Problem is a lot of local communities do not understand these facilities.

Was a news story around here where a datacenter project was deeply regretted by the local politicians. They saw "business will build facitlity with huge amount of square feet" and their closest comparison was a textile plant of about that size and how many jobs they used to provide. So they excitedly bent over backwards to accommodate the datacenter project and then ultimately had an enduring employment of about 6 jobs.

Tax revenue? Their business has little to do with the local community, so no sales tax revenue. Very few jobs, so very little income tax. Local communities *can* get property tax, but part of the sweetheart deals is usually huge property tax breaks, because the communities think they are making jobs and want the jobs instead of property tax.

The general problem in this scenario is that free market works best when participants have roughly equivalent resources and information to protect their interests. These datacenter projects are supremely asymmetric between the local communities and the companies building the datacenters.

Some of the concerns are fundamental.

They tend to prefer getting rid of farmland or forests. Maybe if they tended to target abandoned retail spaces like dead malls and shopping centers, maybe they wouldn't be so bad.

Especially since the current frenzy is a bunch of competitors of whom only some will likely survive a correction in the market. Hell, even without investment failures, a large number of these projects are plagued by logistics issues stemming from people eagerly making commitments they could have never realistically met. So we will end up with some 'datacenter blight' just like overdoing retail has left us with blight.

Note they only temporarily ban it, which would buy them time to work out details precisely like what you say.

Such restrictions to manage the impact can take time to work out, moreso if all the business interests involved benefit by stalling establishing and enforcing such nuanced measures. If the status quo is build without worry and consequence, it's very hard to subtly move things toward still building, but with more responsibility and accountability.

If there is a moratorium, then the business interests have skin in the game for getting those sort of measures sorted out, especially if failure to do so may extend the moratorium or perhaps the chance to conclude the moratorium sooner if things can go smoother.

If they believe this, then they have no understanding whatsoever what 'connected' means in a vaguely human context.

Of course, if you asked me if there was a single human on earth that current GenAI could imitate flawlessly, it would be Zuckerberg.

They don't ban datacenters, they just ban *new* datacenters, for now.

I haven't read as to what counts as new datacenter construction. If they can expand existing, or renovate existing. If it's anything like retail around here, datacenter operators being pressured to reuse existing infrastructure wouldn't be terrible. We have a blight of dead retail space even as they keep clearing forest to make new retail space. I would *love* if retail industry was forced to revitalize the abandoned retail footprint instead of leaving it derelict.

Problem with new datacenters right now is that the industry is flooded with people who aren't planning well and causing a lot of projects to fail partway through. There's too much impatience and the people that can plan and execute it correctly are sidelined while less experienced companies make promises that they can't keep but the promises sound better.

I think a fair argument can be made that the buildout is not because people are using, but instead based on an expectation that people *will* be using them.

If it were the case that we overrun the capacity then one would expect companies to be a bit more restrained. Instead almost every google search gets an "AI Overview", inflating the query cost a hundred fold without the user ever actually opting in. So many companies are embedding AI implicitly into existing flows without user demand being actively expressed. This is not the behavior of a market starved of resources that would be saving the capacity for those that specifically opt into it and further the ones that would pay for it.

The scenario that we are under sized for the current demand would imply that no one should be able to see 'free' usage of AI in their experience and would be expected to pay up.

It's not just about the energy, we have water and land usage concerns as well. A few cases around here of farmland potentially going to datacenter buildout, and I'm not sure that's a good long term trade.

It's abundantly clear this is a tech bubble, with some undefined durable demand, but the current speculative buildout may never get fully utilized. By the time the non-bubble demand catches up, there's good chances that we have a whole other approach that dramatically changes what sorts of resources are needed. For example people sometimes defend the dot-com buildout as rational because, eventually, we surpassed even the dreams of back then, but we had to scrap a lot of that buildout as hopelessly irrelevant to the market that was all-in on internet.

Broadly speaking, a lot of AI advocates believe AI can do every single job *except* their own.

In terms of hating programming, yes, actually a lot of the staunchest supporters hate programming. Because they can't do software development themselves but have somehow latched onto the business of software development. Business folks that carry a great deal of resentment that there are employees that have sufficient leverage over them to extract significant salaries and there's not a lot the business side can do to counter.

Code gen represents the possibility that they can have a fungible workforce where the labor has no particular leverage.

A lot of these folks are a bit unhinged in thinking that somehow codegen eliminates their need for skilled workers but somehow leaves them in the loop. I saw specifically a software sales org think they could get away with selling the act of inputting the client's requests into prompting without any software development experience/skills.

It demos well, and for some scenarios demo == the application, however it's pretty bad at meeting specific requirements. If the context allows the requester to be flexible about their requirements and the scenario is pretty well trodden, then codegen has a shot at working from a relatively normal 'manager' level prompt. However, a key issue remains that when in doubt, it generates something that doesn't actually do things correctly but superficially resembles things being done correctly. If you are blindly trusting the codebase and the codegen ability to generate and test itself and a superficial check of the resulting application, you could get really screwed over.

If it did work that well, then it would be similar to math education. You start by forbidding calculators, then allow only basic arithmetic calculators, then graphing calculators, then full computer aided math.

Think there's flaws in general, but to the extent it can work, the burden shifts more to education rather than workplace.

Frogbuntu.

Windows isn't easier, but it costs about $2000 per seat to train people to use an new operating system. Once you are past that expense, Linux is cheaper because it doesn't require retraining every time Microsoft obsoletes it's old UI. Google Docs does a fairly good job of handling Microsoft Office file formats now, so document backwards compatibility is no longer an issue.

If you bought it from CarMax, you paid too much.

The people that aren't ethical enough to be used car salesmen become tech recruiters.

The problem being I haven't seen a good term that refers to the extended LLM scenario that is specific enough to exclude other things like machine vision.

Everyone is referring to the extended LLM scenario and despite things feeding improvements, it still cannot do everything that people promise/believe it can do. I have been inundated by project proposals that largely center around "screw everyone but my job, AI can replace everyone but me", and they are just full of bad ideas.

Basically, the good old "I have an app idea but I can't develop" crowd that actually didn't have a good app idea now think LLM based systems have come to finally realize their vision. As a result, various things are flooded with half-realized concepts that really need to deflate.

For the non-technical folks, a relatively decent analogy is looking at the likes of youtube and just how even worse the uninspired crap has gotten now that GenAI can let them low effort up a significant volume. It's not that GenAI necessarily *has* to make bad content, but bad content creators are equipped to flood the field. Similarly, people who can't deal with software designs are pitching right next to skilled professionals and the target audience doesn't know the difference until after they've already screwed over the wrong party.

They keep asking people "Don't you want to use Edge instead of Chrome?" too.