Oh man, I hate data centers more every day. They're burning energy and causing disturbances in order to support fucking what? What the fuck are we getting in return?
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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More surveillance.
Shrimp Jesus memes and scams able to dupe even more old people
AI propaganda, AI surveillance.
Slightly more convenient search engines. At least according to most of my IT-illiterate peers. "Just ask ChatGPT" - "Fuck, I can already do that with any other search engine, for 1/10th of the energy".
People never see the cost if they don't pay it.
Not all data centers are for AI. Practically anything you do on the internet lives or transits through a data center. A very serious answer to your question is simply "the internet". AI data centers are just bigger and more dense than the ones that have been around for a long time.
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What the fuck are we getting in return?
A third yacht for a billionaire
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You know I will say as an IT tech, that often times works in data centers doing repairs upgrades ads changes etc. That data centers are absolutely horrid to work in. The constant hum in drone will just wear you out. There's absolutely no way to silence something like that. It literally gets into your bones. That's why most data centers are not really staffed unless somebody is on site to do some work. This myth of data centers creating jobs is absolutely idiotic. I've never been in a data center with more than one or two employees in it. And most of those like I said aren't full-time employees they literally show up let you in show you where you need to work and will only hang out long enough while you're on the site. Having to wear headphones in a data center is absolutely mandatory.
A gigafactory with close to zero human maintenance, literally a dream come true if you're a robber baron.
Most factories are already close.
Not in the US, they're not.
Yea, they are. Quite a bit of automation, many employees are there to maintain the machines, not do the actual work.
I've worked in industrial automation for the past 18 years. What you're talking about is lights-out manufacturing. While this may be the state of the art in some sectors, it's definitely not for most sectors and even less in the aged installed base in the US.
The investment to bring old factories even close to fully automated is simply not being made, and for good reason. The sad reality is that exploiting humans to do a lot of the more expensive to automate work is cheaper.
I guess the only jobs that those created are temporary during the construction.
After that it's some security guards and they just contract smart hands for a few hours when they need it. Landscaping I guess.
After that it's just a big noisy heater.
Maybe an office for two or three people, but they're not really human habitable. The HVAC is like a cold twenty mile an hour wind being blasted at hot twenty mile an hour wind produced by little powerful fans designed to push air.
It would be like being trapped in a room with a million drones.
I used to work for a company where we were in the data centers constantly, either deploying new machines or servicing others. Definitely not the norm, and way overstaffed compared to other companies. But, it made sense given their business model.
Anyway, working in the hot aisles is miserable when you have to do a bunch of cabling work (about 60% of the copper we ran was cut and tipped to length). It also sucked working on equipment at the tops of our racks as ours were like 56U high. Ear protection was must-have, I used noise cancelling headphones but a lot of guys didn't even use ear plugs.
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I used to live a few miles from I5 and that was loud and constant, but was a pretty soft kinda rushing sound not really that different from hearing the wind rustling trees; the sound going on in this video sounds like an idling diesel truck parked across the street.
It really does sounds like a large idling diesel truck.
I still wouldn't want to hear that diesel truck sound all day everyday.
Obviously. I think the guy in the video is being too generous comparing it to the freeway sounds. The data center is way louder and more annoying. That would absolutely drive me insane.
Yea, it might be hard to hear that full sound in a video. Being near them, it is loud as fuck.
I live close to a highway and it's just white noise. I can tune it out outside and inside you can't hear anything. Except for the motorbikes with custom exhausts. You can hear those assholes even inside. And it's not because of the highway, you can hear the motorbikes all on adjacent streets as well. It's really crazy to me that some idiots are allowed to add huge amounts of noise to our environment just for fun. Fuck bikers.
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If anyone’s curious, this is the AWS Tanner Campus. It’s right across the street from the official, marked on the map location for AWS’s us-east-1, and they are all IAD- buildings, so they’re part of what makes up the us-east-1 AWS region. The project was announced as early as 2020.
It consists of four single-story data center buildings spanning nearly 800,000 square feet, which are supported by a massive 192-megawatt electrical substation and backup diesel generators.
As others here have said, this is not an “AI” data center, it’s a data center that runs massive swathes of the internet as we know it. Either way it’s fucked that they’re approved to build this shit right behind peoples houses. They are right across the street from a regional airport, so maybe that areas zoned commercial? It’s definitely a weird area in general. Driving down prince william parkway you’re seeing tons of straight industrial support shit, like metal shops and construction supply stuff and warehouses with performance car shops with dynos and everything, then you just hit houses.
It was probably zoned back when nobody ever thought anyone but the rednecks already out there would live that far outside the beltway, but now commuting from Manassas/Gainesville into DC or somewhere else inside the beltway is normal, and they’re building houses where they never thought they’d be building.
Again though, fuck Amazon and Prince William County for assaulting these people like this.
this is not an “AI” data center
I was a bit more high-level in the supply chain planning side (more on the long-term supply planning than rack planning), but AWS definitely has different rack types including AI rack types with dense GPU hardware setups. Are they slicing the buildings by rack type or is it heterogeneous with some AI racks + compute racks?
I just meant that they’re just us-east-1 racks, that the facility wasn’t built for AI specifically in the way that most people are probably going to assume given the past couple years. I don’t know what’s in there rack by rack, building by building either. There is a good chance that if you spin up Opus 4.7 in Bedrock it could be in these buildings.
It's weird that they would build such a big annoying target in a country with so many rifles
and they build it in GOP controlled districts too. republicans, by in large do not actually protest in anyway for change.
The don't tread on me crowd are the biggest pussies in the world.
The only time they stood up and protested was against nurses as doctors trying to save lives....
Meanwhile corporations dry fucking them in the ass... they bend over and cry "Can I have some more daddy??"
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And also in a country with such a huge diabetes from sugar problem. That was a joke - fun fact sugar ruins concrete mix
Rifles are noisy. Trebuchets are not. What's the range of the average consumer trebuchet?
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Well that was pointless.
Was there supposed to be something on the "sound readings" meter? Can I see it?
No.
I hear it perfectly. It is a sort of background hum.
It's more about what the guy is saying.
Lots of people say lots of things. I was interested in the data. Particularly since he said he was collecting it!
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For what its worth, despite missing the punchline of the actual measurement, the guy knows what he is talking about. Taking a dB measurement in C weighting over some integration period is how to do it for this scenario. I doubt his meter is calibrated but its doing a good job.
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He should have showed more.
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Before he described the noise I was assuming he lived by a highway, because that's exactly what it sounds like in the video.
Made without AI will be the next organic non-gmo revolution, even though the latter was mostly a fad.
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Is the image for this just a man’s torso with his hand over his stomach like he’s going to have a baby or is it just me. I thought this was going to be very different at first
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Stop using your mobile phones and computers. All those ones and zeroes need to go someplace. I wonder if the European or Japanese data centers require more sound proofing to reduce noise pollution.
Not all datacenters are the same. The U.S. has like 4000 of them which outscales any other country by a factor of ten. Most are small nondescript buildings which are just there to route internet packets or were built before other countries even had internet.
This is like treating a car the same as a semi.
most of the stuff on a debian computer and graphene phone is processed directly on the device, the ones and zeroes go to your device
and primitivism is bad, computers are a net good for us
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I can't think of a better illustration for the article than that guy's belly.
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