ricecake comments on Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (6 children)

It's less a vague umbrella and more an academic category. It just feels odd to call it vague in the same way you wouldn't call "chemistry" vague, despite it having applications ranging from hand soap to toxic waste.

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[–] XLE@piefed.social 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

In this case, the vagueness of the term AI is abused by its fans. "Aha, you claim to hate AI, and yet..." they say. They should know better.

"Chemicals" is actually a great example. If someone said "Chemicals are coming out of that factory", you'd rightfully cringe if a factory manager said "well actually soap is made of chemicals too"

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 0 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I take your point. :)

It's worth mentioning in my opinion though, because if someone were to say "we should ban chemicals" it'd be worthwhile to point out what that actually means.

I don't actually think the broadness of the category is intentionally abused, it's just that it's an incredibly common thing to remove anything from the AI category that's explicable.

I feel slightly more hanlons razor about it since there's people in my city talking about and petitioning on the popular notion of banning all data centers from the state, and how it would be awful if s data center came here. I know what they mean, but it's not what they're trying to get the law to do, and our city already has six data centers I know of off the top of my head. The language drift is fine, but when it starts to conflate with policy it's another issue.

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[–] XLE@piefed.social 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

Considering data centers tend to harm the local communities, yeah, I can't blame them for wanting data centers out of their community. Make sure they don't break the law to poison the air of local communities like Elon Musk's data center did. Fix the other electricity loopholes. Make sure they don't destroy local water tables. Tax them appropriately. Don't let them lie about employment opportunities... And maybe then we can talk about whether they should be built.

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I think the part you're missing is that 1) it's my community too 2) they're not talking about AI data centers, or new data centers or anything like that, they're petitioning to ban all data centers, and 3) we have multiple data centers in the city already that no one complained about until AI data centers became a thing people felt concerned about.

There's a major difference between the 2 square mile hyper scale AI data center that requires a nuclear reactor and a full water treatment plant to cool and the 2 acre data center that's air cooled and has no more ground pollution than any other parking lot and essentially a warehouse.
The state government has two in the city, at least, for processing electronic tax records, applications and hosting service sites. We have a few national insurance companies that need to process all the things they process. A research university, and a web hosting company round out the list of ones I know about.

This is my entire point about why sometimes it's really necessary to point out that what someone is referring to is only a small part of what the words they're using describe. The language being imprecise doesn't matter until someone proposes a law outlawing chemicals, shuttering all data centers, or banning AI.

LLMs are problematic. My fancy rice maker isn't.

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[–] XLE@piefed.social 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

Touche. It is interesting that in this case, the differentiation between "AI data center" and "non-AI data center" is almost as important a distinction between "bad chemicals" and "chemicals" in general. I was previously familiar with the harm of living close to a Bitcoin mining farm, but a conventional data center, not so much.

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, the conventional ones still draw a good chunk of power, and they're not clean but they're not dirty. Same as how a grocery store isn't good for the environment but you're not looking at them first for places to clean.

They tend to be boring, and are usually not a public thing but just something owned by a company to house their computers. The only reason I know about the ones near me is I used to work at one and people would move jobs to or from other ones. (As an aside, a datacenter is a great place to nap if you like white noise).

For a sense of scale:

This is the site of an open AI data center. The yellow square is about 1 square mile and mostly encompasses the area they plan to/have filled.

That angle shows more build out.

This photo has two normal data centers in it. The yellow square is also about 1 square mile. I've highlighted the data centers in red. One is to the left of the square near the middle, and the other is down from the right side near the big piles of what looks like rocks. (Spoilers: it's rocks. They make asphalt). The sprawling complex in the upper right is a refrigerated grocery store distribution complex. The middle on the other side of the block from the asphalt is a coal power plant.

Of the things in this picture, I'm most upset about the giant freeway interchange. Coal is shit, but it's a modern plant so it's not belching soot, just co2, and the utility is phasing it out anyway. The grocery traffic is mostly dead except between the hours of midnight and 7am when they do restocks.
I can hear the freeway if I go outside.

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