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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption.

Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)

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I think it’s pretty clear that it’s easy to sell rage against companies right now. News just tells people what they want to hear in this age

Because the NSA doesn’t care about their public image or energy consumption. Google at one time did so this makes them pretty big hypocrites

Yeah. Public pressure might actually work against Google, but it’s unlikely to work against the NSA so easily.

I'm curious for your perspective:

It seems clear that the article is not about arbitrary data center usage, it's about a large increase in data center usage at Google, attributable to AI.

The initial premise of the thread was "Why isn't this about (arbitrary data center other than Google)?"

Isn't that easily answered by: because it's about the delta, and the context of AI, where Google is perceived behind, and Satya famously pointed out the energy demands x their margins puts them in a strategic situation with only bad choices?

Witb that context, do you believe this is attributable to someone picking what to write articles about, based on how much they'll be able to influence them to change their behavior?

We can care about two things at the same time. This isn't a "hit piece", it's reporting on Google's own 2024 environmental report.

No you can't that's why the attention economy is very competitive

The NSA's data center is a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of similar data centers operated by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, et al. And I would not call increasing your power consumption YoY by 13% or whatever it was to be "trying". To the extent they are trying, it's only to squeeze the value out of their real estate and to avoid blowing their transformers. They can spin that as "saving energy" until something like LLMs with their GPU requirements comes along.

All those ones operated by google, amazon, and microsoft are operated for the NSA. They exist to spy on you.

I don't think it's right to characterize this as a hit piece. They're reporting on a document Google published, using Google's numbers and framing. If Google didn't want people to talk about their carbon consumption they would presumably not have published this report.

It was talked about a lot when it was first opened, news massively biases towards new topics.

Bias toward new topics is why it's called news. Otherwise, we'd have to call it olds.

MS and Apple seem to be doing an awesome job as well

It's because the NSA's "massive" datacenter is actually tiny, cannot contain the things that paranoid people think it contains, cannot do the things weirdos imagine it does.

pretty sure lol that what snowden has shown reveals you are quite wrong

What's new to me?

A couple year ramp in phrasing like "hit piece" used to describe mundane news.

Put another way: I see a ramp in use of hit piece for writing, where not writing, given you have the info, would be described as a cover up.

Grok's ASIC is pretty efficient afaik.

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