skeaker

Those things aren't at all equivalent, so I'm not sure I understand your point.

There being a market for something does not justify its existence, at least morally.

Hmm. I gotta say I do see these though. Especially Claude...

Yes, because it's a matter of scale. Napkin estimate that you can do at home is that there are about 2.7b buildings, and half of them use concrete. 8/1.35b = 0.000000001~%. Compare that to 12,000 data centers polluting 0.1% of us. 0.1/12000 = 0.000008~. That's 8 zeroes past the decimal vs 5, so right off of the bat we can see that a completed data center is thousands of times worse than a concrete pouring.

The buried ledes here are firstly that a concrete building is a one-time thing, where once it's built it is built and that's that. (The 8% of pollution is a yearly recurring thing from the production of concrete, but an individual concrete building is done polluting once construction is finished.) On the other hand, an AI data center contributes its pollution every year continuously forever.

Secondly, the matter of scale. Concrete took billions of buildings to get to its share of the pollution done. You will be hard pressed to find anything in the world period that can be produced at that scale without causing significant pollution. It's almost miraculous that it's only at 8% globally, especially when compared to AI data centers, of which there are only 12,000. You could build a dozen buildings out of concrete every day for the next 40 years and on a global scale you would not move the needle on how much pollution concrete is responsible for. Do the same with data centers and while the math is a bit harder you will wind up being responsible for ~30% of the pollution on Earth.

This site literally has a user powered ranking system so dissenting opinions get downvoted. It is an echo chamber.

That's for all cement in the entire world, not one data center. This math is not hard. Plastic is roughly 5% of our emissions but you would not point at one straw and say it is worth 5% of all emissions.

This would still pollute less than the usage of the center. You're underestimating how much energy they use once active.

On paper you can't do this, but in practice the fines for doing so (if they ever even reach your mailbox after you've bribed the local politicians, which you've done to get your center built in the first place) are just a cost of business. There are plenty of videos of people who live near data centers who now have sputtering water from their sinks, or water that comes out brown and unusable.

Exactly, you can't compare them and they should therefore be treated differently.

Very unintentionally funny for you to say this here of all places.

A port area that uses the same water infrastructure that runs to residential areas, yes. The saboteurs are not named but I would wager that the Dutch group talked about in the article recruited from the area, yes.

Emphasis on "mostly" meaning that you do see people talking about the impact. There you go.

If you think bribes are at all going to the constituents, you don't understand what a bribe is. This is a very different thing from them paying taxes back into the city.

> Are we talking about the environmental impact?

Yes, obviously. Scroll up or down.

Yep. Even in very red areas like Texas, isn't the public opinion something like 95% opposed? City councils keep allowing it despite this, clearly due to bribes. Whole situation sucks.

I suppose if you're one of the people that live near where it would be built it might be worth sabotaging it if only to go another week without the incessant hum and brown, filthy tap water.

Not sure about rating them against each other but I've had plenty of success with YouTube Music. Once it learns your taste well enough it starts giving you some real deep cuts. I've found songs I like with it that had less than ten thousand views on several occasions. Notably it has never played AI-generated music for me which is a big plus too. Google can be awful but their algorithm undeniably works.

In all fairness, a genuine attacker WILL be abrasive and abusive. They WILL single out employees that are gullible and exploit them. It's not pretty because a genuine attack is not pretty. Of course a simulated attack will be indecent and discourteous in nature, that is how attacks are.

"You take my privacy, I take yours" would be the thought process here. Not complicated.

If your point is that you're trying to parrot Sanders' beliefs in a deliberately stupid way, it isn't working, because this isn't why he thinks the public should have a stake in how AI companies are being run. It's what you think he thinks after not having read the article.

Why? He makes a compelling argument for his stance, and he is of course one man, not a business. If AI companies are going to have such a profound effect on the common man, including both you and me, then why shouldn't we have a say in how they operate? I can hardly say the same for Sanders' belongings.

Who is "we?" A utopian society is what we should ideally be aiming for at all times, not some dirty word like you seem to think it is.

This will be true for me. The new layout is just so, so bad. It's hard to believe they found a way to make a worse UI given how many people found the old one difficult.

Pretty cruel to do this right around finals.

I feel like this actually isn't that complicated. Just remove any special protections that they get on the judicial end. The judicial is already there with the intention of balancing the powers of the executive, it just doesn't do that currently because they limply decided that the executive can go and do whatever the hell they please.

I would imagine using any non-Chromium browser would cause it to fail to find any Chrome extensions, yes.

Fair enough, but I think many people miss that something can be suboptimal in one way and very optimal in another. As an example, plenty of people here hail ffmpeg as the most optimal way to convert videos between formats, and for the technically inclined it sure is. Despite that, probably 99% of people that have ever needed to convert a video haven't touched it/don't know its name and never will because its interface is totally suboptimal. "It is the best and not successful" can be read as a true statement, but it leaves out that it is the best in this one sense and is far from the best in another sense.

To bring this back to the point I have found that AD is well documented, functions generally the same everywhere, and has an intuitive enough interface that you can get not-super-techy interns on the helpdesk up to speed on reseting passwords in it in short order. I couldn't say the same for any Linux management system I've touched, so even though you could say "system management on Linux is the best" and have that be a true statement, you're still missing where it fails and why that area matters to businesses.

Surely you understand how a data center is different from housing?

> Honest question: Why?

Because it works really well for a corporate environment where you require central management for your devices. Yes, the environments of Linux and Windows are different as you said, and unfortunately that means one will generally be better than the other within certain contexts. The corporate workstation use case is a gigantic one that Windows is currently dominating in, and this is terrible for Linux adoption because it means to get a job at a place that uses Windows you are incentivized to use it yourself so you can learn it. It also means that schools (which are often run like businesses internally) are way more likely to use it, so new students that are just learning how to use a computer are coming up on Windows.

Linux is indeed very different from Windows and that's fine, that isn't a problem at all and it has plenty of upsides. What should be clear is that this particular use case is a remarkable downside for Linux, and the mass adoption of Windows in the majority of businesses should make that self evident. Realistically Linux can and absolutely is used in business contexts in the same way as Windows (hence why France is going ahead with it), but it isn't as optimized for it as Windows is, when it totally could be. Macs have had some robust management platforms made for them that I've found pretty similar to AD for example. If someone developed a straight out AD clone for Linux that functioned more or less the same on the front-end it would be huge for Linux adoption in my opinion. Hopefully that answers your question.

No, it really just gets like that at the end which is what this chain has been going over.