[DoctorOetker]

Please do hang your datacenters in space so as not to piss away your waste heat in our rivers, soils or atmosphere.

Go to the bathroom upstairs, don't use our ecosystem as your latrines if you can direct it straight to the CMB.

[delaminator]

The US consumes 100 million aluminum soda cans per day.

We lived without aluminum soda cans for 100k years

[DoctorOetker]

You can't compare soda cans with computational results, we can't teleport soda cans up and down cheaply, but we can cheaply beam data up and down.

[delaminator]

Yes I can, on utilitarian grounds. We do it all the time, sending data centers to space is not zero cost externality.

[DoctorOetker]

Please continue:

1. humans use soda cans, that people could do without for 100k years

2. ???

3. Don't put datacenters into space?

[delaminator]

"aluminium smelting uses a lot of electricity we should do that"

"data centers use a lot of electricity we shouldn't do that"

"why?"

"computers are different"

[DoctorOetker]

for the simple reason that other energy consuming industries have physical products in and physical products out, which is costly to transport from space, while uploading extra corpus tokens and downloading new weights is essentially free from space (compared to the hardware shipping costs).

people have been correctly indoctrinated about global warming and the dominant heating terms coming from excess CO2 concentration, but because of this over-emphasis they neglect the prompt heating that comes with nearly all energy generation mechanisms (from fossil fuels, to solar panels to nuclear energy).

when the whole world starts raising their living conditions, and when a computational race erupts, there is no taming of total human energy consumption.

but what we can do is offload the bulk of computational energy consumption, like training common goods such as LLM weights...

[DoctorOetker]

I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%.

Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

[Rexxar]

Maybe because your tone is needlessly aggressive and lot's of people don't want HN turns into Reddit/Twitter. There is enough people raging on everything on all social networks maybe we are here hopping to have more civilised discussions.

[DoctorOetker]

Or maybe because people don't know basic physics principles, and dislike "reality based communities" from forming in their midst?

[quickthrowman]

> Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.

One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.

Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

[DoctorOetker]

>One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.

This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy.

> Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.

Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...

[quickthrowman]

Welp, turns out I should verify information better. I thought 6kW seemed high when a 1 square meter solar panel that is ~25% efficient can generate 250W of electricity. My apologies.

[rsync]

Let me explain to you that I downvoted this comment because you complained about your downvotes.

Please don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

[DoctorOetker]

look at the timestamps, when I wrote that comment there was no discussion at all, only the downvote and my request for discussion... which worked

but now you say I "interrupted" the back-then-non-existent discussion... whatever rsync, whatever...