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Comment by WarmWash

1 hour ago

The current hysteria has little to do with datacenters and a lot to do with societal unrest about AI.

Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews. People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.

I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.

  • [flagged]

    • People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.

      Good luck with this attitude homie!

    • The thinking on display in this thread is something like,

      "I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."

      1 reply →

That can't be true. People obviously believe DCs have big local impact and it really does affect their power bills at least.

The global impact of AI doesn't change when you force DCs to build in another area.

  • It does if it slows the rate of data center builds and makes it progressively more difficult to site future data centers.

The noise issues seem real, but don’t impact whole cities

  • Is it? Can you give me a link to a video that shows the issue in a straightforward manner?

    Most of the shorts I've seen about this use an overlayed sound or synthetic sound of some sort.

    I've also seen ben jordans price on "infrasound" but that was inconclusive (and not very scientifically rigorous).

    I did see one video that measured 60db from the front yard, which I can admit could be problematic, but that fails to show that it's a pervasive or unsolvable problem

I live in northern va and I can tell you that histeria is about ballooning electric and other bills. vast majority of population is unfortunately “not there” in regards to any unrest about AI