• Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
    36 minutes

    Didn’t Microsoft already try this a few years ago, and it didn’t work because it was a frankly stupid idea.

  • magnue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1 hour

    Ah yes. The time-tested strategy of dumping our shit in the ocean.

  • Tikiporch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 hours

    According to everything I learned watching Shark Tank reruns, a business isn’t worth anything without sales.

  • Zier@fedia.io
    6 hours

    Imagine the noise that will create underwater. What a horrible form of torture for all the animals in the water.

    • plz1@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5 hours

      Wave power is transmitted back to land, usually, it won’t be a floating data center. At least I doubt it would be, but who knows, they are pretty awful people.

      • crystalmerchant@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5 hours

        It’s a floating data center. They started out as autonomous hydrogen electrolysis in the middle of the ocean, then shipping liquid hydrogen back to land. Now they pivoted to using the hydrogen to power onboard compute

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          35 minutes

          So they generate electricity from wave power then use that to electrolyze water and put that to a catalyst to generate electricity?

          Seems unnecessarily overcomplicated with lots of inefficiencies. Why not just power the computer’s directly?

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
    8 hours

    Even though it’s renewable energy, it still generates a significant amount of heat.

    Can we try cutting down on computing resources wherever possible first?

    • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.socialEnglish
      8 hours

      Yeah seriously, if we could start making software more efficient rather than throwing more hardware at it, we’d be in a much better position environmentally and economically.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zipEnglish
        7 hours

        Imagine only one thing: the web of the 90s/00s with today’s hardware and bandwidth.

        A wet dream. But actually I loaded some pages faster with a 14k4 baud modem than some pages with 5Gbit today. With 47228 frameworks and captchas and …

        With every iteration of higher power, programs went shittier, more clogged and devs grew lazy.

      • acosmichippo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6 hours

        Efficiency is a big deal in datacenters. Aside from the AI bubble, companies actually don’t like lighting money on fire. More efficient hardware saves them lots of money; less hardware, less power, less datacenter space, less maintenance, fewer support contracts, fewer software licenses, etc etc.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          6 hours

          While the current splashy “state of the art” models in terms of cognitive ability are American, IMO the real foundation for future AI is coming out of China these days. It’s not quite as smart but they’re focusing heavily on making AI training and inference cheaper in terms of compute (and therefore more efficient in terms of energy usage). It’s a mother-of-invention situation, sure - they’ve been cut off from the latest and greatest NVIDIA cards so they’re having to find ways to make do with less powerful hardware. But that’s going to be super important once AI is “good enough” for various real world tasks and the most powerful models aren’t needed for most activities.

        • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.socialEnglish
          6 hours

          That’s not what I said. We’re using those hardware efficiency gains to offset the performance losses of additional abstraction layers. If we were to make the software more efficient, the hardware efficiency gains would actually be noticeable and we wouldn’t be wasting nearly as much energy overall.

          • chocrates@piefed.worldEnglish
            3 hours

            This is all ai compute. Yes modern software is bloated but ai inference currently kind of has to run on gpus.

    • akilou@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7 hours

      From a physics standpoint, would the energy from the waves eventually turn to heat anyway through friction and waves crashing onshore? Law of conservation of energy and such? If we’re getting the energy from the ocean and venting it back into the ocean…?

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
        6 hours

        Indeed, it’s basic thermodynamics. The energy coming in to Earth gets turned into heat one way or another, the only question is where that heat goes. In this case it goes into the ocean either way.

  • MynameisAllen@lemmy.zipEnglish
    7 hours

    Somehow this will wind up destroying the ocean

    If Thiel is involved that’s almost a guarantee

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      The year is 2050, massive petawatt scale ocean based data centres are warming the ocean in their immediate vicinity, opening up new breeding grounds for a new killer algae. The algae once unable to grow in regular ocean tempatures thrives in this new ecosystem, and once it matures is able to leave the warmer waters and destroys other marine life it comes into contact with.

      This destruction of life in the ocean reverberates around the world as food supply dwindles and hundreds of millions of people begin to starve.