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BlueMonday1984 Mar 2

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026 - awful.systems

Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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Soyweiser Mar 6

So the water usage of data centers/ai has long been controversial (either a huge issue/a non issue/distraction depending on who you ask) and the lack of real numbers around it made it hard to know more (but data center owners keeping it a secret made it sus). But now the stats of one google data center have been released due to legal pressure. 2-8 million gallons a day

Google data center water estimates go public, residents in Roanoke and Botetourt react

A proposed Google data center campus in Botetourt County could use between 2 million and 8 million gallons of drinking water per day, according to an executed agreement between the developer and the Western Virginia Water Authority.

WSLS 10

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fiat_lux Mar 6

Genuine questions borne of ignorance:

When they say “using” water, is this water that has to be actively removed from the supply each day, or does this number just say how much water is circulating in the center? I’m assuming it doesn’t all disappear, or does a lot of it end up released as steam or piped away as contaminated water or something?

The data center nearest to me uses sea-water, but I have no idea how much. And it doesn’t seem to put out steam or dump bad water back into the sea (not that I could tell if they were doing that).

I totally understand the electricity resource issue for data centers but the water usage thing confuses me, because I assumed it would be for cooling and therefore mostly contained and recirculated. With the exception of predictable maintenance issues like leaks and waste from mineral scale or algae, I don’t understand why this water would need to disappear, or why they would need to use potable water from the outset.

Admittedly my mental model is based on consumer CPU water-cooling setups at an imagined industrial scale. What am I missing?

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corbin

This is fresh water coming into the datacenter. A datacenter uses water for air conditioning; imagine spraying water on a screen door when wind is blowing through it and you’ll have a good intuitive idea of the dynamics. Most of the water is recaptured and used for several sprays before it evaporates away. To force wind through the screens, they use windcatchers, tall towers which induce wind inside the building.

This is completely different from water-cooling gamer setups. It’s more like a weather system. Water usually needs to be added because the datacenter is located in a dry biome; air conditioning doesn’t thermodynamically work if the air is too dry. This is actually really delicate; too much water will cause clouds to form inside the building!

Windcatcher - Wikipedia

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fiat_lux Mar 8

Ok that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

The data center nearest to me works a bit differently, I know they use sea-water for their HVAC because they share the pipes with other buildings using it for the same purpose, and I was lucky enough to get a tour of the system in one of those buildings a few years back. It’s multi-storey so perhaps I simply didn’t notice the windcatcher parts in the architecture.

But that obviously means it’s also near the coast and therefore not the driest biome from the start. I don’t doubt it still impacts the ecosystem but at least it’s not draining the potable reserves at the same time. To me this begs the question of why they’re building these data centers so far inland to start with.

As a side note, it’s pretty amazing we still do the windcatcher setup. They’ve always been fascinating to me, but I can’t help but be amazed they’re still relevant even in the highest tech buildings.