Andy Masley

What a data center is Lots of hyper-efficient computers in one place

New post! andymasley.substack.com/p/what-a-dat...

The two most common pieces of feedback on my blog posts are that they're way too long and they conveniently leave out a single random key detail that makes the reader take the rest less seriously, which seem to pull in opposite directions

Sorry not satellite, heat sensor footage

Truly unsure about xAI's stuff in general bc satellite footage did show a lot more gas plants running months ago that xAI claimed weren't. The government there imposed new regulations on them too. My main issue is that some people try to use this as representative of the 5,400 DCs in the country

From my recent TED Talk

During a government shutdown it's important to remember that the monopoly on violence has been lost and we need to build elaborate horizontal mutual aid networks and use illegibility as a tool to prevent local concentrations of power and the re-emergence of hierarchy

I'm pretty convinced that most confusion about data centers would be solved if we just started calling them "Big computers" because a lot of people seem to think they're something completely different from that.

I think a lot of it is also due to inflation yeah, haven't done a deep dive yet but I'm worried that too many people are very strongly implying data centers are the sole reason for the rise

Electricity price rises from data centers do in fact be real. I'm pretty worried that
1) The correct framing here is "We should be building out renewable infrastructure instead of limiting a new industry."
2) We're not actually building it out enough.

Yup makes sense, want to do a deep dive on electricity prices and air pollution, which are the two places I think data centers are harming local communities the most. Definitely important to compare them to other industries, but on electric prices especially is where they stand out

I need to reiterate that if you around saying that people running data centers are the most evil people in the world you should really take some time to read up on the general situation in the world

If you actually read the post you'd know that Loudoun has incredibly cheap residential water and the data centers bring in massive tax revenues for the locals. Zero issues at all

If you think the worst ghouls on Earth are the people running data centers you're profoundly out of touch with the real evil currently happening all over, that's a complete lunatic take

Thanks so much!

Sorry how is Neoreaction/the Dark Enlightenment connected to data center builds?

idk I think the left *should* care, in a choice between different industries why not favor the ones that get poor areas the most public resources per what the community gives to them?

Appreciate the feedback, why's the tax revenue part such a miss?

It's just so easy to break a problem up into parts to figure out which parts are real and which ones aren't. Try it out!

I think the mere fact that we can have cities in New Mexico at all is a sign that we’re good at moving water around!

Something we can all get behind

Yup!

Really appreciate the bump

A lot of things to pull from this list to show how dishonestly More Perfect Union has presented the water issue, but my personal favorite is this section.

More Perfect Union videos are wildly deceptive on data center water use They're misinforming their huge audience and making the data center debate much worse

MPU has become one of the biggest sources of false ideas about data center water use on the internet andymasley.substack.com/p/more-perfe...

The single place where I'm pretty sure a data center actually did affect people's health is Colossus in Memphis. That's conveniently the one data center they keep calling back to, ignoring the other 5400

One person they interview says "Yeah I'm gonna move if they build the data center because I'm reading about some of the effects on diabetes... lack of sleep, how it can lead to all these different health effects" and again they just run that like it's real.

They keep quoting residents where data centers are being built and each one says "I heard they dry up the water" and they just run that verbatim every single time without mentioning that this literally never happens.

More Perfect Union videos on data centers are basically the most straight-up misinformation directed at people left-of-center that I can remember watching, it's really wild. They've getting huge audiences and seem to be influencing the conversation a lot.

YouTube video by Andy's AI Songs Shoegaze

This is the best AI music I've made I think, shoegaze depends more on cool overwhelming sounds which works well for Suno www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kefv...