Comment by zkmon
14 days ago
People in UK opposed train tracks in steam engine days, saying that the train engine sound scares their horses and cattle. Ofcourse data centers are far worse. But it is amusing to see how humanity continues to oppose tech and the tech buldozes anyway, like a evil monster.
How are they "far worse"? Steam trains are noisy, polluting, require tons of coal, kill animals and people in their way, and crash fairly regularly (when built with 1800s technology).
A data center is a big grey box that sits there humming quietly, and that's it. They do require power and lots of it, but unlikely steam engines they'll happily use solar, nuclear or anything else.
Noise pollution is a real issue, even for data centers that is "humming quietly". Same for its energy consumption. Water cooling is another issue, given that lots of the steam a data center generates can rain down in places that wont make the water re-join the water lifecycle easily.
You're comparing steam trains in practice to datacentres in theory. To give one example: the US federal government is suspending all sorts of environmental regulations relating to pollution, just for datacentres: why would they do that if datacentres ran on clean solar or nuclear?
I get why people wouldn't want (steam) trains in their proverbial back yard just as much as they wouldn't want datacenters. Trains may be a net benefit for a region's mobility and economy, but that doesn't undo the local disruption to people's environments. (I'm unconvinced datacenters have that impact on a region, it generates some jobs at best but most of those will be secondary/tertiary jobs. Primary jobs will be the people doing daily work in and around the site like security and maintenance, but the higher paid specialist work will be flown in or done remotely)
They tend to use coal and natural gas, instead, often in especially dirty forms. The fact that they can use solar doesn’t mean they do.
Data centers are quite loud.
I worked in a data center for a decade. None of the neighbors even knew what it was. One actually stopped me to ask.
It was very loud inside, but you couldn't hear it from outside unless the power failed and the generators came on.
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“Humming quietly”? Really? Humming, yeah, sure, but ask the people living next door how quiet they are.
The data centers near me are pretty quiet. They’re set back from the road enough that they’re no louder than the background noise of traffic, wind, airplanes overhead, etc. I understand my small sample size doesn’t apply everywhere, but it does negate “all data centers are loud.” Some data centers might be loud.
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The new ones will be though. Look up the specs for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin: no fans; recycled liquid cooling.
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it's a dumb comparison and you're doubling down on it
They also need gargantuan amounts of fresh water. And it's anything but a quiet humming.
96db is quiet?
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-n...
The linked article claims that sound can be heard "hundreds of feet from the data center". That is a very short range.
As much as I doubt that spreading of the data centers is a good thing, noise is not the weapon to wield. Unless we are talking the center of a quaint town. And possibly not even then.
The posted article measured 67db, the sound of a lively conversation, next to the data center.
I am interested to learn where the 96db comes from.
I see only vague claims about up to 96db inside of a server rack, but could not locate a concrete measurement or method used to determine this number.
I stopped reading this a few lines in at: "Because there is a lack of reliable data from sound level meters ..."
A decibel meter is about $20 on Amazon, often cheaper. I dont know what their agenda is, but they've got one.
> like a evil monster.
I tend to like not fearing starvation every year, not fearing freezing to death every year and not having the vast majority of my kids die. Industrialization led to all that.
Post-industrialization, AI-fication, Human Replacement (whatever it ought to be called) could take that all away.
I didn't make the analogy to railroads. I'm just pointing out that its a terrible one if you want to use it to argue against AI.
I didn't realize we were going to freeze to death if there weren't chatboxes everywhere.
Well, we're all going to die of something unless we invent radical life extension technology. I personally hope that artifical intelligence makes progress on this before I myself get old and die.
Wow, HN really believes that AI is keeping us from freezing to death?
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>But it is amusing to see how humanity continues to oppose tech and the tech buldozes anyway, like a evil monster.
So you're saying the UK should never have built a railway system? It sounds like tech is right.
The benefits of the railway system should've been distributed a hell of a lot more evenly and it should have been blocked until that happened, yes.
I disagree with the “evil monster” part, but thanks for sharing that example. I’ll probably use it the opposite way in meetings .. people were deeply skeptical of railways too, yet they ended up transforming society for the better.
Only after a lot of mega companies ruined a lot of people's lives and then went bankrupt.
ah, yes.
It's not about opposing data centers, it's about opposing them close to where you live.
There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact: - insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away - virtually no jobs brought to the place, besides some construction work early on - massive drain of local resources - massive eye sore
Like, I'm not against data centers per se, but you tell me they building one few miles from my house, I'm listing it the day I hear it and escaping as far as I can.
> There's now a gargantuan amount of documentation about their impact: - insane noise levels 24/7, you can hear them even at miles away
Can you share a link or two to this? Hearing a data center from miles away sounds suspicious.
I'm fairly sure that most aren't any louder than other facilities of similar size. It's comes down to their cooling infrastructure and they vary widely.
It sounds more like humanity opposes noise pollution?
It's almost like all of that is true and early train companies didn't even bring enough value to the area to offset all of that?
Trains still do that today. They cut a locality in half with only certain crossing points being allowed. But at least enough people ride the train they can feel it's worthwhile.
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