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> Bringing uo AC while you defend datacenters making global warming worst is just a cherry on top.of it. Just underlines anti-human fck you all ideology of it all.
You are badly breaking the HN guidelines in a dozen different ways. You should refamiliarize yourself with them:
This one is factual on both counts. All you need is to read what CEOs we talk about write and listen to what they say.
> These bad faith "but you exist and do unrelated things" fallacies are a.) bad faith b.) make people have ai people more.
This one was entirely correct assessment of the situation and proper response. It was a fallacy. It used the "but you exist and do unrelated things" argument. And yes, it makes people hate ai culture more.
What they write and say is all over the place. Some of it (IMO, everything in the last few years by Musk and Zuckerberg) is obviously nonsense.
Altman, much as people like to hate him, is presenting himself as wanting governments to figure out the rules by which this should all be restrained. Amodei put his money where his mouth is on attempted morality, and got burned by the Trump administration for his efforts.
> This one was entirely correct assessment of the situation and proper response. It was a fallacy. It used the "but you exist and do unrelated things" argument. And yes, it makes people hate ai culture more.
It's fine to care about the stated negative consequence. I sure do.
You a software developer? If so, where do you put your efforts on optimising code, the bit with 5% of the problem, or the bit with 95%?
Likewise: If you care at all about the stated negative consequence, you do not stick your fingers in your ears and moan about the people telling you the origin of 95% of those negative consequence, just because everyone's favourite target of hate this year is 5% of the total problem.
Meat in particular is way, *way* worse than most people think it is. I presume this is due a mixture of "but I like the taste" and PETA having about the same level of political nous as Liz Truss.
For most of the environmental issues under discussion, the total impact of meat production by itself has a *much* greater impact on both local and global environment than even what happens if all the currently planned data centres get built, though of course "how much" varies by both specific location and specific measure. Greenhouse gasses? Meat is 20x worse; Electricity? Meat's worse by a factor of 2; Fresh water? Meat's worse by 4000x in aggregate, with specific local stresses going both ways, wars have even started over fresh water supplies for agriculture; Biodiversity, eutrophication, deforestation, for these things DCs are obviously negligible, not so for meat; Mining/material extraction is hard to compare, given how much mineral fertiliser we go through, but the extraction of mined fertiliser has basically killed off some ecosystems; Local air pollution? Specifics matter, though planet-wide meat's still worse.
And then there's all the other things people do, and demand the right to do.
Of the two, use of air con in the US is a bigger source than current data centres, and in the middle of the range of extimates for how many new data centres will actually get built over the next few years.
It would of course be much better if both AC and DC (in both senses) were powered by renewables, but y'all elected someone who thinks they're a woke Chinese scam or something, possibly because one got built near a golf course in one of his foreign properties, possibly as a favour to the people who gave him that new aircraft for his "library".
Citation needed.
It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay.
At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term.
Good news is that in the short term, the higher partial pressure in the air means it leaves faster at first, so things stop getting worse much sooner than that.
> At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term.
So, that's ignoring carbon capture by means natural or artificial, and therefore is a totally irrelevant number, both to this conversation, and to most others.
No, it inherently incorporates all natural processes that capture carbon.
Artificial, sure, if you want to point at them I believe current effots might reduce the required reductions from 99.9% to 99.8%. However, I wrote "emissions", and the overwhelming majority of CCUS systems are reditecting what would otherwise be emissions directly to capture, i.e. what I wrote would include that as reducing "emissions".
It literally cannot, because it's not parameterized on the amount of additional plants being planted.
> Artificial, sure, if you want to point at them I believe current effots might reduce the required reductions from 99.9% to 99.8%.
Goalpost moving (i.e. fixing a particular value in hypothetical future assumptions that was not fixed or agreed-upon previously in order to support an otherwise-false point), which solidly sets the original claim as false.
> However, I wrote "emissions", and the overwhelming majority of CCUS systems are reditecting what would otherwise be emissions directly to capture, i.e. what I wrote would include that as reducing "emissions".
Technically compatible with your statement but not how the vast majority of individuals would interpret it as you originally wrote it.
To be clear: I'm not arguing that we don't need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions or that carbon capture is necessary. I'm arguing that last point, that "we need to reduce emissions by 99.9%" is extremely misleading and much more harmful than hurtful for those ends.
Primary production of the planet, i.e. total carbon fixation, is broadly not influenced in this manner.
The things which do influence it, are included in the function.
> Goalpost moving (i.e. fixing a particular value in hypothetical future assumptions that was not fixed or agreed-upon previously in order to support an otherwise-false point), which solidly sets the original claim as false.
My point is that it is tiny in scale even at best.
Furthermore, I claim it is unlikely to get meaningfully better than it already is, given the economics at present appear to be more "how do we game government objectives to get subsidies" rather than directly performing useful work that does not require subsidy. Perhaps I am too cynical, but typically if there's a good economic reason for doing something anyway, it's not in a list of big showy projects that might happen at some unspecified time in the future, it gets implemented by people who are happy to never get noticed.
> Technically compatible with your statement but not how the vast majority of individuals would interpret it as you originally wrote it.
Can you prove that?
> To be clear: I'm not arguing that we don't need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions or that carbon capture is necessary. I'm arguing that last point, that "we need to reduce emissions by 99.9%" is extremely misleading and much more harmful than hurtful for those ends.
I do not accept your argument.
Especially "much more harmful than [presumably auto-corrupt and you meant helpful]".
*Net* emissions must go down approximately that scale. The common phrasing is "net zero" rather than "net 0.1%". However, your assertion that me missing the word "net" from "We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%" seems pedantic rather than helpful.
Plants account for roughly half of global carbon fixation. "Broadly not influenced" is straight-up false. Your follow-on arguments are consequently false as a result.
> My point is that it is tiny in scale even at best.
Such as this one.