Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I donāt know the answers to a lot of these questions, I assume they heat up the water, and dump it back into the rivers, which causes some disruption to the local ecosystem. Which is fine if you do it in small amounts, but it will disrupt things. (powerplants have the problem for example that some flora/fauna gets attracted to these more warmer waters, risking clogs and more. (so a datacenter does this twice, first via the powerplant generating power, and then to cool the datacenter).
There is also the issue of contamination, while I assume they donāt put extra dirty things in the water, this is not a guarantee, nor will every municipality/gov just go with the assumption that it is clean, I assume that in some places this cooling water will need to be cleaned extra as industrial waste. Esp when there are some odd laws interacting. (I know some of those laws re waste and what counts as waste interact weirdly in .nl causing weird busywork during roadwork so they donāt run into extra costs by accidentally letting the waste count as a different class of waste).
But yes, I think they do not recirculate, and just pump it round and dump it back into the river directly (so no evaporative cooling where the water goes into the air, which you had at some powerplants, the big towers), and I assume they donāt use lead pipes so the water isnāt very contaminated. But these sort of processes do put a strain on the water quality. (In .nl we have some problems with river water quality because our big rivers come from industrial areas of other countries, (Germany mainly)).
I mostly posted it so that we now at least have some indication of the amounts we are talking about, as tech companies are very tight lipped about this. But as somebody who knows nothing, I do not know all the implications of it. I am however suspicious, due to a combination of natural paranoia, them being very mum about it, and me not trusting the big tech places.
But yeah, if they use up 90% of the daily flow of a river and heat it up, that will absolutely not be good for the local ecosystem. And any industrial site downstream who also wanted to use the water for cooling now also in trouble.
Bit like the same reason I posted about protonmail, more an FYI than a sneer (not a huge shock that eventually protonmail would reveal the data if forced by their gov, they always said they would do this, but it is an important thing to take into account if you worry about privacy).
So any reason for the downvote? What did I miss dear random critic?
Thanks for giving it a go, I mostly hoped there might be someone who had some experience in the area who could shed some light. But the numbers were certainly interesting. Then the pivot to AI post went up 30 mins after I posted and shed a little light on the while thing too.
It would seem odd to put the heated water back instead of cooling it off and re-using, but I donāt have faith in any kind of sustainability designed or built into the system, so that would make sense for impact.
If theyāre being quiet about it, it means one or two things. Either theyāre actually considering it proprietary new tech, but there would almost certainly be patents filed somewhere for that case, and/or they have something theyāre not proud to announce. I have no idea what words would be used for a patent here, being an area well outside my expertise, but Iāve not heard any patents mentioned, so Iām going to assume itās squarely the shame reason.
The protonmail thingā¦ I just assume nothing I do is private and keep all my services as decoupled as possible to make me more annoying to track down, should the situation arise that I become somehow not boring. One day Iāll set up something more private and annoying, but I have a long list of todos that never become todonesā¦