- cross-posted to:
- actually_infuriating
- cross-posted to:
- actually_infuriating
Original comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1uyyywv/comment/oy3cgd7/
Trees vs. Data Centers
Photo 1: Memphis, TN (top)
Photo 2: Sandston, VA
Photo 3: Abilene, Texas
Photo 4: New Albany, OH
Photo 5: Fayetteville, GA
You can do the same with solar panel farms, orphanages, hospitals, community owned grocery stores, or any number of things that you would be happy with being built. Things need space to be built on. More at 8.
lmao what a clown. There’s plenty of abandoned stores in every city and empty lots. You don’t have to go tear up mother nature when we don’t even use the land we already have.
And people would have a fucking fit if they put a datacenter in the middle of their town.
The people out there aren’t having a fit? Where’s their silence?
Yet they do, for things I mentioned among others.
Things need space to be built, but all of those other things you mentioned have value. It’s upsetting to cut down a shitload of trees for something that is going to be useless in 3 years when the AI bubble pops.
AI isn’t ever going away. It’s here to stay like cars, houses, the internet. It’s part of life as we know it, and it’s literally never going to disappear.
You think the world is just going to go back to normal with no LLM usage?
People still have houses and mortgages after the mortgage bubble burst in 2007.
The internet, ecommerce, and .com’s still exist after the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000s.
A bubble bursting doesn’t mean that thing dies and goes away. It means that the hype for it goes away and the market normalizes/corrects suddenly.
There’s a VC run and an attempt to force AI usage into things where it doesn’t belong, or serves no purposes, or completely alienates the user base. There is going to be a correction for sure, and its not going to be pretty.
No, people genuinely think AI is going away because it’s “useless” and doesn’t provide anything worthwhile. The comment I replied to said the AI data centre will be useless when the bubble bursts. If they don’t think AI will go away, why would they say that?
I’m anticipating that mixed-use data centers will have enough capacity to meet post-pop demand. The current ubiquity of LLMs will end once people are forced to pay the true cost. I don’t expect the technology to suddenly just vanish, but most people are not going to be willing to pay what it will cost to make inference profitable.
That depends heavily on the quality bar, not just aggregate capacity. Gemini 3.5 Flash qualifies on 42 of 52 tasks at a 75% bar, but only 15 at 100%—so routine workloads may remain cheap while demanding ones become premium. The real question is how much of today’s usage needs near-perfect output.
In my personal testing as a senior software developer and in encounters with other users (anecdotal evidence probably doesn’t mean much to someone writing LLM benchmarks, but it’s all I have to go on), I’ve found LLM output to be unacceptable at any quality. I most recently tried using Claude at various efforts and with various models and found that even Opus failed to give me acceptable results with less effort than my own cognition would have provided, regardless of the effort setting used. I dislike LLMs and that dislike probably affected my results, however.
I have a coworker (a senior dev with ~25 years of experience) using a frontier model with all of the latest prompting techniques and harnesses (he’s been using loops for the past few weeks and we have an extremely robust array of MCP servers available for easily accessing resources), and the software he has been writing has been a constant aggravation. He’s been generating a lot of shell and Helm (i.e. gotpl) which are fucking terrible and require a lot of care to get right, and the volume of pull request feedback I’ve had to give him is mentally unsustainable for me. I’m averaging something like 4 reviews for every PR from this guy. I don’t have firm numbers, but before he began using LLMs, I’d guess the average was closer to 2 review rounds.
My only interactions with LLMs are in a professional software development context, and I have been unimpressed with them to the point where I question their utility. If the supposed state of the art struggles this much to produce useful output in an area where I have mastery, what is the output like for areas where I don’t know as much? It kinda poisons the well for me.
Demand isn’t going to reduce though. It’s going to continue increasing.
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Solar panel farms actually work really well with rewilding projects. Not forests sure but if instead of where we grow fuel corn we instead dropped solar and rewild them for more power than the corn can provide plus biodiversity.
And as others said there’s plenty of empty spaces already existing that most of what you list can use. There’s two malls near me with half the shops or more empty, an abandoned hotel (though it was recently announced it would be converted into apartments so, ya know, proving my point) and a field bought by a hospital just being left as bare dirt (because they say they might need it some day).