As a datacenter technician, yes, having all the computers in one place is more efficient than it would be having one running in individual homes. The buildings are specifically designed to cool computers. Does your house have massive holes in the roof bringing in outside air during the winter?
Solar is great. And we use it at the datacenter too. Lol.
“Traditionally, data centers use evaporative cooling. This water is drawn from a groundwater aquifer or surface water source (lake, river, or stream). Water usage depends on both local climate conditions as well as the type of cooling system, but much of it rises as water vapor into the atmosphere, is carried away by prevailing winds, and becomes unavailable for reuse near its source”
Are you using all of the computer power effectively? Does it know how to dynamically allocate resources and move containers around to meet demand?
You think I’m just fucking around and don’t understand container orchestration?
I am sorry but you are way oversimplifying how this all works.
No, I’m not. Data centers overcomplicate how the internet should have worked.
If your homelab hosted every online resource you utilize, it would have a worse impact on the environment given it probably sits in a room temperature room and would therefore require more power than a room designed to be cold.
It seems like a drop in the bucket but if everyone hosted their own compute we would have serious environmental issues way before AI even existed.
You think people should be running a gigabit switch and dell poweredge for example in their own house?
Why do they need all that when most things can be done on a simple arm SBC? Most “online resources” dont need to exist to begin with. We dont need 30,000,000 AI generated articles. We don’t need 7,000 different social media sites. We don’t need tracking cookies, advertising, or any other of the stupid bullshit that came with Web 2.0. We were doing fine before corpo shills ruined the internet. ActivityPub is a perfect example of how the internet SHOULD be. A single user instance costs almost nothing at all to host. If you remove the “profit incentive” the internet would be a lot more efficient.
The reason users dont know what they are doing is because corporations simplified the computer to such a degree that users do not need to learn anything about them to begin with.
The current implementation of data centers are inheritly capitalistic. They are not there for anything other than profit. There is no reason not to educate people on what they are actually doing when they connect to the internet, other than profit and power.
There is no reason for me to want a data center to exist in its current form. I will continue to be against them being built until we see them being used for good. (lmfao, good luck in this economy)
100%. This started with mass adoption of the smartphone in like 2013. Hot take but I think the world would have been better if we never let “normies” on the internet so easily. But you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle now
I miss the days when the only thing my datacenter was used for was the public library, the hospital, and for processing research. But it is what it is.
At least I get to maintain a node for Internet Archives.
As a datacenter technician, yes, having all the computers in one place is more efficient than it would be having one running in individual homes. The buildings are specifically designed to cool computers. Does your house have massive holes in the roof bringing in outside air during the winter?
Solar is great. And we use it at the datacenter too. Lol.
“as a member of the system, I do believe the system is efficient”
thats great one data center is using solar. How about you go make the rest of them do that so my electric bill goes back down.
My homelab doesnt run that hot so I dont need holes in the roof during winter. It runs cooler than most gaming PCs. It also barely uses any power.
I mean, I’m someone who knows how it actually works, talking to a guy who thinks they know how it works.
I wish I could do that my man.
Can you elaborate on how my datacenter is polluting the water? We have not topped up the water cooling loop in six years.
How is every person self hosting the services they love going to bring down your power bill?
Are you using all of the computer power effectively? Does it know how to dynamically allocate resources and move containers around to meet demand?
I know what I’m doing and my homelab wastes a lot of power idling.
I am sorry but you are way oversimplifying how this all works.
“it works this way at the one data center I work at so they must all work this way”
third grade level thinking.
https://www.sehn.org/sehn/2025/8/14/data-centers-and-the-water-crisis
“Traditionally, data centers use evaporative cooling. This water is drawn from a groundwater aquifer or surface water source (lake, river, or stream). Water usage depends on both local climate conditions as well as the type of cooling system, but much of it rises as water vapor into the atmosphere, is carried away by prevailing winds, and becomes unavailable for reuse near its source”
You think I’m just fucking around and don’t understand container orchestration?
No, I’m not. Data centers overcomplicate how the internet should have worked.
keep editing and moving the goalpost though.
If your homelab hosted every online resource you utilize, it would have a worse impact on the environment given it probably sits in a room temperature room and would therefore require more power than a room designed to be cold.
It seems like a drop in the bucket but if everyone hosted their own compute we would have serious environmental issues way before AI even existed.
You think people should be running a gigabit switch and dell poweredge for example in their own house?
Why do they need all that when most things can be done on a simple arm SBC? Most “online resources” dont need to exist to begin with. We dont need 30,000,000 AI generated articles. We don’t need 7,000 different social media sites. We don’t need tracking cookies, advertising, or any other of the stupid bullshit that came with Web 2.0. We were doing fine before corpo shills ruined the internet. ActivityPub is a perfect example of how the internet SHOULD be. A single user instance costs almost nothing at all to host. If you remove the “profit incentive” the internet would be a lot more efficient.
I almost completely agree with you. But this is a capitalism problem and not a datacenter problem you do realize?
Datacenters existed and worked fine before the examples you mentioned existed.
The other problem is that users don’t know what they are doing, and that’s why datacenters are required…
The reason users dont know what they are doing is because corporations simplified the computer to such a degree that users do not need to learn anything about them to begin with.
The current implementation of data centers are inheritly capitalistic. They are not there for anything other than profit. There is no reason not to educate people on what they are actually doing when they connect to the internet, other than profit and power.
There is no reason for me to want a data center to exist in its current form. I will continue to be against them being built until we see them being used for good. (lmfao, good luck in this economy)
100%. This started with mass adoption of the smartphone in like 2013. Hot take but I think the world would have been better if we never let “normies” on the internet so easily. But you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle now
I miss the days when the only thing my datacenter was used for was the public library, the hospital, and for processing research. But it is what it is.
At least I get to maintain a node for Internet Archives.
#notalldatacenters lol