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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

But you would be banning trains if they were built to just run smack into the centre of town squares loaded with bombs, rendering the cities to dust, as a part of their design and boasted about by the owners.

At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.

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I think that perhaps your perception of the impacts of data centers is a bit over the top.

I parsed that wrong (better?) as running smack (heroin) into the center of town

And so I thought it was a reference to the overall AI psychosis, FOMO, and dopamine marketing. That is the big impact that bothers me, regardless of whether this deployment uses massive new datacenters. It is a toxic social impact even if it somehow reduced atmospheric CO2 with every token.

There are datacenters all over the place and have been for a very long time. Some of them host physical servers for people and companies, maybe only a literal closet somewhere in a building. Others are giant hyperscaler datacenters that have tons of 24/7 lighting and are the size of multiple football fields.

We need to be very careful here, or we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That is also my concern. This feels like a Satanic panic type of thing and if people don't form nuanced opinions, politicians will latch on to the issue and before you know it, many people who are heavily reliant on machine learning who don't realize it are going to have a bad time when stuff starts getting banned.

It 100% feels like a satanic panic type of thing

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