Stop squashing your commits. You're squashing your AI too
2 points by jannesblobel 8h ago 7 comments
Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?
100 points by pixelworm 2d ago 89 comments
Meta is spending $10B in rural Louisiana to build its largest data center
63 voxadam 67 8/26/2025, 2:10:42 PM fortune.com ↗
As much as I prefer burning gas over coal, conflating it with zero(-ish) emission energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear is bad.
Anyone who has to live in a fairly closed system (i.e. this planet) in which fossil fuels are burned for power would be beyond a fool to not strongly prefer gas over coal seeing as their greenhouse emissions are close enough to be within arguing distance. It's all the other stuff coming out that's the problem with coal.
Summarized: Anyone would be a fool not to prefer gas or coal, because their emissions are nearly equal.
One doesn't follow from the other, can you correct/elaborate?
So only looking at the byproducts of methane combustion is also misleading since nat. gas plants largely aren't burning methane - and blanket statements for all natural gas are also misleading since e.g. the gas from Canada is extremely 'Sour' and releases a ton of sulfur compounds when burned, often with fewer scrubbers than coal plants.
Nuclear for base load and gas for peak/flexible demand is the most climate friendly solution available.
Also the people working for that company. Unimaginable wealth, both at the corporate and personal level, everyone aware at this point that the climate is breaking down and yet, they just can't do the right thing because they are just too damn greedy.
That's because you've chosen not to read about it. Location is one of the most important things they think about for data centers and there are plenty of articles on the subject.
Here's a recent article:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/25/meta-massive-data-center-lou...
“We set out looking for a place where we could expand into gigawatts pretty quickly, and really get moving within that community on a large plot of land very quickly,” said Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers for Meta. “We looked at finding very, very large contiguous plots of land that had access to the infrastructure that we need, the energy that we needed, and could move very, very quickly for us.”
To answer the question you're implying, surrounding temperature is pretty minor, the cooling required is orders of magnitude higher, so power access is more important; You'll frequently find them located near sources of energy.
Similar reason to why a lot of chemical manufacturing is in Louisiana.
I get where you're coming from but still I find funny in so many levels that the literal speed limit of the universe is too slow for our mundane (or even banal in FB case) needs. the universe isn't good enough to our need to move bullshit across the globe. surreal.
In the same vein it would be awesome if this _need for speed_ would materialize in infinite funding of neutrino based communication research.
Hurricanes on the other hand will still be a very real thing.
I do often wonder if it might be worthwhile to shove a bunch of server farms into a few abandoned mines, if you setup the appropriate infrastructure in said mines to protect your data centers.
> Electricity demand in the U.S. held steady for 15 years but, last year, it increased by 3%— marking the fifth-highest rise this century. More jumps are projected for years to come.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
Total electricity generated has been relatively flat for a couple decades.
A variety of factors may or may not make a future where aggregate electricity demand would increases, or stagnates, or even declined.
Given that the human brain takes much longer to "train", I wonder how the energy efficiency pans out — comparing the two.
[Edit] ok, yes, please. I get that i missed the k in kcal. The point stands. Biological training is massively more efficient, even when you forget to multiply by 1000
In general, saying that biological systems are "wildly efficient" is... wildly wrong. Some biological processes are optimized by evolution... most are not. There are no bicycles in nature.
A human consuming 2000 kcal/day (conservative estimate) uses about 2.32 kWh per day. Over 75 years, that's roughly 64,000 kWh.
If the true, total cost of a machine to perform some task is less than a person to do the same task, then the machine should do it and the person should move to do what the machine cannot. This means more energy is available for everything else, living included.
Nearly everything a biological system accomplishes depends on massive external machinery.
Humans are only intellectually interesting because of their use of tools.