
Darwin Woodkayes they bloody well do
Magnus Ahltorp@darwinwoodka @Longwing @viq @LillyHerself This depends on where the data centre is, and how it’s built. For emergency purposes it was quite common in the ‘90s in Sweden, I imagine it’s not very common here now. In other parts of the world, it’s common.
small, primitive, wingless