AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metrics that are relevant to the community like positive externalities, and negative ones like noise pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And all uses of private property should be judged on the basis of those criteria, not what industrial category the use falls under and the generalizations that are made about that category.
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
In general they just use a shitload of energy so prices go up for everyone and produce very little jobs. The worst part is that they don't generate any taxes for locals or Finland in general from services produced by datacenters there, which is very different from other industries.
They pay for the energy they use, which leads to the energy infrastructure scaling up, which generally reduces per unit electricity costs. They also fund, either directly or indirectly through their taxes, upgrades to transmission lines, which also improves the energy infrastructure.
They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.
What surplus? They basically only pay property taxes and for services they buy like electricity, like any other company does. But taxes for services they produce go to Ireland. A local industry would have loads of employees and also pay much more taxes that benefits the community.
The community benefit is nowhere close and I'm not sure why you're trying to pretend it is.
I'll try to find the analysis. It compared industries and showed the amount of taxes AI compute facilities pay (which is primarily in the form of property tax) relative to the cost of government services they use is the highest ratio of all industries.
This surplus is why the county with the highest concentration of data centers, which is Loudoun County, has been able to reduce its property taxes year over year. The property taxes the AI facilities pay is what enables that.
So you have no idea how different property taxes are in European countries compared to the US? At least your argument makes sense now that we know you're arguing from complete ignorance.
I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built
There was an app that hit it’s peak during covid: Clubhouse.
Many powerful and interesting people were having powerful and presumably private conversations in rooms because they say people walk in and out and legally CH could not record without consent. But what they could do was “collect metadata”. Emotional and tonal analysis is metadata. So is time, date, location, username (each user had their own mic stream), email, etc. Transcription is also metadata.
Essentially the tech has left the laws in the dust as you could now reasonably and legally record enough metadata to accurately resynthesize a recording.
I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things).
I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier.
I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, process, suggest relationships
Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most.
The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N.
I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI.
The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)
You missed the core of what I was saying: not vibe code a whole thing end to end (I agree, not sustainable), embrace the idea of having devs build the storage, parsers, schema, and security and let everyone vibe code the rest.
Like, let’s use a simple photos example: a photo file has metadata standards already embedded, but doesn’t store it’s edit history, event, or who’s in it. Immich already does a lot that’s great here with parsers and ML and if they changed focus to the data storage layer they could essentially boil down to a table for edit history, a table for events, a table for people, etc, the ability to store in SQLite or sidecars, and an API layer for people to hand to their AI.
Not only would it reduce the dev load, but then we could have an ever-expanding sphere of personal data ownership as Futo adds schemas/tables for video, audio, documents, and maybe everything else most people need to build their own UIs for specific uses or even “god view” UIs.
I am really not following. If “anyone” can write a GUI, how does moving it away from the devs reduce load? Either it’s a lot of work for devs and then even more so for “anyone” or it’s easy for everyone.
For simplicity of explaining, I’m going to group web software parts in to “hard” and “easy” with AI assistance
hard:
- Overall security
- User permissions in multi-user deployments
- Input sanitization
- RDBMS schema design
- Parsing
- Bit-rot protection (here because it’s rarely on the radar of the general user)
easy:
- DB queries against a known schema
- Working in a front end HTML/CSS/JS stack
- Making UI components
- Moving those components around
To your question about why moving front end away from devs would reduce load: a person making a UI they want is a different category of work than creating a UI that everyone wants. Even if it’s easy, it’s distracting to be thinking about everyone’s use-cases and refining the details.
If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.
GOS has their own support policy, they can’t keep updating old(er) devices. So yeah, it matters, as some vulnerabilities wouldn’t be patched on some devices.
Aha, sorry, I hadn’t realized that GOS had their own EOL timeline.
What I meant to ask was “If you use GOS, does it matter if Google ends support” and after your comment I read deeper to find the answer “yes, because GOS relies on Google to maintain the firmware”. Thanks for the push
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
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