Hacker News Reader

recallingmemoryon How does the US use water?

Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2].

People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.

1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w...

2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...

recallingmemoryon How does the US use water?

Vox did a great video visualizing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc&ab_channel=Vox

recallingmemoryon AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, OpenAI are worst offenders

Yeah, I am in the opposing camp too - I don't use Cloudflare's bot fight tooling on any of our high traffic websites. I'm not seeing the issue with allowing bots to crawl our websites other than some additional spend for bandwidth. Agent mode is pretty powerful when paired with a website that cooperates, and if people want to use AI to interact with our data then what's wrong with that?

recallingmemoryon 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

Humans like knowing their next paycheck is safe. AI is a disruption to that feeling of security.

recallingmemoryon 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

So long as precision isn't important, I suppose. Hallucination within summaries is the issue I keep running into which prevents me from incorporating it into any of our systems.