• badgermurphy@lemmy.world
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          15 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
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            20 hours ago

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

          • Tja@programming.dev
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            14 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
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              13 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.