Comment by ipdashc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipdashc | Hacker News Reader

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> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want.

I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK.

Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going.

I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.

i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....

This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.

> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.

Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before?

I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever.

On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.

I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize.

We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.

> If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business

In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful.

We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone.

I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

I think that low externality things people are willing to pay for should be presumptively allowed unless there is strong reason otherwise. We are much too involved in the 'legislating individual activities' and not nearly enough in the 'tax wealth and redistribute' side of things.

> We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

Post-2020, the internet is real life. Internet native thought has proven to be a powerful force in the physical world. I remember laughing at the absurdity of 4chan posters in high school. I will not make the mistake of taking internet ideology lightly again.

>the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc.

Some of them are doing this at their jobs, but there are also tons of people pushing slop to open-source projects, vibe coding useless or redundant apps, etc.

It's also a cognitive failure of humanity to assume the free market is only guided by the invisible hand of demand and supply, if only government and moralists would get out of the way.

> the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn....

This ceased to be true lomg time ago. AI datacenters are not related to that chain.

For that matter, tech is not about satisfying a bunch of small customers either. Enshittification would not be a thing if it was.

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