The problem is data centers produce absolutely colossal amounts of noise that can be heard and felt for miles. Even if water is a non-issue, the noise isn’t.
Neither is a problem in the sense that both noise and water consumption can be mitigated with some minor (relative to the total cost of a project) capital investments. If these were rational objections, states and municipalities could simply issue noise codes and water access caps, then let the companies figure out how to work within the lines. Instead, we’re left with blanket bans
No, it’s not the noise it’s the power consumption. Your locale becomes a power consumption hog so your off-peak hours and your peak hours become very similarly priced. Noise can be dampened, the power bill cannot.
This is actually a meme/fake videos on the internet, where they add random noise over their videos while recording a datacenter to make it seem really loud.
Realistically you can only hear it if you're within 30-50 feet of the data center, unless there's a separate diesel/natural gas generator.
People are complaining because they are building data centers near people, and data centers produce prodigious amounts of noise pollution. They should be building them far away from civilization, where the low frequency noise has plenty of distance to attenuate.
People are complaining because of propaganda online. My middle school age children think data centers are evil and we don't have any around us nor have they ever seen one.
Fairness isn’t the relevant lens. Copyright isn’t the right lens either. This is purely might-makes-right, where the winner is whoever has the best offence and best defence.
It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.
Copyrighted works plainly have value for Anthropic. Why aren't they paying for that value?
As a vigorous, thrusting company surely Anthropic has the wherewithal to pay for it. And if they don't, if all they can do is steal, if all they represent is the theft of the labor of others, then what good are they?
I'm describing reality as it is, not how I wish the world to be. Copyright is a legal construct that makes intellectual works ownable. But those works aren't merely property; they're also culture. And borrowing from, building upon and transforming existing works has been fundamental to human creativity since the very beginnings of human creativity.
I support copyright in a narrow sense, but I think it's proving to be increasingly archaic, conceived for a 19th-century world of mechanical printing presses and far too absolutist for the 21st-century world of memes, sampling, and LLMs.
Well their justification is that distillation is bad because it means baddies can get their own models without their safeguards and then make anthrax nukes or whatever. Even though it's self serving, it's at least self-consistent.
I’m getting unsolicited texts all the time about how the “billionaire tax” in California is the worst thing ever. No matter if you think the tax is misguided, it’ll probably work at preventing the billionaire tax from passing, but it’s a good firsthand demonstration at how power accumulating to billionaires tends to accumulate even further. Only billionaires have the resources to fight back so aggressively against any encroachment on their power.
That gets into an idea I've been pretty adamant about. People say that capitalism is the worst system except for all the others, but its actual property is that it's inevitable. Money (power) can be used to gain more power. If even a few people choose to do so, if not countered intentionally by some outside force, wealth and power will accumulate.
Whether you see that as good or bad or something which needs to be checked and controlled is a separate discussion, but it's an obvious and expected result.
Look at Trump and even Vance “joking” about Canada being a state. They wouldn’t hesitate to take Canada by force if America ever got to the point where fleeing to Canada was forcibly prevented.
Exactly. How did the roadster stick to the curved ramp with no obvious jets firing before going airborne? It wasn't going fast enough for centrifugal force to keep it from falling so how did that part of the magic show work?
Suction as I understand it, it had a ground curtain and the blurb talked about the ability to create downforce to keep the roadster version on the road at high speeds.
The same fans that blew downwards to create lift were likely first run to suck it in to the ramp, then reversed.
These demos were not performed by "daily driver" cars - they were multiple look alike props in a magic show, each optimised for the trick shot and not driver comfort or experience (if any driver(s) even took part).
> The same fans that blew downwards to create lift were likely first run to suck it in to the ramp, then reversed.
That's a nice theory, but it is wrong.
The fans that are used to create suction do not create lift. The amount of air moved by those fans is way too small to create lift, the lift is entirely due to compressed air used as reaction mass.
Fair point, I was thinking the same when I wrote the comment <shrug> .. I still side with the reverse hovercraft sucking force .. and thinking they likely reversed those fans after the need for suction passed (every little bit counts).
I guess nobody clicks on the links anymore? From the OP:
"Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary. Powered fans and active wings maximize traction and cornering speeds in all conditions, achieving massive downforce at zero speed. A next-gen steer-by-wire system offers incredible feedback in various road conditions. Activate Track Mode to lower the car and transform the suspension. High downforce or low drag modes can then be used as needed on the track."
Very cool. Too bad the demo was achieved with wires and special effects.
Edit: citation? Common sense. If it was real they'd have done everything they could to prove it. It's as real as Tesla's self driving taxis were a decade ago. How many more times will people get duped by this conman?
I want a citation this was real before I believe literal smoke and mirrors at night.
Didn't F1 cars briefly have downforce fans (basically suction fans underneath the car) until it was ruled out of spec? Basically a "reverse hovercraft" trick, normally used for handling, but "turned up to 11" here.
There was the Brabham BT46 that got quickly banned.
On the front of cars you can actually buy and drive there is the McMurty Spierling an electric single seater with a fan generating more downforce then it weighs (can go upside down)
Yeah it now holds a bunch of lap records on tracks without very long straights (where it looses due to not that high top speed). It also took the Goodwood hillclimb in 2022 and held it for a couple years.
"We should be able to handle a long term net-split" was always part of my emergency plan for every service I worked on. (ie. Imagine all Comms between the Americas and the rest of the world cut for weeks)
Pretty likely to happen if there is a major war or political upheaval to require the internet be cut in two. I didn't require the service had no downtime, but that it was reasonably possible to restore service within a few hours.
Things contributing to that are you should have either live data or a backup in similar geo location to the user. Both the data and the crypto keys. Same for the code. And you should build your service simple enough that someone else who has never seen it before can deploy it and get things at least mostly working. Things like terraform are good for that - and it dramatically reduces employee training too.
> a quick fyi: in a total war everything is a valid military target
this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions, even in WW2 people pushed back on some things their government decided to do, like firebombing large civilian centers
hospitals and water facilities are easy examples, which Israel is very guilty of violating in recent years
I would just like to point out that the court that prosecutes war crimes was just hit with even more sanctions from the US, with the justification that "nobody will hurt American citizens", buy the guy who indirectly ordered the bombing of the school.
Legal definitions are pretty worthless if nobody gets prosecutesd.
> this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions
That is why total wars are distinguished from a normal war. The concept that "all civilian infrastructure supports the war effort" is used in a total war to justify firebombing civilians.
Dresden and Hamburg, by the UK and Americans, public outcry saw this tactic end
WW2 is arguably bad example because everyone was committing crimes against humanity, worst thing humans ever did do, and today we're doing a lot of the same things that got us there
Do you have any sources on this? Would be interesting to read that perspective. Coincidentally read an article [0] on the bombings of Hamburg 2 days ago. As far as I know it was the tactic the US and UK employed until the very end of the war. Dresden was 2-3 months before the end of the war. The bombing of Hamburg was 2 years earlier.
The "tactic" of committing war crimes? How exactly does the date make indiscriminately killing civilians more legitimate? If the bombings had targeted military installations or even civilian targets of strategic importance (which would technically still be a war crime) it would be a different story, but targeting innocent civilians in their sleep isn't really debatable.
I have no idea how you could interpret my comment to think that I'm trying legitimizing bombing civilians.
The parent said "public outcry saw this tactic end".
To my knowledge, it didn't end. That's why I asked for sources and explained how Dresden happened at the very end of the war, where they still employed the tactic, that OP said was ended because of public outcry.
>data centers are dual use technologies now and valid military targets
proclaimed by who? Even the "international order" would disagree, as Yandex Cloud wasn't providing their services to any military companies per my knowledge.
Yandex Cloud was bombed symmetrically. Ukraine made no attempt in targeting MSK-IX, which could be a real military target.
Datacenter hosts Russian bots that comment on western social media. Disrupting Russian propaganda online weakens the Russian military. A crushing defeat for Trump in the mid terms is a military boost for Ukraine.
Google and Amazon abide by US sanctions - if these are Russian firms, it’ll take much longer to get bespoke approval to pay AWS or GCP.. my org is smaller than those and we just outright banned Russian companies after Ukraine was invaded. Too much of a headache and too risky.
Aim a laser at it at a well-chosen frequency (or just use one high enough that nothing reflects it, you don't have to go that high for that), send up a couple kilowatts of power, and just wait. The cooling will not compensate and just heat the satellite to 1000 degrees or so. If needed do it for a week, a month (assuming 10W laser power isn't outright enough to destroy the solar panels or antenna or some other critical component)
Yes, I get that aiming it is pretty hard, but we've hit far smaller targets.
Eh. I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable." They just got into bed with the wrong ally, I guess?
They are not politically stable, quite the opposite: weak states held together by single sector revenues.
Right after Ukraine war started, I started maintaining a map of next flashpoints: got a hit on Arabian peninsula + Iran, Venezuela, India/ Pakistan.
Israel and Gaza were a surprise.
Eastern flank (Finland/ Baltics/ Poland/ Romania is in a slow burn.
Still waiting for Taiwan, south china sea and Singapore/Malaysia+ Indonesia - but that will be the big one, and actually the conflict for the straits (Malaca and Sunday) may have gotten invalidated by the Iran mess.
> I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable."
That's the lie that the US and most other Western countries have told themselves ever since the discovery of oil turned what used to be nomads herding camels and catching fish into the thriving petrostates they are today.
Most of MENA is only stable on paper, that stability being heavily dependent on oil and gas production providing giant slush funds to citizens and a horde of exploited migrant and seasonal workers providing for daily needs. That's why they all went into tourism so hard over the last two-ish decades, they know that the fossil fuel reserves are eventually going to deplete and worldwide demand collapsing with them, and that's why everyone but Iran eventually made their peace with the existence of Israel despite sometimes heavy opposition of the population, and that's why there's still barely any opposition to the US and Israel waging war against Iran, and that's why most of MENA militaries but Iran and Israel's are utterly useless as well - a capable military would be able of coup'ing away the ruling kleptocracy.
And now the MENA countries are in for a wild ride. The Mullahs are sadly far from gone, the Western world is busy weaning itself off of oil and gas following the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the price shocks related to that plus the Iran war, tourists won't come back in meaningful numbers likely for a decade if not longer.
I agree, but the way they have gone at it is about the dumbest and incompetent way to do it. A blunder of historic dimensions, I'd even say Vietnam made more sense.
These countries measure processes in decades. Their rulers are not up for election. They can go through huge (sometimes futile), multi-year projects and processes which would not survive any regime change in the west. They are willing to pay a price to assure their independence from Iranian influence - they pushed and encouraged this war in the first place.
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