Given how YouTube makes money from advertising, I suspect it's more profitable for them to keep the data to themselves and use it for targeting. I would not be surprised if they also share it with Adsense & other Alphabet entities (and presumably with government agencies), but am doubtful beyond that.
Not that this is much better than directly selling to third parties.
This sort of thing is common enough that simply establishing means, motive and opportunity are convincing to me. If not yet then soon. You can't hope for a smoking gun every time.
> Copyright infringement use to be the absolute worst crime imaginable if you asked the tech industry
Every day hundreds of links to archive.is are posted[1] to this website to get around paywalls. Technologists built file sharing tools to subvert copyright. It has never been one of the worst crimes imaginable in tech circles.
"Tech circles" was never the claim. The original phrase was "tech industry", and that seems to be accurate. The post replying to it may have misread or misinterpreted what "tech industry" means. (Or perhaps the term is simply ambiguous and each person who reads it comes away with a different meaning!)
> I've never met someone who wasn't on Aaron's side on that one.
This rather says something about the people by who you are surrounded. I know quite a lot of people who are on Aaron Swartz side here, for example people who are in academia or those who left academia but are still deeply interested in scientific topics.
Jstor is an information database provider that that specializes in the republication of academic journal articles. The web is the company's delivery mechanism, not the defining trait of the its existence. A public-facing website doesn't make it anymore of a tech company as such than it would the New York Times.
NYT is more of a tech company than you might think [1] and they've been one for longer than you might think: the de-facto standard profiler for Perl [2], of all things, comes from them.
Maybe the time horizon for a statement like that shouldn’t include the decades before most current tech companies existed, much less at this scale even for the few still kicking around from 50 years ago.
I am for moderation and strong penalties for users that use it in that manner. Anyone who uses grok to generate an undressing image of someone without their consent within 5 seconds should probably go to jail or whatever the penalty is for someone spending 5 hours to create revenge porn with photoshop.
But I'm not sure if the tool itself should be banned, as some people seem to be suggesting. There are content creators on the platform that do use NSFW image generation capabilities in a consensual and legitimate fashion.
StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM
The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there.
Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.
As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.
Yes, sometimes you search and find someone else's attempt to ask something that looks very much like your question, but it's duped to a different question. There are a few common failure modes:
* The originally asked question was very low quality; for example, it might have basically been a code dump and a "what's wrong?" where many things were wrong, one of which is what you were both asking about. Someone else may have decided that something else was the more proximate issue.
* The OP was confused, and didn't really have your question. Or the question title was misleading or clickbaity. These should get deleted, but they tend to get forgotten about for a variety of reasons.
* Sometimes two very different problems are described with all the same keywords, and it takes special effort to disentangle them. Even when the questions are properly separated, and even if every dupe is sent to the correct one of the two options, search engines can get confused. On the flip side, sometimes there are very different valid ways to phrase fundamentally the same question.
My favourite example of the latter: "How can I sort a list, according to where its elements appear in another list?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827) is a very different question from "Given parallel lists, how can I sort one while permuting (rearranging) the other in the same way?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298). But the latter is fundamentally the same problem as in "Sorting list according to corresponding values from a parallel list" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515). It's very easy to imagine how someone with one of these problems could find the wrong Q&A with a search engine. And there were a lot of other duplicate questions I found that were directed to the wrong one, and if the site were as active as it was in 2020, I'm sure it would still be happening.
And that's after the effort I (and others) put in to improve the prose and especially the titles, and add reference sections. The original titles for these questions were, respectively: "python sort list based on key sorted list"; "Is it possible to sort two lists(which reference each other) in the exact same way?"; "Sorting list based on values from another list?". No wonder people didn't get what they wanted.
I have not had that experience, most of the time the duplicate question was answered, but to address the argument, it seems like it would be correct to mark a question as duplicate even if the original isn't answered. Why should there be two instances of the same question with no answer as opposed to one instance with no answer?
> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original.
This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.
Not OP but I think it’s the same problem. Mods got a pat on the back for “curating” (i.e. quickly closing) incoming questions, so they leaned far too far toward closing them ASAP for specious reasons because it rewarded themselves.
Sure, there was a whole appeals process you could go through if you had infinite time and patience to beg the same cohort for permission, pretty please, to ask the question on the ask-the-question website, but the graph of people willing to do so over time looks a lot like their traffic graph.
I disagree. Look at the moderator election threads[0] and a good chunk of the would-be mods’ stories are demonstrating how good they are at deleting and flagging and downvoting content.
And that stuff is important, but when it becomes a metric to optimize and brag about…
It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes. A more positive q&a community might "steel-man" the question and try to find what's different about it, but SO's culture leaned heavily towards essentially telling people "go away, you don't have anything new and worthwhile for us".
> It's not an entirely different problem because the main method through which moderators are mean is in closing new questions as dupes
This discussion needs a grounded definition of "toxic" then.
Elsewhere in this thread I see:
> I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
So we're all speaking about different things it appears.
> This discussion needs a grounded definition of "toxic" then.
When I wrote about the issue on MSE (https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/394952/173477) a couple years ago I explicitly called out that the terminology is not productive. It generally seems to describe dissatisfaction with the user experience that results from a failure to meet the user's expectations; but the entire reason for the conflict is that the user's expectations are not aligned with what the existing community seeks to provide.
And yes, the ambiguity you note has been spammed all over the Internet (everywhere Stack Overflow is discussed) the entire time. Some people are upset about how things are done; others consider what is done to be inherently problematic. And you can't even clearly communicate about this. For example, someone who writes "You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk." might have in mind "don't point people at the policy document as if they should have known better, and don't give specific interpretation as if their reading comprehension is lacking"; but might also have in mind "point people at the policy document, and give specific interpretation, because otherwise there's no way for them to know". Or it might be "say something nice, but don't close the question because that sends the wrong message inherently" (this interpretation is fundamentally misguided and fundamentally misunderstands both the purpose and consequences of question closure).
And yes, every now and then, the person making the complaint actually encountered someone who said something unambiguously nasty. For those cases, there is a flagging system and a Code of Conduct. (But most Code of Conduct violations come from new users complaining when they find out that they aren't entitled to an open, answered question. And that's bad enough that many people don't comment to explain closures specifically to avoid de-anonymizing themselves.)
1. They overwhelmingly are not moderators, and they are not doing moderation by closing questions. This is curation, and duplicate closures overwhelmingly are done by subject-matter experts: users with a gold badge in one or more of the tags originally applied to the question. The requirement for such a badge is based on answering questions:
> Earn at least 1000 total score for at least 200 non-community wiki answers in the $TAG tag. These users can single-handedly mark $TAG questions as duplicates and reopen them as needed.
So these are definitely not people averse to the idea of answering questions.
2. I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of these cases are not people trying to be "mean". Users are actively incentivized against closing duplicates, which has historically led to nowhere near enough duplicate questions being recognized and closed (although there have been many proposals to fix this). Dupe-hammering questions "to be mean" is considered abusive, and suspicion of it is grounds to go to the meta site and discuss the matter.
No, people close these questions because they genuinely believe the question is a duplicate, and genuinely believe they improve the site with this closure. It's important to understand that: a) people who ask a question are not entitled to a personalized answer; b) leaving duplicate questions open actively harms the site by allowing answers to get spread around, making it harder for the next person to find all the good ones; c) the Stack Overflow conception of duplication is not based on just what the OP understands or finds useful, but on what everyone else afterward will find useful.
For example, there are over a thousand duplicate links to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 , most of which is from my own effort — spending many consecutive days closing dozens of questions a day (and/or redirecting duplicate closures so that everything could point at a "canonical"). Yes, that's a question about how to indent Python code properly. I identified candidates for this from a search query and carefully reviewed each one, verifying the issue and sending other duplicates to more specific canonicals in many cases (such as https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239668). And put considerable effort into improvements to questions and existing answers, writing my own answer, and adding links and guidelines for other curators so that they can choose more appropriate duplicate targets in some cases. I also looked at a wider search that probably had a fairly high false positive rate, but implies that there could be thousands more that I missed.
3. When your question is closed as a duplicate, you immediately get a link to an answer. You don't even need to wait for someone to write it! It's someone saying "here, I was able to find it for you, thanks perhaps to my familiarity with other people asking it".
4. Stack Overflow users really do "try to find what's different about" the question. It just... doesn't actually matter in a large majority of cases. "I need to do X with a tuple, not a list" — well, you do it the same way. "I need to Y the Xs" — well, it seems like you understand how to Y an X and the real problem is with finding the Xs; here's the existing Q&A about finding Xs; you shouldn't need someone else to explain how to feed that into your Y-the-things loop, or if you do, we can probably find a separate duplicate for that. Things like that happen constantly.
Sometimes a question shows up with multiple duplicates. This almost always falls into two patterns: the user is really asking multiple separate things (due to failing to try to break up a problem into logical steps) and each one is a duplicate; or the question is constantly asked but nobody knows a good version of the question, and gives multiple links to previous attempts out of frustration with constantly seeing it. (The latter is bad; someone is supposed to write the good version and send everything else there. But that typically requires behind-the-scenes coordination. Better would be if the first bad attempt got fixed, but you know.)
5. Closing a question is emphatically not about telling people to go away. The intended message (unless the question is off topic or the OP just made a typo or had a brainfart) is "please stay and fix this". However, it's perfectly reasonable that an explicit attempt to catalog and organize useful information treats redundant indices by pointing them at the same target rather than copies of the target. And questions are indices in the Q&A model.
I question the "failed" here. You did land on their pages, after all. You most probably also clicked on an internal link and moved to another of their pages, and then bounced off.
Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.
What you seem to overlook is that the people curating the site and setting up duplicate links don't see a penny of revenue. There is extreme misalignment between them and the actual stakeholders. Nowadays the site staff/owners are seen by the meta community basically as active saboteurs.
Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025.
They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.
The dream of decentralised moderation that came with Web 2.0.
In reality, the Venn diagram of people wishing to moderate online spaces for virtual points and petty bureaucrats that get off on making arbitrary rules is pretty much a circle.
I would agree, Reddit is in a slow death spiral. I'd point at bad management primarily. The main thing keeping them afloat may be lack of good competition.
I definitely think that has made it worse, but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site.
> but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site.
Stack Overflow's situation, of course, is totally different. It only changed ownership once.
> the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025.
You are supposed to go to the existing question and post a new answer on it.
Answer approval means almost nothing and should never have been implemented. In the early days it helped experts spread out their attention, as there was an immediate signal that a question had at least one answer good enough for the OP. But there is really no reason to prioritize the OP's opinion like this. (The reputation system has been misaligned with the site's goals in many ways.)
I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though."
When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly in response to someone acting like "I just need to convince them"
There are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case.
A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: <code> and here is the issue I have <output or description of issue>. <More details as relevant>"
This does two things: 1. It demonstrates that the question ask-er actually cares about whatever it is they are doing, and it's just trying to get free homework answers. 2. Ideally it forces the ask-er to provide enough information that an answer-er can do so without asking follow ups.
Biggest thing as someone who has been in Discords that are geared towards support, you can either gear towards new people or professionals but walking the line between both is almost impossible.
I believe in gearing towards teachers. Q&A sites are often at their best when the Q and A come from the same source. But it needs to be someone who understands that the Q is common and can speak the language of those who don't know the A. Unfortunately, not a common skillset (typically doesn't pay the bills).
The key part of your post is "has to tell people". Absolutely nobody on SO was obligated to respond to anything. The toxicity was a choice, and those doing it enjoyed it.
To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I find this to be a common cultural difference between contributors from different backgrounds.
Personally I find a lot of "welcoming" language to be excessively saccharine and ultimately insincere. Something between being talked down to like I'm a child and corpo-slop. Ultimately I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution here and it's weird that some people expect that such a thing can or should exist.
Personally I'm not a fan of terse writing; if something's worth saying at all it's worth using suitably expressive language to describe it, and being short and cold with people isn't a good form of interpersonal communication in my view. Pleasantries are important for establishing mutual respect, if they're considered the baseline of politeness in a particular culture then it's overtly disrespectful to forgo them with strangers. Terseness is efficient for the writer certainly, but it's not necessarily for the reader.
Written like you're on one side of the cultural barrier and think that you have to be somehow naturally correct because that's what's natural to you. To others, that attitude is just arrogant and self-centered. Why should one particular culture dictate the behavior of everyone, and especially why should it be your culture?
What you call "establishing mutual respect" is just "insincere and shallow" to others. I do not believe for a second that a grocery store cashier wants to know how my day has been.
That's not what I mean, I don't like corpo-speak either. I mean just treating people like they're human beings, neither with affected shortness nor affected warmth. I really don't like the common notion that you have to be cold and short with people to be a good engineer, it makes the culture considerably less pleasant and more abrasive than it needs to be in my view.
I could just as well turn that around and say why should we all adopt your preference of unpleasantly curt communication? Is that not also an imposition of someone else's culture?
What if short isn't "cold" at all? That's a value you're projecting to it.
I understand there are cultures that value flowery speech more than mine. I'm asking you to stop using emotionally loaded words to describe how other people behave.
Exactly. When a certain moderation style is allowed, it attracts aligned personality types and produces a distinct culture. When toxicity becomes the norm, it is enjoyed by sadists and the demented, who have positioned themselves appropriately to get off on it.
I was a user of StackOverflow for quite a while. I appreciated the friction. It taught me how to ask better questions to the point where I'd be doing all the research needed to ask a good question and just solve it myself along the way. It's a skill that has made a world of difference in my career relative to my peers. Makes me want to reply to my coworkers simply with "Closed as Duplicate" or "Closed - Needs details or clarity".
Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away.
Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.
For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.
(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)
Fully agreed with your reason for leaving, but I'll throw in: it's absolutely terrible at showing time relevant information, seemingly on the theory that someone will dedup and edit every question and answer as it becomes history rather than helpful.
That became more and more clear as the site and content aged, and afaict they have done absolutely nothing to address it. So after a few years the site had good information... but often only if you had accidentally time traveled.
I had FAR too many cases where the correct answer now was much further down the page, and the highest rated (and correct at the time) answer was causing damage, and editing it to fix that would often be undone unless it was super obvious (if I even could). It shifted the site from "the most useful" to "everything still needs to be double checked off-site" and at that point any web search is roughly equivalent. And when it's not a destination for answers, it's not a destination for questions (or moderation) either.
Definitely. And interestingly, that sucked for authors of the old answers, too. I had a few highly ranked answers from around 2010 or so. Every now and then I’d get a new notification about someone telling me I was completely wrong and should be embarrassed. Look, my time traveling friend, that answer was perfectly reasonable when I wrote it 16 years ago. It’s not my fault that the ebbs and currents of SO pushed you to it today. I’d answer differently today, but I’m not going to go back and “fix” all my old suggestions to keep them up to date.
That’s the weird feedback loop from practically forcing new askers back to the old answers, which was bad for everyone involved.
The Android filesystem APIs are a perfect example of this. The old answers no longer work because Google keeps restricting what apps can do. If you're lucky, someone might post a comment or a new (non-accepted) answer.
> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run
That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things about how the site was explicitly intended to differ from traditional forums where "perfectly good" questions are constantly asked.
> Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay.
This is absurd and I can't think of anything remotely like this happening in practice. The opposite is true: popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago, list two different options from two other different previous answers, list a subset of options from some previous answers, describe some personal experience that ultimately led to applying someone else's answer with a trivial modification for personal circumstances unrelated to the actual subject of the question, etc. etc.
I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.
One thing that isn't talked about enough is the impact aggressive moderation had on people answering too.
If you were in the New queue, and found a question you could answer, by the time you posted your answer the question itself may have been nuked by mods making your answer/effect not seen by many.
Oh, man. That was kind of the end of the line for me, too. I’d get roped into conversations trying to defend the question, which wasn’t even mine, because I thought it was novel and interesting enough to be worth answering in the first place. And then I asked myself what I was doing getting suckered into these talks. I don’t need that kind of tarpit.
Yes. The problem is that the model was questions open by default, so you had exposure to the question before it could be properly be considered for inclusion. The Staging Ground fixed this, but too little (only applied to a small random sampling of questions) and way too late.
You complain, but actually the deck is heavily stacked in your favour: there is a 5-minute grace period on answers; plus you can submit the answer by yourself, regardless of your reputation score, while typical closures (not duplicates and not questions flagged and then seen by someone on the very small moderation team) require three high-rep users (and it used to be five) to agree.
However, the question was not "nuked": the OP gets at least 9 days to fix it and submit for reconsideration before the system deletes it automatically (unless it's so bad that multiple even higher rep users take even further consensus action, on the belief that it fundamentally can't be fixed: see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a...).
And this overwhelmingly was not done "by mods". It's done by people who acquired significant reputation (of course, this also generally describes the mods), typically by answering many questions.
And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who used to answer human questions won't give a s*t anymore. You reap what you sow.
Best of both worlds? I disagree vehemently. At least my job is secure; experts with decades of experience are in high demand, and I can be even more selective who I decide to work for. I'm done contributing for free to the corpo Internet though.
Stackoverflow was never about getting the best code and neither are LLMs. People ask questions to figure out how to do something. If an LLM provides an answer that doesn't work, then they will just ask it to do it another way and hope that one works. Experts will always be in high demand, but on the other side there are a lot of jobs that just want a working product, even if it's not well made.
Nowadays when I do a conventional search for information, the results on all sorts of topics are dominated by obviously LLM slop articles trying their hardest to SEO by padding out the page with tons of tangential dreck. When I can actually scroll through and glean the information I'm looking for, it's wrong in at least some subtle technical detail a significant fraction of the time, yes.
And then, the other day someone showed an example of a "how to configure WireGuard" article, padded to hell, in LLM house style, aimlessly wandering... being hosted on the webpage of a industrial company selling products made out of wire meshes.
No doubt AI slop is a problem. Writing well with AIs is a skill -- there are lots of people who are uncritically just copy/pasting whatever the AI produced on first draft onto the web. But I'd argue that's a "content" problem rather than an AI problem - i.e. the imperative just to publish something to wrap ads around.
You _can_ write well with AI. You _can_ also create good products with AI. It's a tool. You need to learn how to use it.
> You _can_ also create good products with AI. It's a tool. You need to learn how to use it.
The incentives to do so are seriously lacking, however. A big part of why SO had to ban LLM content so firmly is that otherwise hordes of people will literally copy someone else's question into ChatGPT, and copy its answer back into the answer submission form in the hopes of getting some reputation points. It was much worse for bounties, of course, which had largely become ignored by anyone not doing that.
Mindless stackoverflow copy-pasting was a scourge of the programming world before. I can't imagine the same low quality stackoverflow answers mashed into slop being the best of any world...
Well put. It's maddening that people still don't get it 17 and a half years later. (It's interesting that Spolsky is giving the talk, since to my understanding Atwood was considerably more hard-line about it, and was always the one blogging about the high concept.)
I mostly chalk it up to UI affordances. The most obvious one: the site constantly presents an "Ask Question" button; it gives you a form to type in a question; people come to the site because they have a question, and it goes live to a general audience[1] as soon as it's posted. No amount of emphasis on search is ever going to override that.
Less obvious but much more important is that the community can't actually put information about community norms in front of new users, except by scolding them for mistakes. No matter how polite you are about giving people links to the tour[2] or to policies[3],
Then of course, they wanted the site to actually grow at the start, so we got that terribly conceived reputation system best described as Goodhart's law incarnate[4]. And it was far too successful at that early growth, such that if anyone actually understood the idea properly at the start, they were overwhelmed by new users (including the experts answering questions) and had no chance to instill a site culture. It took until 2012 or so until a significant chunk of the experts were getting frustrated with... all the same things they were historically frustrated with on actual forums; then we got the "What Stack Overflow is Not" incident[5]. A lot of the frustration was misdirected except for a general annoyance at certain stereotypes of typical users. It took until at least 2014, from my assessment of the old meta posts, for a real consensus to start emerging about what makes a good question, and even then there was a lot of confusion[6].
Newer sites like Codidact[7] have a chance to learn from this mess, establishing ideas about what good questions look like, and about site scope, from the start[8].
5. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/137795. Back then I was actively using the site but not active on meta; I pretty well gave up in 2015 for largely unrelated (personal) reasons, then came back in mid 2019, coincidentally shortly before the Monica situation[9].
6. In particular, see 'How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592), originally authored 2013, and especially compare the original answers to newer ones. Notably there were also quite a few deleted answers on this one, for those of you with the reputation to view them. Also see 'How do I ask and answer homework questions?' (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822) which largely misses the point: it's not so much about the ethics of someone cheating on homework, but about the question fitting the site model.
7. https://codidact.com , with subdomains for various topics. Notably, "programming" as a topic is not privileged; unlike how the Stack Exchange network started with Stack Overflow which still dominates everything else put together, software.codidact.com is just another section of the site. Full disclosure: I am a moderator for that section.
> StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point.
This is a very charitable read of the situation. Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this.
> > The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google.
It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.
> Much more likely is, as another commenter posted, a set of people experiencing a small amount of power for the first time immediately used it for status and took their "first opportunity to be the bully". Question quality and curation was always secondary to this.
It always looks like this from the outside. Especially for those who don't understand what the quality standards are, or what the motivations are for having those standards.
There is a Code of Conduct and a flagging system for a reason.
> It obviously was only tolerated because of that, as evidenced by the exodus the moment a viable alternative became available.
This is not a contradiction or rebuttal. Every Internet community is allowed to decide its own objectives. Stack Overflow's was explicitly not "help the question-askers". It was brought into existence specifically because of the social problems, and lack of utility for later searchers, observed in "help the question-asker" environments (i.e., traditional discussion forums). Of course there was an exodus when it was no longer required to bother a human to make a natural-language query find the right information (more or less, most of the time). From Stack Overflow's perspective, that's just an improvement on conventional search, and no more of a problem than the fact that Google used to be good at indexing the site.
(I still don't understand why Firefox spell-check doesn't think "asker" and "answerer" are words. They're not in my /usr/dict/share/words, either. I've been speaking English for over four decades and I still hate it.)
This is the reason we have people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities.
If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic.
Edit: By the way, I also don't think we should trust big companies indiscriminately. Like, we could have a system for pesticide approval that errs on the side of caution: We only permit pesticides for which there is undisputed evidence that the chemicals do not cause problems for humans/animals/other plants etc.
"If you make any other assumption than "I don't know what's happening here and need to learn more" you'll constantly be making these kind of errors. You don't have to have an opinion on every topic."
I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong. The tendency to optimize for profits at the expense of everything else, to ignore all negative externalities is inherent to all American corporations.
The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack,
and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.
You're reducing it down too far. Policing has a problem policing itself -- it's very well documented.
People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.
Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.
The good cops, such as they are, get run out if they try to challenge the institutional problems in police forces. This radically restricts how good a cop can be while still being a cop.
Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?
Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.
And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.
Well, who votes for politicians? The public. Are all members of the public therefore culpable?
Voting isn’t a means by which every voter’s preferences are amalgamated into a coherent set of preferences.
Voting is better than the available alternatives, but one person voting for something better doesn’t make the outcome of the vote be that better thing.
You might have a point if we actually had an anti-police-corruption movement led by police officers - but we don't. The people who are supposed to be protecting us and enforcing the laws are really just bullies who like to abuse people, or they'd do something about it. They keep voting for union leaders who will cover up their crimes.
I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.
One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".
The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.
As much as I understand ACAB due to their systemic corruption and acting as a gang to provide their friends and family with more “justice” than others, I disagree with ending the war on drugs.
While it would be nice to think we can live in a world where everyone can be healed from mental problems (including drug addiction), I don’t think it’s possible to come back from the hardest of drugs (on a population level). The only thing you are inviting is chaos into your neighborhood.
I understand your concerns about this (living outside Portland OR) but would counter that there's plenty of chaos with the current system.
I lost my brother to heroin decades ago and the laws on the books did nothing to prevent it, and a better system could have helped prevent it.
It would have to be done "holistically" (coordinated with the legal system, policing, health care, etc) but it's technically viable. The only thing stopping us from doing it is, um, us.
Even if it wasn't truly legal, it could be vastly overhauled if it actually was about doing what it pretends to be about: protecting us from the dangers of drugs.
The fact that 6 people replied to my comment in order to "correct me" on something that is less deadly than hunting accidents, is the most evidence I can offer for my point.
In the signal of things that are damaging society, negatively impacting individuals, police-brutality-self-investigation-no-harm-found is so far down in the noise floor, it should be about as worrying as people who live on busy street intersections not trimming back their hedges for safe driving visibility.
But somehow, here are 6 people deep in random HN comments telling me all about the importance of trimming hedges. Err, reforming police.
Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.
IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).
( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )
>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in many large bureaucracies, especially across the government. A notable (and likely controversial) case in point is teachers who (sexually or physically) abuse students, and are kept on the payrolls, often in ‘rubber-rooms’. Are public schools worth having?
I guess the equivalent here is the teachers and the teachers unions covering up that abuse, moving the abuses around to other schools, and lobbying for special protection for those abusers even after they are caught and convicted.
Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.
I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.
Teachers in many jurisdictions (I don’t know about every jurisdiction) are required (and paid) to take training in spotting signs of sexual or physical abuse, and are (at least often) legally required to report it. In that sense, they are ‘in charge of’ preventing sexual abuse.
I don't think many teachers think that abusing students is part of their job, but there are LOTS of cops who think that abusing their power to kill / maim / steal from / rape citizens is JUST fine.
Police killed about 1200 people last year, with 118 happening during a wellness check, 116 during a traffic stop, and an additional 213 for unspecified non-violent offenses.
Only 10 officers were charged with a crime from these cases. What do the 'rubber-room' stats look like?
The statistics for sexual abuse in educational settings are not quite as clear as those for police-involved homicides (and I am not a subject-matter-expert), but the numbers which do exist are quite alarming.
If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.
If we apply your logic, would you say it's fair to go around and say "all teachers are bastards", when referring to teacher unions that make it hard to fire incompetent teachers? Or maybe "all doctors are bastards" when referencing how the american medical association (the trade association for doctors) makes it hard for more doctors to be admitted?
Sure, but one key difference is that if either of those groups steps outside the law, you can recourse to the law to check them.
Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")
>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.
I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.
you are definitely going to start involving the justice system if teachers and doctors start physically abusing people, illegally detaining them and killing them!
>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).
one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."
another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".
there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
> modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers;
That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.
My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.
That is a lot of words to make a claim that nobody would accept if they used it for other issues. If somebody said that all blacks are criminals and used your exact argument, nobody would buy it.
You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).
Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
And when a cop tries to do something about it, this is the sort of thing that happens. This guy seems like he's trying to do the right thing, but the system is designed so he can't:
> Bianchi claims his superiors retaliated against him for his stance against the “corrupt” cards after he was warned by an official with the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, that he would not be protected by his union if he wrote tickets for people with cards. And if he continued, he’d be reassigned... The lawsuit cites several instances where his NYPD colleagues complained about his ticket-writing, including on Facebook...
> Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.
> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.
His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.
It's been a long time since I heard this, but I believe there is recording here [0] of his colleagues forcing themselves into his apartment to have him committed.
> I can do this and still start off by assuming the corporation is in the wrong
You really can't. You can start off with a prior that it's more likely the corporation is wrong than not. But if you're assuming your conclusion, you're going to find evidence for what you're looking for. (You see the same thing happen with folks who start off by assuming the government is in the wrong.)
When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.
Destruction of the system and building a new fairer one. Similar to how feudalism gave way to capitalism, things can improve. What details are you wanting to know exactly?
An egalitarian society where the means of production are owned (or mostly owned) by the working class. A blend of that and small private industry with heavy regulation would be nice. I like how the Kurds in Rojava are trying to build things but it's impossible to know how successful their ideas could be while they're dodging bullets from Syria and Turkey. The Zapatista movement is another way of doing things I'd consider.
I have a bias towards not dying, and so far that has steered me away from activities that increase my likelihood of it. Bias is not intrinsically negative (that's prejudice), it just means a preference towards.
I see some lifted pickup truck, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive a potential outsize source of accidents.
If I know where a hidden driveway is, I know where to focus my attention to better perceive any cars emerging. My knowledge of the driveway biases me towards looking towards it, where another driver without that knowledge would not.
Biased perceptions of things as dangerous will absolutely make us observe them more closely in order to better perceive danger.
You're still (perhaps inadvertently) equating 'bias' with 'prejudice', but experience biases our perceptions in positive ways, like clocking a hot stovetop.
You think I think there isn't a difference between bias and prejudice, while I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized, or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific. The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
> I think you think there isn't a difference between prejudice and knowledge
I'm having trouble following this. Of course there's a difference between prejudice and knowledge.
Being aware that studies show pickup trucks are statistically more dangerous than other classes of vehicles (SUVs included, which is nuts!), and thus wanting to avoid them, is knowledge.
Thinking that pickup truck drivers are wannabe macho chuds, and thus wanting to avoid them, is prejudice.
From the outside, you have no clue whether avoidant behavior stems from knowledge-based-bias, or prejudice. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion I'd conflated the two.
> What I really care about is guilty-until-proven-innocent masquerading as civilized
What?
> or false-until-proven-true masquerading as scientific
I have no clue what this has to do with our discussion.
> The starting position should be I don't know. I may have seen cases that look like this, I might know where to look first, but I don't know what I'll find. Until I do, not before.
Ah, I see where you're going. You're wrong.
If you truly believe that you don't use lived experience to make prefactual assessments throughout life, you haven't thought about it enough:
When you walk up to a new computer, you don't assume that you have no idea how the mouse will work, just because this is a new mouse you haven't individually encountered before. You assume (and act on the assumption) that it will work the same as other mice. You don't swab it just in case it's a bomb, or covered in poison.
You just act on your expectations of how it will behave -UNTIL- you see evidence to the contrary.
The problem is you're trying to (as I said) equate bias with prejudice. The comment from pepperghost93 was about the belief in corporations' willingness to do bad things.
You and Permit1 clearly assumed they were merely prejudiced against corporations, and not basing their wariness of corporate malfeasance on factual data showing corporations being willing to, in fact, do immoral and illegal things.
tl;dr Ironically, you, in the process of decrying bias, used your own biased perception of prefactual judgements to assume they were coming from a place of prejudice rather than knowledge.
I'm sure our viewpoints are more similar than it seems, and we eventually would find a fairly spacious middle-ground, but I'd prefer not to continue: thanks for the conversation.
That bias is well earned. Maybe one day corporations will do enough good things in the world to undo the evil they've perpetuated. I'm not holding my breath.
>people mistakenly repeating the conclusion that AI consumes huge amounts of water comparable to that of entire cities
Does it not?
"We estimate that 1 MWh of energy consumption by a data center requires 7.1 m3 of water." If Microsoft, Amazon and Google are assumed to have ~8000 MW of data centers in the US, that is 1.4M m3 per day. The city of Philadelphia supplies 850K m3 per day.
Why do we need to assume so many things, when we can peg it to reality.
Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.
I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.
Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
Yeah, but that is for everything. YouTube, Amazon itself, AWS, Azure, GCP, ... not just AI stuff. I mean, it is still a lot of water, but the numbers are not that easy to calculate IMHO
Resource consumption of AI is unclear on two axes:
1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.
2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").
I agree, but that's what people are implicitly doing every time they toss out one of those "The machine drinks a glass of water every time it" statistics. We are to assume a human doesn't.
AI water usage is pretty bad on a local scale where a large water consumer(Data centers) start sucking up more water than the local table can bear at the expense of the people living there.
Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person. It's correct that these companies will push limits and avoid accountability. It's correct that they're generally a liability creating a massive bubble and speculation based on an immature tech designed to automate as many careers away as possible without a proposed solution to the newly unemployed besides "deliver fast food" or "die".
Despite legally treating corporations as people, there's no consistently enforced mechanism that can punish them like people. Monsanto can't be sent to jail for murder. Their C-Levels will never see a cell the way the average person can have the book thrown at them for comparably minor crimes.
Because companies cannot be held accountable legally and effectively, it's important to assume the worst, to generate the public blowback to hold them accountable via lost business.
>Even if the general takes seen on water use is wrong, it's correct in that these companies don't have the best in mind for the average person.
That just sounds more like cope than anything else. eg. "AI companies sucking up all the water might not be a real issue, but I still think they're evil for other reasons".
Buddy no one can buy RAM right now because Ole sammy bought up the useless wafers for datacenters they can't power for 10 years.
They don't have your best interest at heart. They're going to willingly nuke the economy before admitting their chatbots aren't the god machine they've been preaching about.
Nonsense, if we view proving as providing evidence for, then absolutely we can prove a negative. We have our priors, we accumulate evidence, we generate a posterior. At some point we are sufficiently convinced. Don't get hung up on the narrow mathematical definition of prove (c.f. the exception[al case] that proves [tests] the rule), and we're just dandy.
I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.
And when a chemical goes off patent protection and you have a new patented chemical ready to go, it's advantageous to suddenly dis the now public domain entity.
It's a rational default position to say, "I'll default to distrusting large corporate scientific literature that tells me neurotoxins on my food aren't a problem."
As with any rule of thumb, that one will sometimes land you on the wrong side of history, but my guess is that it will more often than not guide you well if you don't have the time to dive deeper into a subject.
I'm not saying all corporations are evil. I'm not saying all corporate science is bad or bunk. But, corporations have a poor track record with this sort of thing, and it's the kind of thing that could obviously have large, negative societal consequences if we get it wrong. This is the category of problem for which the science needs to be clear and overwhelming in favor of a thing before we should allow it.
There are shades of gray here. But you are absolutely not required to extend benefit of the doubt to entities that have not earned it. That's a recipe for disaster.
Personally, I find myself to be incredibly biased against corporations over people. I've met a lot of people in my life, they seem mostly nice if a bit stupid. Well intentioned. Selfish.
Are corporations mostly well intentioned? Well, consider that some people tried to put "good intentions" into corporations bylaws and has been viciously resisted.
Corporations will happily take everything you have if you accidentally give it to them. Actual human beings aren't like that.
This is unworkable in practice; nothing will ever be completely safe. Instead, we need a public regulatory body that makes reasonable risk/reward tradeoffs when approving necessary chemicals. However, this system breaks down completely when you allow for lobbying and a revolving door between the public and private sectors.
Ai does us a crap-ton of water.
Most data centers use closed loop liquid cooling with heat exchangers to water cooling. (At least all the big ones like Google and Amazon do)
I’m curious what evidence you think you’ve seen to the contrary. from my side, I used to build data centers and my friends are still in the industry. As of a month ago I’ve had discussions with Google engineers who build data centers regarding their carful navigation of water rights, testing of waste water etc.
The Dalles data centers use a large fraction of the water supply of The Dalles because the data centers are extremely large and the town of The Dalles is of negligible size. It is also true that the paper mill of Valliant, Oklahoma uses 50 million gallons of water per day and that the town of Valliant, Oklahoma, population 819, uses less than 1% of that amount, so the paper mill can be said to be using > 99% of the local water supply but this is also a meaningless comparison.
So we'll move the datacenters from the tiny town to just outside of a giant city which will probably move that percentage down to only a few percent if even that. Problem solved!
You're looking at the wrong metrics to compare here if we're trying to just gauge how efficient a datacenter is or is not. This metric could be useful if the datacenters are attached to the municipal water system and thus begin to be a massive load compared to what was originally planned/built, but in terms of understanding the total water use compared to other industrial users its kind of a meaningless statistic.
I’ve been unclear on this. What datacenter out there is using an open loop cooling system that does not return the water after cooling for other uses?
It seems extremely inefficient to have to filter river water over and over then to dump it into the ground so deep it doesn’t go back to getting into an aquifer.
As is always the case when discussing systems, the answer changes depending on where you draw the system boundary. In some cases you would expect water to fall as rain in the same watershed where it was drawn. This is the case for example of water "used by" California rice fields that are irrigated by flood. In other cases, you can expect the water to disappear into a distant system. This would be the case for water drawn from fossil aquifers.
No, that's incorrect. Others have provided citations demonstrating that the big tech AI facilities use more water than cities with populations of 100,000 people.
A city is not defined by its size. It is defined by its legal incorporation as a city. There are big cities, and there are small cities, and most cities are on the smaller side.
What possible value could a comment from someone who has no knowledge of the site or conflict add to this discussion?
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