Is he wrong about AI water usage, though? Using the fact that he defended AI water usage, as a reason to ignore everything he says, only works if he was wrong to defend AI water usage.

I read that article in depth and checked all the math and the extensive sources and found it very much accurate and it convinced me that the water usage issue is not serious.

He’s kinda wrong. The facts he states are correct. Others are clearly exaggerating or making mistakes. But he jumps from that to the incorrect conclusion that “data centers don’t use water”.

There are water accounting games on how much water is used for the electricity - Masley is right about that. But he ignores the water actually used to cool data centers, which is about 1/10th that. (About 25 billion gallons per year vs the 200B misstated as consumed during electric generation.) 25B gallons is actually still quite small in the big picture, but it’s growing very fast. And in the local regions where these data centers are built that can be a huge strain on the water supply.

So I would say Masley is biased in his reporting, and should be read critically. But on infrasound I think he’s right.

Agreed.

I think my takeaway from the water usage deep dive was about the scale of the numbers and a better intuition about water usage, but also that you really need to consider each data center uniquely. He'll say in broad strokes that data centers are fine, and then mention the few exceptions (in the infrasound article, that's the xAI DC). That's fine for the moment when he wrote the article, but if I'm evaluating a proposed data center in my local area, I don't know what bucket it falls in. Is it the exception or the norm? Still, because I read that deep dive, I feel better equipped to make that evaluation.

I don't think saying "as a general rule, data centers don't use remotely enough water to be any kind of significant threat, when you see through the accounting games, media hype, and look at things in a proper context" is made wrong or misleading by admitting that there are a few exceptions.

> That's fine for the moment when he wrote the article, but if I'm evaluating a proposed data center in my local area, I don't know what bucket it falls in. Is it the exception or the norm?

It does help you set your priors though, and not fall for the "all AI guzzles water, and DCs are dehydrating every town they're in and are always bad, without doing the research" rhetoric that's driving DC bans around the country right now.

I think we agree? I can't tell if you meant this as additional support for what I wrote or as a rebuttal.

Regardless, yeah, I don't think that's wrong or misleading. I only meant to say that because there are exceptions now, there might also be more exceptions in the future. Which, to me, means it's important to evaluate each new local DC individually.

And your point about setting my priors is exactly what I'm saying, too.

Ah ok, we probably do agree then.

> Others are clearly exaggerating or making mistakes.

I'd be interested to hear a specific example, so I can get a sense for what you mean.

> But he jumps from that to the incorrect conclusion that “data centers don’t use water”.

He doesn't ignore the amount they are using, though — he goes to great lengths to contextualize how much water that actually is, compared to other industries (at a national scale) and other industries and recreational things (like golf courses and water parks and so on) at the local scale, specifically to point out that "25B gallons is actually still quite small in the big picture," as you yourself say — and yes, the water usage is growing "fast," but I don't know that anyone's actually quantified that growth rate, and it's still small in comparison to plenty of other industries that also grow year over year, and I neither he nor I think it'll continue to grow forever (AI bubble and all that).

> And in the local regions where these data centers are built that can be a huge strain on the water supply.

He explicitly deals with this, and as far as I can tell he's also right here, that there isn't a meaningful strain on most local water supplies either, as a fraction of total water production or in comparison to other industries those places also choose to host that are water intensive, despite being in arid climates, like the aforementioned golf courses, water parks, and other more industrial things. He goes through all the specific news headlines that claim that the water thing is a serious issue, and show that either they're talking about something different (like data center construction temporarily dirtying well water in nearby houses) or just pointing out that data centers "use water" and are also in arid areas, as if that's self-evidently bad, when other water using industries are already there and it isn't a big issue.

If you could point me to sources that he missed that disprove this, I'd be open to it for sure — I'm open to being wrong, and not committed to absolutely defending the honor of a guy I've never met on the internet against all odds. But I'm not personally aware of any contradictory evidence. I've been linked to a few reports from various foundations before, but they always are referencing numbers from other reports that link to other reports that, if you follow the whole process to the end, bottoms out in random news articles with unsubstantiated numbers that don't line up with what any actual math or other reports say.

> So I would say Masley is biased in his reporting, and should be read critically.

I read everything very critically, especially when it seems "too good to be true," like a lot of the stuff he says, but I might've missed something?

Yeah I know, and I hate it.

I'm in this weird space where I'm working for a company on behalf of my actual company. And the company I'm being farmed out to does not care for us because we are contractors in a sense. This resulted in us being brought on board without any training, any knowledge transfer, and guidance, and being told "get to work".

The result is when I ask people for information regarding the organization or code bases they come back to me with "ChatGPT said this", where ChatGPT is an internally hosted AI stack.

It's gotten to the point where I've given up and just have the internally hosted AI writing unit tests for me because their organization doesn't care about us, and as a result I just don't care about them.

The worst part is the tests seem to be reasonably working. Which is terrifying because I actually know the language or testing framework very well. I'm effectively working in a junior capacity without any training or guidance and my merge requests are getting pushed through.

It's going to be interesting seeing how these organizations that force AI in the workplaces age, because there are no longer experts in the code base. Only slop.

I just don't understand the fuss. Having run some models locally, there is some interesting phenomena going on there, but trying to troubleshoot why things go wrong within the confines of the model itself is... Well, for me at the moment at least, intractable. If I have to rely on something, and I can't troubleshoot or fix it... I'm not relying on it. Especially when the only thing these models really seem good at is burning watts, and massive token multiplication.

Maybe a nice halfway point would to be vegetarian...

incremental steps like reducing or eliminating beef consumption by substituting less water intensive meat (e.g. chicken / turkey) are also helpful

Do you know if there are food tracker apps that can incorporate a n emissions style tracker into food planning and eating? For example is it better to opt for imported sardines or for locally grown chicken? I imagine the answer varies.

This is a fair strategy.

Your sympathy is severely misplaced. Magic Leap was Theranos-sized fraud from the beginning: they never had the goods, put out a whole bunch of misleading hype to persuade consumers and gullible investors that they had the goods [0], and eventually it caught up to them. Good riddance.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9r2Z5v_E9o

I agree they hyped the product too much, but contrary to Theranos, they did ship two products that actually moved AR tech forward. They just weren't efficient enough and the product market fit wasn't there. Even Apple is failing at AR.

Damn. I wish we could get the release of the 35mm colors in the way they look in the comparisons. The Aladdin one specifically looks so good! It makes me feel like we're missing out on so much from the era it was released.

I absolutely hate this. Great to the OP for amazing work, but I am so sad that we're living Black Mirror dog world instead of Star Trek equality world.

There needs to be a new word for when you're impressed, but so depressed at what is being achieved.

There's dozens of us. Dozens! Seriously though, having a lightweight text editor like Sublime that I use is an interesting comparison when I see people immediately reach for tools like VS Code. Especially my juniors.

The thing about VS Code is not that it's bad, it's just, like everything and the kitchen sink? Sublime Text just feels like a really nice tool bench that your craft for yourself.

I'm really happy to hear there are others out there.

(And yes, I totally bought the license, but never enter it in)

I agree with you a million percent, so you're not alone in this. But we are very much the minority :(

It feels like people aren't interested in being creators. Just consumers. And that shows in how media and companies refer to people as consumers.

I wish there was a way to reverse this trend. It feels in many ways like a Plato's cave kind of situation.

Even back when all the kids had C64s, most only knew enough about it to load up games from the tape drive. Personally I was intrigued by the built-in basic, and that got me started programming (and I absolutely loathed the mindless consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System), but I was very much in the minority.

My dude, what do you call the Apple Vision Pro? I don't like the technology or product, but they're LITERALLY making a new product line.

A half-hearted product launch of something even iPhone loyalists didn't buy because it costs 2 months' rent and has no real use case out of the box. Zero buzz online; even Apple appears to have forgotten it, seeding rumours instead of on-device LLMs to get the hype train going again.

The news of production cuts is probably the biggest indicator that this isn't the Apple we know.

Jesus christ. I'm so deep into my current game I'm hesitant to move away. But this is bad...

I don't know what to do. I have a huge sunk-cost fallacy here.

I guess I'm going to ship it and pray, and then never use Unity again.

Jesus christ, what were they thinking?

Fuck Unity.

What is your monetization model for your game? It might not be a huge issue if you know you'll get way more than $0.20 per user. If you were selling a game for $10, this is minor. If you're making a f2p game where there's no guaranteed income and most of your players will not spend a dime, it's a lot riskier. I'd worry about the install counts getting spoofed by angry players, but that seems like a bigger liability for Unity than developers.

It's per install not per user! If your user installs it 5 times over the course of 2 years it already eats 10% of the game gross revenue. And it just keeps going..