Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don't understand though is where the water goes that it can't be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It's my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what's going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I'm confident that I'm missing something.
Thanks for your time!
I think you mean we let a small, selfish minority destroy it for everyone else
All US households consume 1 trillion gallons water a year flushing toilets. That's 4x more water consumption than datacenters.
Please elaborate what's being destroyed for everyone.
dude.... indoor plumbing is fucking amazing.
are you really telling me you shit out in a hole in the ground?
see, plumbing has a genuine utility and has probably saved more lives than you can imagine.
that data centers are nearing the consumption of 1/4th of all us households indoor plumbing should be the stat that gives you pause, because we have yet to identify what the fuck it's all for, while sucking 1.5 trillion dollars out of the economy while driving up prices for power, water, cpu, gpu, ram, memory based storage, disc based storage, fucking everything, while it walks people through committing mass murder AND undressing CHILDREN.
And you're chuffed because ai, only, lol, sucks up one quarter of the amount of water used by all OF THE FUCKING TOILETS IN THE FUCKING COUNTRY, for fucking WHAT?
We got along just fuckin fine without ai data centers. and I dislike calling it ai; these massive resources are being sucked up by LLM development - training, inference, and execution - usually someone asking for a summary of a fucking email. it's not alphafold, they aren't going to save anything. they're mashing the gas pedal into the climate crisis.
THINK FOR A MOMENT: HOW IS ALL THE WATER THAT AI IS ALREADY FUCKING USING JUSTIFYING ANY OF THESE PROBLEMS?
no but if water was my concern i might have done just that.
no shit.
but AI also has a genuine utility. and i'm not talking specialized algorithms that figure out protein folding or detect cancer. i mean regular chatbots.
personally i benefit enormously from it. i coded and shipped more in the past year than in last 10 years. at work i write more code in a day than i used to in a week. it helped me diagnose an autoimmune disease that require treatment that shitty doctors in my backwater country failed to do. it explains things i don't understand. it helps me overcome my prejudice and help me be a better person. it provides me a second opinion when i need it. -- that's just a short list of shit ai helps me with. and i'm not using even 10% of it. there's text-to-speach, there's speach-to-text, there's image generation, video generation, audio generation -- these have enourmous amount of use cases, and helps enormous amount of people. think an indie dev that can solo an entire game in weeks/months that was previously simply impossible. think producers that can ship entire series for pennies. think all those dreamers that dreamed but lacked ability to actually produce.
honestly i don't understand how you don't see value in ai.
that's just 1% or even less of total US water consumption. agriculture sucks up 30% if i'm not mistaken. but okay agriculture is food. we really need food. but watering lawns. do we need our lawns green and pretty that bad to waste 1.5 trillion gallons of water on it? and that's wasted, not total consumed. total consumed - multiply by 2.
i can agree with that.
well ai is a tool. some tools are used by bad people to do bad things. but for every "this dude used ai to do bad stuff" article there's a "this dude used ai to create a cancer vaccine for his dying dog" article
do you know how useful that is? i mean maybe not for you, but for someone who have to handle hundreds of mails daily? but really that's one real narrow real silly use case. more serious use cases: improved ai discovering new math, physics, chemistry, ai automating research - including usage of alphafold and all other scientific tools - to discover new drugs, new materials; ai optimizing business processes. and that's not some 'high-on-hope' shit like it was just 2 years ago. it's real. it's happening right fucking now.
think for a moment: why are you wasting your time and effort and mental energy to fight technology? like what for? what do you want to achieve? i mean i understand what you want to achieve. but is it a realistic outcome? like how do you see this fight turning out for you? like tomorrow doland trump addresses the nation: "TODAY I'M STOPPING AI. NO MORE AI." and xi goes like "特朗普停止了人工智能。我们也必须停止。", and all businesses that are ears dip in ai shit all go like "yeah we ain't need no ai, let's undo all our automation workflows and rehire all those people we deleted". you do you of course but i really, really hate wasting my effort on something that is very unlikely to happen.
i wanna get a bit personal - why are you doing this? "stop ai" isn't a goal. what do you want to achieve by stopping ai? like what improvements in your day-to-day life do you see if it's stopped? your relationships? work? do these improvements justify personal tragedies of millions of people who depend on ai?
and last question: have you actually used ai enough to confidently say it's useless?
fuck that was a long write. and will be a long read. hope you'll read it 😅
you obviously didn't read my response or didn't comprehend:
probably had an LLM summarize it.
furthermore, the rest of your reply is drivel. like:
your slopcode output has grown enormously! so much better thany the copypasta from stack, whoop-de-fuckin-doo.
no one cares.
I don't believe you. Straight up.
Or perhaps your docs are trying to tell you something.
re: the dog thing - FROM THE FUCKING ARTICLE, YOU TOOLBAG: Promising, but not a cure - It should be noted that this is a single dog, not a controlled study, and mast cell tumours can behave unpredictably. We cannot be sure how much of Rosie’s improvement is due to the vaccine, how long it will last, or whether the same approach would help other dogs, let alone humans.
The AI did not “cure cancer” by itself.
you're the one who brought the subject of plumbing up, as if the US is shitting too much or our infrastructure should be reimagined to make shitting more efficient. Instead I fucking schooled you on why plumbing is nice and the AI use is ridiculous, and you simply ignore the hard parts lol.
Dude, you're a cheerleader for LLMs. For fucks sake, go rent a personality, please, find a friend that you don't have to calculate the token cost for, because I'm not it.
I'm anti-ai because it's LLM garbage built on theft. You're not bothered by the theft, illustrating how weak of character you and your LLM slurpin homies are.
1.5 TRILLION IN THE HOLE, FOR WHAT?
For your speculation that maybe it'll pay off, jfc, if it was gonna happen it already would have happened you silly stupid fuckwit.
I want to get a bit personal: why do you need AI to justify your sad existence?
don't bother to reply, I'm blocking you.
i'll still reply. first of all, i want to apologize if my response seemed aggressive or insulting to you. that was not my intention. my communication style might feel rough at edgs but i carry no ill intent. i'm just trying to understand your position, and am trying to convey my position. like a normal exchange of opinions you know? you don't have to get all defensive and insult me to prove your point.
i did read your response in fulll, in fact many times over.
you make baseless assumptions and belittle my experience and expertise based on.. based on what exactly? me using ai? that's not cool you know.
i never said it did. i said, quote “this dude used ai to create a cancer vaccine for his dying dog".
you're completely dismissing the rest of the article: tumors shrunk, condition improved, energy levels improved, dog got much better. And you know what else can be described as "We cannot be sure how much of Rosie’s improvement is due to the vaccine, how long it will last"? every fucking existing cancer treatment. No chemo is a guarantee you'll defeat cancer, or that it will never come back.
i didn't ignore anything though? i validated your part that plumbing is essential but i objected your stance that "ai is useless". and i brought US toilets up just to show how little water datacenters consume compared to 'regular' stuff like flushing a toilet. and okay my flushing toilets and agriculture examples were kinda bad. you can't just remove canalization or farms without killing everyone. but there are things we waste water on more.. wastefully? sorry for tautology.
my goal was to convey that the whole "SO MUCH WATER CONSUMPTION!!!" hysteria is only really relevant in draught-prone areas. and btw most other claims like "ai driving climate crisis" or the "heat dome" from some comment in this post are mostly pseudoscience.
if you really want to optimize water usage you should start with lawns, not ai.
i'm a cheerleader for technology in general. techno optimist you could say. AI is only part of it.
what exactly did LLMs, or companies that create them, steal from you? what meaningful contribution of knowledge did you make to this world that was worth "stealing" by LLMs?
in the US. China for example spends around $120B. as for "FOR WHAT?" i already answered that.
i kinda dislike that you ignored the one part of my response that i'm most interested in:
And I want to make an accent on "justifiable" because you say a lot about ai expenses being unjustified. You want ai stopped. How do you justify disruption of millions of lives and businesses that rely heavily on ai?
that's another long read for you 😅