This doesn't seem like a well-thought-out post. I mean, I probably could have told you that from the fact that it's either pro-AI or anti-AI (in this case the latter), but this is a particularly poorly thought out post. Others here have pointed out the water-wasting red herring, but there are several other pieces of nonsense here — the general environmental doom-mongering, and labeling recursive self-improvement as "mystical", for example.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It is basically intended to be emotive or get across the idea of getting emotions out about a topic, and ironically this is what makes it a not-bad-post.
Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way.
In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.
It just seems like a lot of hate resulting from dysfunctional responses to life circumstances — admittedly, probably pretty bad life circumstances, from the sound of it. Spreading hate online, especially accompanied by lies as in this case, doesn't seem like a socially positive action from my point of view. The author should have kept it to themself and maybe talked to someone who could give them a better perspective, rather than letting their hate out into the world to multiply.
I feel this post. I am tired of "directing" agents when in reality it feels more like trying to herd a group of toddlers.
Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
> Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
i'm in the midst of a very large global roll out of a new system including about 24 separate erp integrations. My team's system is dependent on another system coming online first then we go then the integrations come online then a massive data migration happens and ends with all the associated testing. So like a huge number of dependencies and I'm second in line. Today we get word that the first system is having issues with a vendor and will not come online as scheduled (our dry run deployment is tomorrow and spans all next week as each dependency gets their turn. Week after next is PROD.
We're not heavily integrated into that first system but we are in spots and so there's a reason why they go first. Writing around that system is feasible but we're looking around 5k lines which isn't a lot but there's still testing and sign off. My offshore team is in bed, meanwhile they, and onshore, all have other shit to do anyway so pulling them just puts everything else behind.
I tasked an agents to make the changes as soon as i woke up to the news, they got it mostly right. It took two rounds of fixes with some offshore testers who stayed up late but the PR got in and merged. We just did (literally like 5min ago) a validation run against our target system and we're green for tomorrow. I told the testers to goto bed and then i pulled up HN and opened a coke.
There's no way in hell that would have happened without the coding agents we had on tap. So, yeah, i find a lot of value in the rate at which AI can work on code even if it's not perfect every time.
I think the main problem is a conflict of objectives. AI companies need you to use more tokens so they are not going to improve that. They are optimizing the models to get as close as possible to the point in which people would stop using them because they are useless but without crossing that line.
Proof of this is the amount of unnecessary tasks that Claude does just as an excuse for not doing a good job doing the tasks that we ask it to do
AI builds like 95% for me than i play around with it for a bit for the last 5%.
I'm still a lot faster for certain things with AI but its weird. Instead of just being annoyed about some weird bug, i'm annoyed about an LLM which can do everything and then falls over itself on weird issues.
It feels weird true but it still also relevant faster?
I never liked telling people what to do or watching people do something. Using AI is exclusively like telling someone to do something who is either super smart or dumb as a brick and you never know which persona you will. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will produce whatever it produces very fast with 100% confidence. Also I care for code style, consistency and overall maintainability because I don't want to be locked into using LLMs and I can only really do that when I proof read everything. I don't want a huge project that will take a full rewrite for a human to understand it.
I feel like humans don't switch between being an idiot and a genius quite as fast as LLMs do. But yeah I have been thinking about my future and I am not sure I am cut out for the role of manager.
> human resources are still a zero-sum game, and every individual feeling super busy in their agentic silo doing a thousand things at once does not, in the end, help solve the kinds of projects that require cross-functional collaboration and team work.
I’ve had a pet theory for a long time that society loses it’s collective mind every 10ish years or so, usually starting with a good reason, but the outcome is mass stupidity followed by mass forgetting leading to a new cycle. War on terror, GFC, crypto, covid, now AI. Although the cycle does seem to be shortening.
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
I agree with you but I think it happens every 4 years, not every 10.
I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..)
Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old.
(Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..)
People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all.
I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time.
The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things.
I have a more sympathetic view, I thought covid could have been much worse. Of course there were silly moments like the existential panic from a toilerpaper shortage but it seems like the vast majority of people acted responsibly and kept their heads over the long haul. In the meantime, we developed revolutionary vaccines that solved the problem.
There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way.
Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
This might be Australia specific, but I think a lot of the movement restrictions were unnecessary. And long term damaging to not just adults but there’s a whole cohort of kids/teenagers who just missed out on certain things and we’re patting ourselves on the back we survived?
The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show.
I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
Kids mostly forgot and adapted back. It is adult, mostly men, who just cant get over fear of vaccines, injury of having to do something a little uncomfortable for someone else.
Journalists fear mongering and making sure the hoi polloi know their place as powerless pawns in a game they couldn't possibly understand is a constant.
They know what they're doing, the people who fund them know it and the people with half a working brain cell sooner or later hear someone like me and go 'oh, that explains it'.
It's much simpler than some mythical cycles - manufactured 'mass stupidity' is a conscious, deliberate, ongoing choice.
It used to be religious organizations, then it was newspapers, now its social media platforms. The playbook has been the same for thousands of years - nothing has changed.
To save everyone some time - the playbook is you're cattle, I'm shepherd. I'm master, you're slave. It's not anymore complicated.
The bit 'educated' people miss is that most people would love nothing more than to be the master (freedom they call it? American doublespeak). They dislike being slaves, not the concept of slavery.
Your comment is utterly ridiculous since all the examples you shared are examples of the evolution of society to address an inherent problem, and none of them are about it having lost its mind.
It's interesting how there's an increasing split of software engineers into those who're very happy with AI and leaning more into it, and those who're increasingly skeptical or dejected.
I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
I have leaned heavily into it… and became good at “agentic thinking”, but now I’m going to reverse. I have become dumber, sloppier, lazier, more distracted. I’m less happy than before. It’s hard to escape the productivity addiction and expectations though.
Yeah, when you are pulling out terms of the very online like "meat proxies", you're not exactly in a place to judge the rest of society, you're in a bubble.
I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding.
It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and it took a whole week to implement.
Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.
If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
It’s amazing how half the developers on earth live on a completely different planet now. There are plenty of new challenges, sure but we are far past the point where we can have a debate about “is it useful?”
And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
Completely off topic, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the fact that this blog's central column is built as a... <table>
Good old times. Definitely not vibe coded, though.
I agree that everyone's lost their minds, but so has this guy.
LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.
It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening.
It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.
> So no, I'm not going to set ethics aside and then actively offer myself up as tribute to self-amputate my brain. I'm sorry if everybody else can't get rid of the brain slugs, but at this point I'm just looking to get off this ride.
Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables.
To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats.
(For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)
> Google’s water use in The Dalles has nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.
> That’s according to records released this week after the city settled a lawsuit against The Oregonian/OregonLive and agreed to hand over data on Google’s water consumption. The company’s water use is poised to continue soaring in the years ahead, as Google has plans for two more data centers along the Columbia River.
> Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River.
> Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more – only that The Dalles can’t meet Google’s needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade.
> Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland.
> Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city’s long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don’t know enough about Google’s actual water use.
----
It is possible to do some cooling with closed cycle, though more than a few data centers have been built with open cycle cooling in places were the water table is precarious or in parts of the country under drought conditions.
Unless a data center construction discloses its water use and shows that it isn't using a lot, then people are assuming its using as much as it can (and up to the water rights or capacity that it has). ... Which isn't an unreasonable assumption to make.
> Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water in The Dalles in 2025. That’s nearly 40% of all the water consumed in the entire city and a huge jump from the year before.
> The city expects that local water consumption will soar over the next several years and bills will nearly double as The Dalles works to upgrade its aging water system. But the city won’t say how much of the rising demand comes from Google, citing a promise to keep the numbers secret and confidentiality provisions in Oregon public records law.
And data centers are being very cagy with their water consumption because the amount of water that it uses is related to the amount of compute it has and that is being held as an industry secret.
Evaporation cooling. They think that because the earth is only 2/3rds water we will run out before it rains back down again.
I jest, of course. The actual argument is something about most water being frozen and how some people live in deserts so we should all live as if we were desert dwellers. As you can tell I'm not very convinced by it.
Water is literally the least scarce thing on earth.
Rather than a myth, it’s more of a meme in the sense of “naturally selected, self-replicating idea”.
Hits all the right buttons for the motivated reasoner: An eco-disaster that our brains aren’t climate-change numb to. A threat to the most precious fundamental substance in the service of a high-tech fad. An evocative symbol of corporate recklessness in the service of greed.
That it’s not really a big deal compared to, say, almond cultivation is no match for that brain-niche fit.
There was construction of some data center, and someone's well water started looking dirty around the same time. From there it metasisized into claims that it's destroying all the world's water.
I don't know if it is the minority but I think sanity is the group of people not taking a "side" and just realizing this new tech is what it is and it's going to and has had both major advantages and disadvantages. Blog posts like the above are a dime a dozen along with their opposite and thy only read like people caught up in bubbles.
We are all caught up in our bubble. That’s why being exposed to someone else’s is useful. The moment you dismiss it as their bubble you assert not just their wall but also yours.
AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.
I'm not the one here making assertions, I'm asking questions of the person making claims. I'll leave it to others to judge what is 'a lot' or 'reasonable'.
I don't think 'anyone who thinks X is Y' is a good basis for discussion, which is the real point.
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
Maybe yours do, but all the CyrusOne date centers outside of Chicago smell like is grass and landscaping; they smell a great deal better than the car exhaust choked strip malls that dominate the exurban sprawl areas they tend to get sited in. I would much rather have one of those DCs as a neighbor than I would a Walmart.
You still have to grapple with the merits of their argument to find out if the indicator is correct or not.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.
There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.
I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
It's mostly the emissions from diesel generators which many DCs use as it's far too expensive to ever shut them down. Often diesel generators are used to lighten the load on a power grid as well, so many DCs will run generators 24/7.
That source of power, since our grid is so outdated and struggles with the weight of these power-hogs, EVs as well as increased usage of AC during the summers create some dangerous conditions.
There is the risk of heavy metals getting into the water supply as the copper degrades but that will only be a problem down the line, that's prescient but not yet realized.
> I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
I agree; however I would not want a DC or a refinery, smelter or steel mill anywhere near my town. We have industrial districting for that reason, and because a lot of DC projects want to be put next to lakes and water sources, this causes issues for the residents.
It's helpful to put this number in context, although if the people you're talking to will do anything to avoid using the metric system, that becomes much more difficult.
Fortunately, now we have computers, which are great at unit conversion, so we can cut right through these feeble attempts at obfuscation. In non-medieval units, 10.9 billion gallons per year is 41.3 million cubic meters per year or 1.3 cubic meters per second. The river a few kilometers from me has a discharge of 22000 cubic meters per second (of fresh water dumped into the sea), so Google is the equivalent using 0.006% of the Rio de la Plata. Lake Superior contains 12070 cubic kilometers of water, which is 1.207 × 10¹³ cubic meters, also of fresh water, so Google's current use would dry up Lake Superior in only 290,000 years.
Google is mostly not very close to Lake Superior or the Rio de la Plata; a more relevant river might be the Sacramento River, which drains into the San Francisco Bay where Google was born, and it's much smaller than the Rio de la Plata. Specifically, its average discharge is 797m³/s, so Google is using 0.16% of the discharge of the Sacramento River. (But some of that is at datacenters far from California.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur... tells us that agriculture in California uses 34.1 million "acre feet" of water per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system, especially when they're trying to be sneaky). In non-medieval units, that's 42.1 billion cubic meters, and per year, it's 1330 cubic meters per second, almost exactly 1000 times Google's use. Of that, 18% (240 cubic meters per second) is spent on alfalfa, or was in 02014, anyway.
One major difference is that you need fresh water, like the water of the Sacramento River, to irrigate crops, but you can cool data centers with salt water from the ocean. It's less convenient, because there are a variety of annoying things that happen with biofouling and corrosion, but that's what you'd do if hyperscalers scaled up by another factor of 100× so that their water usage became large enough to be environmentally significant.
But that doesn't happen until they have 100× the computing power they have today. So anybody who tells you AI datacenters are a major water user is lying.
Me, I pointed Claude Opus 5 at a C codebase I've been working on for years and it immediately found five serious bugs and told me how to fix them, as well as how to use Linux system calls I wasn't familiar with to solve some other problems. And I gave it a new language for PEGs I'd written up a couple of years ago, and it wrote me a working implementation in OCaml that afternoon, fixing several bugs in my example grammars along the way and resolving a conceptual problem I'd had a roadblock on. I asked Fable 5.1 to implement a minimal proof assistant, and it wrote a clone of J-Bob in Python, which I'm studying now. Although there is a certain firehose quality to this stuff, I sure don't intend to use AI to actively de-skill my brain.
That doesn't guarantee that AI will be a beneficial innovation overall, of course! As with most innovations, it probably depends on the balance between people being able to use the innovation to gain control over their own lives, and people being able to use it to gain control over others' lives. (Barring a FOOM scenario, of course, where our prediction ability is nonexistent.)
Basically, I don’t know how well thought out it is, but the prose argues that the point isn’t for it to be an objective take, and that if it were well thought out (ie highly iterated on and more objective or factual than subjective) some personal meaning that was intended to be expressed is lost along the way.
In other words It may have not appealed to you but that’s fine - you might just be outside the target demographic. In any case I don’t think it necessarily should be more well thought out. I prefer that these pieces exist or have their place. I definitely prefer their existence to a world where every personal Blog post has to arise from fiduciary or technical concerns, instead of from the soul. This is a soulful blog. I like it.
Sure they can mostly write better code than a toddler but this constant nudging and reminding and reiterating and stopping them from using the token budget of the whole company for a one off script. It gets tiring and I feel like I am losing brain power while doing it. Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
i'm in the midst of a very large global roll out of a new system including about 24 separate erp integrations. My team's system is dependent on another system coming online first then we go then the integrations come online then a massive data migration happens and ends with all the associated testing. So like a huge number of dependencies and I'm second in line. Today we get word that the first system is having issues with a vendor and will not come online as scheduled (our dry run deployment is tomorrow and spans all next week as each dependency gets their turn. Week after next is PROD.
We're not heavily integrated into that first system but we are in spots and so there's a reason why they go first. Writing around that system is feasible but we're looking around 5k lines which isn't a lot but there's still testing and sign off. My offshore team is in bed, meanwhile they, and onshore, all have other shit to do anyway so pulling them just puts everything else behind.
I tasked an agents to make the changes as soon as i woke up to the news, they got it mostly right. It took two rounds of fixes with some offshore testers who stayed up late but the PR got in and merged. We just did (literally like 5min ago) a validation run against our target system and we're green for tomorrow. I told the testers to goto bed and then i pulled up HN and opened a coke.
There's no way in hell that would have happened without the coding agents we had on tap. So, yeah, i find a lot of value in the rate at which AI can work on code even if it's not perfect every time.
Proof of this is the amount of unnecessary tasks that Claude does just as an excuse for not doing a good job doing the tasks that we ask it to do
I'm still a lot faster for certain things with AI but its weird. Instead of just being annoyed about some weird bug, i'm annoyed about an LLM which can do everything and then falls over itself on weird issues.
It feels weird true but it still also relevant faster?
This rings true.
Also we’re just so damn stupid to learn from history, or even just people 10 years older than us, that we repeat the cycle.
And there I guess is where saying a new sucker is born every minute is from.
I first started noticing this in the 90’s .. comp-sci grads were entering the industry with no clue whatsoever how to do software. (Of course its gotten worse since then, but I started noticing it in the 90’s..)
Everything old was thrown away as being archaic and obsolete - only the New Cool Shit™ mattered .. except nobody had ever done anything, properly, with the New Cool Shit™ - everything was still running on the old.
(Unix was dying, everyone was learning only Microsoft tech because “that was the future” ... until it wasn’t. Now, a majority of us are running 21st century Unix workstations given us .. by Apple, of all companies, which didn’t die so easily, after all..)
People entered the market not because they were truly interested in improving the world through computerization, but because they wanted the lifestyle afforded to them by a career in “Information Technology”, a nascent term back then which simply meant “career path for the budding materialists”. Trouble is, you can’t be materialistic with computers, they are almost entirely a spiritual device, which value is determined strictly and only on the decision of value made by humans. It is humans which decide the true value of all that physical hardware after all.
I think this cyclical amnesia is driven by materialist consumerism. People who take a less material approach to technology, tend to build stuff that lasts a long time.
The reason I think it happens in cycles of 4 years, is that is the average time it takes someone to enter the academic churn, and get spit out on the other end, ready to join the work force and do big things.
Or .. not.
There's the lingering societal PTSD to consider, but I think most of the challenge in the aftermath are latent issues that preexisted covid and it just brought them to the surface. I think our world a couple decades from now will be stronger than it would have been in a universe where covid never happened, and actually has a better chance at dealing with the next covid-level threat. Perhaps that is this, in a way.
Covid proved that a healthy looking society is not always so healthy, and I think it works in reverse too. The outcome of the upcoming election will tell us something about how far we have to go.
The places that needed restrictions such as hospitals & nursing homes still got covid by & large. We didn’t necessarily need to close down the whole show.
I’ve had my jabs, also had covid multiple times. I’m not a disbeliever, I just think the collective reaction was completely OTT.
They know what they're doing, the people who fund them know it and the people with half a working brain cell sooner or later hear someone like me and go 'oh, that explains it'.
It's much simpler than some mythical cycles - manufactured 'mass stupidity' is a conscious, deliberate, ongoing choice.
It used to be religious organizations, then it was newspapers, now its social media platforms. The playbook has been the same for thousands of years - nothing has changed.
To save everyone some time - the playbook is you're cattle, I'm shepherd. I'm master, you're slave. It's not anymore complicated.
The bit 'educated' people miss is that most people would love nothing more than to be the master (freedom they call it? American doublespeak). They dislike being slaves, not the concept of slavery.
Anyhoo.
Good try.
I don't know how this will play out, but I haven't seen anything like this before.
It's a great time to be alive. Everyone is infected with pessimism.
Thats just not true.
It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and it took a whole week to implement.
Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.
But if you do think vulnerability research matters, and you're trying to argue that frontier models aren't a seismic change for that discipline, you have almost no company. Vulnerability researchers are overwhelmingly leaning on automation to find vulnerabilities and, just as importantly, generate the tooling required to test hypotheses.
You can feel about that however you want to feel about it. I mostly don't care, except: you can watch people like this being negatively polarized back into the bad old days of the mid-1990s, content-free CERT advisories, and vendor-controlled "responsible disclosure" by a use case that frontier models unimpeachably excel at.
And yet we continue to do so. I understand the feeling of loss some people may be facing. And there are definitely some really bad practices - like nakedly spewing claudspeak at your colleagues instead of communicating. Or raising a PR you don’t understand. There are asymmetries we haven’t learned to navigate. But we aren’t returning to a world where it doesn’t dominate our discipline so it’s best to find opportunities.
LLMs are actually producing a lot of pretty good stuff, can debug things that would have taken an entire team a week, and the people running AI companies are also generally like the most boring supervillains imaginable. All true.
It is also completely screwing up the global economy, and most people barely understand what it is and what's happening.
It's also not going to collapse anytime soon as a technology despite what the economy does, and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Everyone who's extreme on it on either end is generally wrong.
What is screwing up 'the global economy'? LLMs?
Though if any followers still exist, they probably wouldn't agree that 𒀭𒂗𒆠 was just a fad.
rotary telephones and pay phones went away but we still have phones.
Same. I quit, aside from two contracts I'll serve until they run out, I'll be studying Electrical Engineering. Even if AI takes over that space... good luck constructing a robot with the dexterity required to pull cables.
To anyone in IT... go and study for some qualification in tasks not easily doable for a machine. The trades are going to be a goldmine especially with all the boomers retiring. Or buy some ranch in the midst of nowhere and farm artisanal chickens, cattle or goats.
(For legal reasons, the latter was a joke. Farming is extremely risky, requires a lot of upfront cash, a lot of what used to be generational knowledge, but it seems to attract a lot of IT people, especially for whatever reason the goat farming)
https://datacenters.google/discover-more/photo-gallery/ and scroll down to "The Dalles, Oregon" and well... look at them.
And then its reported water use:
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa...
> Google’s water use in The Dalles has nearly tripled in the past five years, and the company’s data centers now consume more than a quarter of all the water used in the city.
> That’s according to records released this week after the city settled a lawsuit against The Oregonian/OregonLive and agreed to hand over data on Google’s water consumption. The company’s water use is poised to continue soaring in the years ahead, as Google has plans for two more data centers along the Columbia River.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles...
> Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River.
> Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more – only that The Dalles can’t meet Google’s needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade.
> Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland.
> Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city’s long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don’t know enough about Google’s actual water use.
----
It is possible to do some cooling with closed cycle, though more than a few data centers have been built with open cycle cooling in places were the water table is precarious or in parts of the country under drought conditions.
Unless a data center construction discloses its water use and shows that it isn't using a lot, then people are assuming its using as much as it can (and up to the water rights or capacity that it has). ... Which isn't an unreasonable assumption to make.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/04/more-orego...
> Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water in The Dalles in 2025. That’s nearly 40% of all the water consumed in the entire city and a huge jump from the year before.
> The city expects that local water consumption will soar over the next several years and bills will nearly double as The Dalles works to upgrade its aging water system. But the city won’t say how much of the rising demand comes from Google, citing a promise to keep the numbers secret and confidentiality provisions in Oregon public records law.
And data centers are being very cagy with their water consumption because the amount of water that it uses is related to the amount of compute it has and that is being held as an industry secret.
I jest, of course. The actual argument is something about most water being frozen and how some people live in deserts so we should all live as if we were desert dwellers. As you can tell I'm not very convinced by it.
Water is literally the least scarce thing on earth.
Hits all the right buttons for the motivated reasoner: An eco-disaster that our brains aren’t climate-change numb to. A threat to the most precious fundamental substance in the service of a high-tech fad. An evocative symbol of corporate recklessness in the service of greed.
That it’s not really a big deal compared to, say, almond cultivation is no match for that brain-niche fit.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
According to EESI (a bipartisan-founded non-profit), a large data center:
> can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.
Also noting that AI datacenters can use more.
I don't think 'anyone who thinks X is Y' is a good basis for discussion, which is the real point.
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
I don't disagree with your assertion; however you do have to realize that their grievances, while not completely informed, are not wrong.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.
I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
That source of power, since our grid is so outdated and struggles with the weight of these power-hogs, EVs as well as increased usage of AC during the summers create some dangerous conditions.
There is the risk of heavy metals getting into the water supply as the copper degrades but that will only be a problem down the line, that's prescient but not yet realized.
> I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
I agree; however I would not want a DC or a refinery, smelter or steel mill anywhere near my town. We have industrial districting for that reason, and because a lot of DC projects want to be put next to lakes and water sources, this causes issues for the residents.
Or about 0.6% of the water used to grow almonds
https://sustainability.google/reports/google-2026-environmen...
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-...
Fortunately, now we have computers, which are great at unit conversion, so we can cut right through these feeble attempts at obfuscation. In non-medieval units, 10.9 billion gallons per year is 41.3 million cubic meters per year or 1.3 cubic meters per second. The river a few kilometers from me has a discharge of 22000 cubic meters per second (of fresh water dumped into the sea), so Google is the equivalent using 0.006% of the Rio de la Plata. Lake Superior contains 12070 cubic kilometers of water, which is 1.207 × 10¹³ cubic meters, also of fresh water, so Google's current use would dry up Lake Superior in only 290,000 years.
Google is mostly not very close to Lake Superior or the Rio de la Plata; a more relevant river might be the Sacramento River, which drains into the San Francisco Bay where Google was born, and it's much smaller than the Rio de la Plata. Specifically, its average discharge is 797m³/s, so Google is using 0.16% of the discharge of the Sacramento River. (But some of that is at datacenters far from California.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur... tells us that agriculture in California uses 34.1 million "acre feet" of water per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system, especially when they're trying to be sneaky). In non-medieval units, that's 42.1 billion cubic meters, and per year, it's 1330 cubic meters per second, almost exactly 1000 times Google's use. Of that, 18% (240 cubic meters per second) is spent on alfalfa, or was in 02014, anyway.
One major difference is that you need fresh water, like the water of the Sacramento River, to irrigate crops, but you can cool data centers with salt water from the ocean. It's less convenient, because there are a variety of annoying things that happen with biofouling and corrosion, but that's what you'd do if hyperscalers scaled up by another factor of 100× so that their water usage became large enough to be environmentally significant.
But that doesn't happen until they have 100× the computing power they have today. So anybody who tells you AI datacenters are a major water user is lying.
The tell of an unhinged anti AI rant that pulls only to the worst case most negative viewpoint.