#data-centers

[rebuiltzine]

Maryland Pays, Virginia Plays: How an Energy Project Is Sacrificing Maryland Land for Northern Virginia’s Big Tech Boom

When Joanne Frederick first saw the survey stakes hammered into the edge of her family’s Frederick County farm, she thought it was a mistake.Nobody had asked permission.Nobody had warned her.And nobody told her the electricity would be flowing out of Maryland — not in. “They told us it was about reliability,” she said. “What they didn’t tell us was who it was for.” The Maryland Piedmont…

[10001gecs]

one 100 word email written with ai costs roughly one bottle of water to produce. the discussion of whether or not using ai for work is lazy becomes a non issue when you understand there is no ethical way to use it regardless of your intentions or your personal capabilities for the task at hand

with all due respect, this isnt true. *training* generative ai takes a ton of power, but actually using it takes about as much energy as a google search (with image generation being slightly more expensive). we can talk about resource costs when averaged over the amount of work that any model does, but its unhelpful to put a smokescreen over that fact. when you approach it like an issue of scale (i.e. "training ai is bad for the environment, we should think better about where we deploy it/boycott it/otherwise organize abt this) it has power as a movement. but otherwise it becomes a personal choice, moralizing "you personally are harming the environment by using chatgpt" which is not really effective messaging. and that in turn drives the sort of "you are stupid/evil for using ai" rhetoric that i hate. my point is not whether or not using ai is immoral (i mean, i dont think it is, but beyond that). its that the most common arguments against it from ostensible progressives end up just being reactionary

i like this quote a little more- its perfectly fine to have reservations about the current state of gen ai, but its not just going to go away.

[scipunk]

Scanners (1981)

[bixels]

As cameras becomes more normalized (Sarah Bernhardt encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use cameras because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by manufacturing companies. I paint not because I want a painting but because I love the process of painting. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

if i have to explain to you that using a camera to take a picture is not the same as using generative ai to generate an image then you are a fucking moron.

[chongoblog]

Your AI environmental articles talked almost exclusively about data centers which is also how the rest of the entire internet works. Do you want to get rid of that too?

Incredible that you managed to read through all of those articles in such a short time. It would be a shame if you missed something like this:

There are plenty of other reasons to be opposed to this AI stuff other than environmental factors, too, btw.

[mostly-natm]

can you draw bashir?

I can. The jury is still out on if I should.

[mjhartwork]

icon for the town of Ashburn, VA. I remember it as an endless map of townhouses (I once had a dream that as i walked around the square I used to live in, new houses kept revealing themselves, as if I was walking along a dimension I couldn't comprehend.).

I only learned that it was the data center capital of the world years after moving away. I also only realized a little bit ago why the sky felt so unnervingly open: there's no telephone poles! Everything's connected by underground cables.

[vandaliatraveler]

I have a theory that one of the primary drivers behind the federal government's drive to sell off millions of acres of our collective national treasures out west is to drill and dig more fossil fuels to power a proliferation of data centers around the country. Doug Burgum, current Secretary of the Interior, is an ex-Microsoft technocrat who no doubt has friends in the IT world counting on his leadership to exploit natural resources on BLM land to fuel expansion of AI and other operations at their data centers. These data centers require enormous amounts of electricity to cool their facilities and have a non-trivial impact on the environment. But in a country now run at the pleasure of billionaire technocrats, such as Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and others, there is no greater need than to serve their own wealth and well-being. The rest of us pay the price, literally, for their self-service. A case in point is an enormous data center proposed within walking distance of two of West Virginia's most popular tourist towns, Thomas and Davis. Ten thousand acres worth of buildings, infrastructure, noise, light pollution and environmental devastation in heart of West Virginia's most beautiful mountain country. The West Virginia DNR is actively helping the data center's owner to hide crucial information about pollutants. This is absolute, fucking madness. But this is the world the billionaire technocrats imagine for themselves, and they're not interested in what the rest of us think or how we are impacted by their decisions. What I can say is, as of today, we all still have a vote and come mid-terms there is an opportunity to course correct, to take the power away from the billionaire technocrats and their supporters in Congress to sell off our public lands (which we collecively own) and plant their data centers without regulation and oversight wherever they please. This is a generational fight and it may be our last chance to assert the authority of the people to save our public lands.

[kuiperoid]

The Internet Archive saves the day again

[dearestcherry]

The Flowerbed - Famfrit (Primal), The Goblet, P39 W6

A combination café and garden-themed dance floor. Designed to serve individual guests, couples, and small parties upstairs. Settle down with a hot tea, relax in good company, or pick out an old book to read. The basement is open for a range of activities, including a stage for performance. Find some music and dance amongst the flowers. OOC: My first house build from 2021. I originally wished to run a venue with it, so it remains set up for roleplay. It was, at the time, inspired by the roleplay scene I had witnessed on Primal. Open for any kind of use.

[opendirectories]

[vahalia-cress]

⸸ ʟᴀᴅʏ ᴀᴛʀᴏᴘᴏꜱ ⸸

[idontmindifuforgetme]

the neurologist i shadow is so funny bc she has a valley girl accent and yet she's the smartest person in the room. this woman was casually doing case consenus ab a man w frontotemporal dementia in the highest girliest voice imaginable. i want to be her i think

[scipunk]

Scanners (1981)

[cosmonautroger]

IBM Data Center, 1963

[archivlibrarianist]

"The U.S. Department of Education announced Monday that it would continue to operate its online library, known as ERIC, after allowing it to lapse last week. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had sought significant cuts to the document repository that is used by 14 million people a year, and allowed funding to run out on April 23. That ended the ability of the Education Department to add new research reports and documents to the library that is used by education policymakers, researchers and teachers. 

"'We are dedicated to sharing knowledge about the condition of education and ‘what works’ to improve student achievement,' said Matthew Soldner, the acting director of the Institute of Education Sciences, in announcing the continuation of the ERIC. A new, albeit much smaller contract was signed on April 24, according to the Federal Procurement Data System. [emphasis added]

"Soldner said that 'no content has been removed or deleted from ERIC.' He added that the 'preservation policy is unchanged: we will not remove an article in ERIC unless it is retracted by the publisher.'"

A cut to the budget will either reduce the number of papers added to ERIC, or slow its intake. The article above also states that the ERIC helpdesk will now be gone. The ERICA, or ERIC Archive, has been created over at the Data Rescue Project to coordinated copies of materials stored on the Wayback Machine.