• badgermurphy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      20 hours ago

      They aren’t inherently bad, but they are bad when not used and built in the public interest on a planet with runaway greenhouse gas emissions and collapsing ecology.

      If someone ever brings up one of those data centers, we can talk about their good aspects. There definitely are plenty, but I don’t think the poster was talking about those.

      • sudo@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        So what you’re saying is… they’re inherently bad.

      • Tja@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        19 hours ago

        We are talking about developing alternatives to US services, which, surprise, will need datacenters to run. You don’t provide email to 700 million people from an old laptop in a basement.

        • badgermurphy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          18 hours ago

          Those are among the plenty that are in the public interest. The whole Information Age would be practically impossible without them. In fact, distributing them would probably make them less efficient.

          LLM data centers are the ones that are all the rage lately, and the ones most often being designed using environmentally irresponsible and wasteful technologies, then lobbying for extremely favorable utility rates, foisting the costs on the locals. They’re so far at the forefront of the media that many people think these are the only kind there are.