alt Hacker NewsDestroying a Community with a Gigantic "Clogged Vacuum Cleaner"
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This feels less like a data center problem and more like a basic failure to price and regulate industrial externalities...are crypto mining or ai compute socially useful? Up for debate, but what isn't is that neither should make a surrounding neighborhood unlivable.
Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound. Any facility like this should have to prove it can operate within a certain acousting footprint before it's built
Make John Stewart, Chief Marketing Officer of Hyperscale Data, live in one of those houses for a month. See how he likes the sound.
youtube video link from the article behind the "you must agree to cookies to play this youtube video embed that's actually not a youtube video embed" shenanigans
Also depends on what you were used to before. I live in a rural area and it can be annoying when a neighbor half a mile away is running a lawn mower.
In a downtown urban center there is so much noise from traffic, emergency vehicles, construction, and equipment of various types that a new data center would probably just blend in unnoticed.
This reminds of a video[1] from More Perfect Union about another (the same?) crypto mining facility in Texas.
another link: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-center-noi...
This particular datacenter was retrofitted into an existing industrial building, there was some sort of industrial metalworking factory there previously. Structure dates to 1972.
The houses are basically right across the street from it. The noise does sound annoying as hell. This seems like a basic failure in local permitting/zoning to allow something this noisy without a significant empty buffer zone to any residences.
edit: it's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dowagiac,+MI+49047,+USA/@4...
Every day, the gap between the news and The Onion gets a little smaller.
Sweet foods turn into poison after a limit of intake. Science and technology products turn against humanity when they are produced in excess of the need. The blind belief that technological advances are desirable without limits - should stop.
These houses are directly across the street. It looks like the data center owner should have allotted some buffer land between the facility and the property line.
dont worry people of the first world, all the noise is going to move to the 3rd world in the next few years.
what I want to know is why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere, catch all the heat and sell it to the few buildings with actual tenants, and as soon as the much less flamable sodium batteries come on at scale stack the rest of the empty buildings with those,and then run the whole mess from cheap solar
Can someone explain why the new crop of datacenters are considered to be noisy?. I've been around the Wall Street datacenters in Jersey and they are basically the same as nondescript office buildings surrounded by a fence. The ones running on generators 24/7 are a problem but what is making the rest such an issue?