I use to work for a company that got around this by posting the job ad physically outside our offices doors. We were 5 stories in a WeWork space. Probably illegal but I doubt the company cared.
I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually.
It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems.
Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a giant river and Google is paying for the water infrastructure is misleading.
That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.
That's not the point, the question was whether an apartment building would use the same amount of water and clearly an apartment would consume substantially less water.
No, the question was whether "the same size space of apartments" (i.e. apartment buildings occupying the same land area as the datacenter) would use more or less water than the datacenter.
Under reasonable assumptions, the apartments would use more water.
- Google's datacenter complex in the Dalles covers ~190 acres.
- Typical density for apartment buildings is 50 units/acre, meaning you'd have 9,500 units on 190 acres.
- Average household size in the US is 2.5, so the 9,500 units would have a population of 23,750.
- According to the original article, per capita domestic water usage in the U.S. is 82 gallons per day, meaning a total water consumption of 710M gal/yr for the apartments. And this doesn't count the substantial indirect water usage you'd need to support this population.
- The Google datacenter uses 355M gal/yr (per the Oregonian article).
- 710M > 355M
Now, it would be somewhat ridiculous to replace the entire Google datacenter with apartment buildings in a rural town with declining population, but that was the original question...
If you replace the area of that data center with apartments, as the question suggested, it would add half again to the local population, which could indeed use 30% of the city water.
I'm not understanding the logic. You want to add more population to the city? That doesn't seem fair but I'll concede I may not understand the point you're trying to make.
Assuming that the population is the same in the city and you just move residents into an apartment complex. I don't understand how you would get the same water consumption, am I missing something? Evaporative cooling is extremely water heavy and these facilities also have the normal HVAC you'd expect. Everything just seems to point to more water usage not less.
Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.
At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.
Why can't AIs be controlled with democratic institutions? Why are democratic institutions worse? This doesn't seem to be the case to me.
Private institutions shouldn't be allowed to control such systems, they should be compelled to give them to the public.
>Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.
As long as Zuckerberg has no army forcing me, I'm fine with that. The issue would be whether he could breach contracts or get away with fraud. But if AI is sufficiently distributed, this is less likely to happen.
>At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.
I don't think of democracy as a goal to be achieved. I'm OK with democracy in so far it leads to what I value.
The big problem with democracy is that most of the time it doesn't lead to rational choices, even when voters are rational. In markets, for instance, you have an incentive to be rational, and if you aren't, the market will tend to transfer resources from you to someone more rational.
No such mechanism exists in a democracy; I have no incentive to do research and think hard about my vote. It's going to be worth the same as the vote of someone who believes the Earth is flat anyway.
I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals. We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?
I'm not buying the argument. Reading your comment it feels like there's an argument to be made that there aren't enough democratic systems for the people to engage with. That I definitely agree with.
> I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals.
I didn't say that. My example of the market includes companies that are groups of people.
> We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?
I can see this about myself. I don't need to use hypotheticals. Time ago, I voted for a referendum that made nuclear power impossible to build in my country. I voted just like the majority. Years later, I became passionate about economics, and only then did I realise my mistake.
It's not that I was stupid, and there were many, many debates, but I didn't put the effort into researching on my own.
The feedback in a democracy is very weak, especially because cause and effect are very hard to discern in a complex system.
Also, consensus is not enough. In various countries, there is often consensus about some Deity existing. Yet large groups of people worldwide believe in incompatible Deities. So there must be entire countries where the consensus about their Deity is wrong.
If the consensus is wrong, it's even harder to get to the reality of things if there is no incentive to do that.
I think, if people get this, democracy might still be good enough to self-limit itself.
This doesn't pass the sniff test, governments generate wealth all the time. Public education, public healthcare, public research, public housing. These are all programs that generate an enormous amount of wealth and allow citizens to flourish.
In economics, you aren't necessarily creating wealth just because your final output has value. The value of the final good or service has to be higher than the inputs for you to be creating wealth. I could take a functioning boat and scrap it, sell the scrap metal that has value. However, I destroyed wealth because the boat was worth more.
Even if you are creating wealth, but the inputs have better uses and can create more wealth for the same cost, you're still paying in opportunity cost. So things are more complicated than that.
Synthesizing between you two’s thoughts, extrapolating somewhat:
- human individuals create wealths
- groups of humans can create kinds of wealth that isn’t possible for a single indovidual. This can be a wide variety of associations: companies, project teams, governments, etc.
- governments (formal or less formal) create the playing field for individuals and groups of individuals to create wealth
>governments generate wealth all the time. Public education, public healthcare, public research, public housing.
> These are all programs that generate an enormous amount of wealth and allow citizens to flourish.
I thought you meant that governments generate wealth because the things you listed have value. If so, that doesn't prove they generate wealth by my argument, unless you can prove those things are more valuable than alternative ways to use the resources the government used to produce them and that the government is more efficient in producing those.
You can argue that those are good because you think redistribution is good. But you can have redistribution without the government directly providing goods and services.
I think I'm more confused. Was trying to convey the idea that wealth doesn't have to limited to the idea of money and value. Many intangible things can provide wealth too.
I should probably read more books before commenting on things I half understand, my bad.
Those programs consume a bunch of money and they don’t generate wealth directly. They are critical to let people flourish and go out to generate wealth.
A bunch of well educated citizens living on government housing who don’t go out and become productive members of society will quickly lead to collapse.
None of these are unique to the government and can also be created privately. The fact that government can create wealth =/= the government is the source of all wealth.
I mean it totally depends what your views on democracy are. Juries are one of the few, likely only, practices taken from Ancient Athenian democracy which was truly led by the people. The fact that juries still work this way is a testament to the practice.
With this in mind, I personally believe groups will always come to better conclusions than individuals.
Being tried by 12 instead of 1 means more diversity of thought and opinion.
I mostly agree here, but would add there's definitely a social pressure to go along with the group a lot of the time, even in jury trials. How many people genuinely have the fortitude to stand up to a group of 10+ others with a countering pov.
I don't disagree, but think of the pressures a judge has as an individual as well. Pressures from the legal community, the electorate, and being seen as impartial.
There is a wisdom of the crowd, and that wisdom comes in believing that we are all equal under the law. This wisdom is more self evident in democratic systems, like juries.
Which is easier to build resilient systems for: the one where you have a few dozen extra scalpels in a storage closet or the one that requirements offsite backups, separate generators, constant maintenance?
Sounds like a great system that benefits from having lots of money. IDK how such a thing can last in rural areas where there may be one single MRI machine to use in a 100 mile radius.
I don't think they used a framework, I remember they used a lot of "vanilla JavaScript". They're using Rails after all. Here is a thread from 2022 where they began using React for their (then) new search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722
May I ask how you feel about editors like vim/neovim or emacs or helix? I find that the best editing experience is one you can easily customize to support your needs, for me that is neovim but for you it could be something outside of VS Code?
Also shocked to learn VS Code is using textmate instead of treesitter.
I "learned" vim and used to spend time on setting up a vim environment. But it took way too much time to customize these things. Plus installing plugins is nowhere as easy as with vscode.
These days I just use vim plugin in VSCode and I'm very happy about the setup.
P.S. I am also an experienced VSCode extension developer. You just get much more exposure with a vscode extension compared to vim -- that's where everybody is. And of course it makes sense for me to dogfood the extension.
