caconym_

Yeah. IMO anyone arguing (explicitly or otherwise) that these facilities don't come with enormous negative externalities for people unlucky enough to live near them is either ignorant or being disingenuous. There is no need to lean on contentious minutiae like the water usage thing to show that this is true.

If AI development has such strategic urgency and importance that this desperate rapid expansion at any cost is reasonably justified on national security grounds, the government should be coordinating access to land and power and making people whole when their communities are impacted. Instead, you see unlucky everyday Americans left holding the bag while datacenter operators trick and bribe their way into building these projects and then run roughshod over regulations (e.g. how many open cycle gas turbines are you permitted to have running in your parking lot, mr. Musk?) because there is nobody willing to enforce them.

Honestly, any attempt to dismiss this all as groundless NIMBYism is unbelievably disgusting and makes me think that China and Russia are not the only parties running influence operations here. I do indeed see a strong push to frame the anti-datacenter position with weak/unsupported points (e.g. water usage) rather than strong and supported points (noise, electricity use, carbon footprint).

On a certain level you're right, but in practice you're mostly wrong. There is nothing exotic about the electronics found on the average FPV drone, but hobbyists today rely on being able to buy (e.g.) integrated electronic components such as flight controller boards and video transmitters, as well as purpose-optimized components like cameras, motors, and so on. All of these components are much smaller, lighter, and better-performing than the bodged-together setups that were used in the early days of the hobby (e.g. repurposing wireless security camera gear for video), and losing access to them will have a very real effect on what can be built and flown.

Source: I've been flying R/C aircraft of various types for over 30 years. Last year I built, I think, at least 7 FPV drones (a mix of fixed wings and quads).

I am not sure if this is implicitly part of the point you meant to make, but I just wanted to point out for those who aren't aware that Chinese EVs and drones are both banned in the US on precisely the (vague) grounds you mention. The drone ban is more recent and nominally only affects new models that haven't yet received FCC certification, but the outcome if nothing changes will be that American consumers lose access to DJI-style videography drones. DIY hobbyists may also find it more difficult or impossible to source parts for their projects.

Routers have now gotten the same treatment. So yes, consumers have been historicaly benefiting from all these things, and those benefits are about to evaporate as we lose access to cheap and high quality Chinese products before any domestic equivalents exist. And IIUC banning the use of Chinese LLMs for consumers and/or businesses in the US is now being discussed at the highest levels of government, with the "encouragement" of US AI firms.

I don't think any of these people care that America consumers are increasingly going to feel like they're living in a sanctioned country. It's all about the defense and b2b segments.

No one ever cared about DCs before now.

This isn't true. People were starting to mobilize against crypto datacenters in the late 2010s and early 2020s^[1][2], long before the current AI-fueled building frenzy.

I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.

It's fairly well documented that this is happening to some degree, but as above, foreign agents didn't conjure the anti-datacenter movement out of nothing. It's a fact that if the average crypto or AI datacenter moves in next door to you, there's a good chance it's going to crash your quality of life and the value of your property, and all in service of making a few fantastically rich guys even richer. Also, they are the same guys building a machine that they claim is going to destroy your livelihood. You don't need foreign agents to engineer a backlash here.

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-dem... [2] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/09/texas-hood-county-cr...

Why wouldn't people hate an industry that has all these obvious externalities and is also run by hyper rich people who are constantly saying that what they're doing is going to destroy the livelihood of everybody who works for a salary or wage?

Maybe the difference in certain other countries is that people aren't so used to being treated like baggage by a government run by people who are obviously interested in self-enrichment above all else. It's very hard to square the AI industry's promises of an eventual transition to luxury gay space communism with what we see in eg the Trump administration (as well as their own desperate obsession with growth at any cost).

If it wasn't so expensive

It's too bad that Toyota and Honda don't have a WRX analogue sitting below their STI analogue, but I guess the demand for that kind of car isn't what it used to be.

I'd settle for the Civic SI having a bit more power on tap. Budgetizing the GRC might be a bit more problematic.

100%. And to be clear I have no problem with BEVs or boring cars (there is some overlap). I own an extremely boring car, a CR-V hybrid, and it's a fantastic family hauler.

Thinking about it now, I suppose I didn't feel any need for my family hauler to have a hot 0-60 time. It will apparently do mid eighties on the skidpad, which really underlines how useless that metric is for describing real world cornering performance---it's unapologetically a boat.

TBH most of the mods that really make people point and laugh won't fare very well on a track or rally stage either.

Land Cruisers are great! If this guy wants a Land Cruiser then he should get one. His interest in Land Cruisers is not my issue with his comment.

I'm not sure why you'd suggest that the weird judgement and smugness is directed only at guys driving gas cars.

Because that's what's happening in this thread?

I have no problem with EVs or NPC style cars, or really any kind of car except those that are excessively large and heavy to the point that people sharing roads with them are placed in significant danger. I own a CR-V hybrid as a family hauler and it's fantastic in that role despite being boring as fuck. Sometimes boring is good.

I mean, engagement aside, you are really just showing your ignorance here if you think skid pad max G is a useful metric to capture real world cornering performance except in extremely broad strokes.

If you want an objective measurement that will usefully speak to how these cars feel to drive vs. each other, check out how much they weigh!

I'm not not just "posting numbers from the Tesla spec sheets", my Model Y is my daily driver.

Yeah? You measure those 0-60 and max g numbers yourself?

The comments I've replied to in this subthread have nothing to do with the aftermarket exhaust issue. It's just people who've never driven a real sports car (at any price point) posting numbers from the Tesla spec sheets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48924505

If people want to roast this guy for installing annoying aftermarket noisemakers then I will not try to stop them. I mean to address the (plenty of) more generic comments like this one:

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A GR Corolla goes 0-60 in 4.9 - 5.4sec.

My unexotic stock electric does 0-60 in around 4.8sec, +/-.

So the same performance that requires a stupid amount of wasted energy as heat and noise can be had from stock electric, with a couple hundred ms leftover. Do you care about performance, or do you just want to just fart out a bunch of noise?

I get traditional car culture, but electrics embody the "money talks, wealth whispers" truism.

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and this one:

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My midlife crisis car would probably be a land cruiser. No need to go fast. Space and chill is best.

A 3 cylinder Corolla, regardless of how fast, is just people transportation at best and in the worst inefficient way possible. A normal base 23k usd Corolla , not saying anything against the car mechanically it is a great machine for what it is.

Just, overkill. Can’t go fast, need to have higher insurance, it’s more at risk for theft, and it’s not easily replaceable as compared to a 23k corolla.

Who cares? Static skidpad performance has very little to do with how engaging a car is to drive, and engagement is what somebody buying a GRC (or a GR86, or a Miata, etc.) is looking for.

More spec sheet flexing, more assumptions that for owners of internal combustion sports cars it's all about the noise. More projection. Another person who just doesn't get it.

I'm sorry to be harsh in this thread, but it's always odd to find these weird empathetic blind spots in people.

Lots of weird judgment and smugness in this thread. This guy bought a fun car that he's excited about? Well obviously he's POOR and IMMATURE because if he was RICH and OLD he would buy an ELECTRIC CAR that's WAY FASTER (in a straight line) and doesn't make nasty noises and smells!!! what an idiot!!!

I'm all for cracking down on excessively loud and stinky cars, but the GR Corolla is not that loud, and it has modern emissions controls. It is also, believe it or not, possible to own a moderately loud car (even with a modded exhaust) without subjecting your neighbors to backfires, 40 minute idling sessions, and loud fly-bys at every hour of the day and night.

The attitudes in this thread really show that people just don't get it, which is probably why the driver's car is an endangered species in $CURRENT_YEAR. How many cars are available in the US with a manual transmission these days? How many that don't cost six figures (or more)? You don't have to be excited about the same things as this guy, but there is a whole lot of projection going on in here from people who can't seem to think beyond how you're perceived by others as the main factor in choosing a car. Have you considered that maybe this guy just likes the car?

Your "unexotic stock electric" is boring as shit to drive and corners like a boat. Stomping on the throttle and going very fast in a straight line is a big marketing point for modern EVs with an excess of power (and usually weight), but there's a reason the concept of a "driver's car" exists, and if you think it's just about making noise then you really, really, really don't understand why people buy them.

I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine.

You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.

I think another big issue they have is their insistence that most (ideally all?) of the people working on their games should be temporary employees. When your most valuable studios get out of the business of providing secure and sustainable employment, you lose the ability to build institutional expertise. When you treat your creatives like a commodity, you'll get generic assets and writing regardless of budget. When you focus on everything but the games themselves, it shouldn't come as a surprise that your big franchises degenerate into undifferentiated revenuemaxxing slop and unique new projects that might get people excited die on the vine.

Overall I think western AAA game development is dead. The executive class killed it with their greed and incompetence, and as long as these huge corporations are allowed to keep buying smaller studios/publishers and shutting them down a few years later, nothing is going to change.

I did read the entire article. One point you may have missed is the same increase in frontal height happened in other countries, but didn’t result in the same increases in pedestrian fatalities. It’s likely that other factors are in play in the USA.

I am not sure where you are getting this in the article, but yes, obviously other factors are in play. Transit engineering, driving culture, and other demographic factors affect the likelihood of a pedestrian collision happening in the first place, as well as vehicle design factors. But once the collision occurs, vehicle speed and vehicle design are the primary factors determining the outcome for the pedestrian. Competent regulators will attack the problem from all sides, and improving vehicle design standards (or at the very least not incentivizing larger vehicles) is low hanging fruit.

Guns and large vehicles are similar in that both increase the safety of the owner. There’s no downside as long as the owner is responsible.

You could say this about literally anything. I would have no problem with personal nuclear weapons for self defense as long as the owner(s) were responsible.

In practice, we know that the owners of guns and large vehicles have (to a first approximation) the same capacity for irresponsibility as anyone else.

One flaw in the NYT analysis was around the “A column” blind spot. No competent driver will look for pedestrians without moving his head enough to eliminate that blind spot.

Makes me think you've never tried to negotiate e.g. a busy unsignaled four way stop with protected cycle tracks on three of the four incoming roads, and no raised sidewalks, at night and/or in the rain.

When a driver's attention is split 5+ ways, there is only so much they can do. As above, intersection design takes a lot of the blame in these situations, but making blind spots smaller will always improve safety. As somebody who has been walking, riding, and driving in a mid sized American city for 20+ years, the most frequent type of near-death experience I've had has been crossing the street with the signal and almost getting hit by left-turning cars who didn't see me, in precisely the same kind of situation highlighted in the article.

There is no denying that large vehicles are safer for their occupants, the statistics are clear.

Nobody is debating this, because it's totally irrelevant here except insofar as it's insane for us to encourage people to insulate themselves from the consequences of collisions while reciprocally increasing the risk for others involved.

I seriously don't understand the mindset that focuses on the safety of occupants of the largest vehicles involved in a collision, especially when the context is pedestrian safety. It's even more frustrating that our regulators seem to have adopted the same mindset.

edit: And the current mix of vehicles we have on the road distorts the safety statistics even more. Is it really surprising that when a Yukon XL collides with a Corolla, the people in the Yukon walk away while the Corolla's occupants get closed casket funerals? Since the protection larger vehicles afford their occupants is dependent on their size and weight, it's not independent of the outcomes for others involved in a collision.

Trucks and guns pose outsized risks to bystanders, and if you don't agree with that, you are either being grossly disingenuous or you're just extremely stupid. In the case of trucks, you can literally just go read OP's article if you want to learn more about the risks they pose, but I suspect you have no interest in doing so.

However, to help you understand this complex issue more broadly (since you're already here), let me present an analogy. A framing saw is a dangerous tool. It has legitimate uses (e.g. cutting lumber) that may outweigh the risks of having it in your garage, but, critically, that ceases to be true if you don't make an effort to mitigate the risks. If your 5 year old kid gets into the garage and manages to cut his foot off with your framing saw because you left the door unlocked with the saw plugged in, you have fucked up bigtime. That's a risk you could have mitigated, and would have mitigated if you weren't a negligent fuckup, but you are, now your kid has a lifelong disability.

And in this situation, maybe you would say nuh uh, the saw didn't cause the injury, and I'd reply that if you want to frame it that way then no, the saw didn't cause the injury. You caused the injury by failing to recognize and effectively respond to the risk the saw presented.

Similarly, trucks and guns are tools. They obviously have certain legitimate applications whose utility outweighs the risks they pose to bystanders with appropriate mitigations in place. But if society makes no effort to mitigate even the basic obvious risks, innocent bystanders end up being needlessly harmed as a result, via the frivolity, negligence, and sometimes downright malice of others.

This is the situation with trucks and guns in America. We demonstrate no will or capacity to place reasonable restrictions on their availability to and usage by people who really have no legitimate need for them, nor the skill and temperament to use them safely, and as a result people are needlessly hurt and killed by them every day. Some people think this is fine, I guess, but I don't.

Trucks and guns have a free pass to cause thousands of deaths yearly. It's that simple. Anybody else doing anything that might be viewed by certain hand wringing hysterical persons as dangerous will be smothered in onerous regulation, despite statistics showing relative (or absolute) harmlessness, but trucks and guns will keep on killing.

I'll believe it when I see it, but I would love to see it.

Fair enough. I'm afraid my adversariality heuristic sometimes yields false positives...

If you were to anticipate a failure for a soon to launch product, it is entirely appropriate to say “dead on arrival”. A similar metaphor might be calling the product “stillborn”.

Okay, but the commenter I replied to said neither of those things. They didn't say "it'll be DOA", or even "it's DOA", but rather "killed this product on arrival". Despite my previous knowledge of the "dead on arrival" idiom, I found this particular wording strange due to its use of past tense, so I wrote a comment expressing that.

If you disagree, that's fine, but you've chosen an extraordinarily unproductive way to express that disagreement.

This one is exclusively for unreleased products.

What? This is so obviously incorrect that I'm not even sure how to respond to it.

That doesn't sound like escaping scrutiny to me! Sounds like it's getting pretty thoroughly scrutinized, in fact.

This is as stromg (sic) as precedent gets, short of a SCOTUS decision.

Another egregious misrepresentation. The courts are obviously making their rulings as narrow as possible because they know the "mosaic theory" style arguments have some merit. Look at US vs. Yang, for example, in which the court dodged the issue completely with some argument about rental car contract periods. And Schmidt v. Norfolk, which IIUC directly challenges Flock ALPRs on 4A grounds, is pending.

Lots and lots of scrutiny. Your claim that the conclusion is foregone here is obviously absurd. Even when/if it gets to SCOTUS I expect they'll write as narrow an opinion as they can get away with, in whatever direction it falls.

No, the fact that it's recording people in public does make it escape scrutiny moving forward. In public you can be filmed by anyone - be they government or private citizens.

This is false. While there is no strongly established precedent yet, there are certainly serious and plausible legal arguments being made that unlimited collection and collation/cross-referencing/etc. of "public" information can under certain circumstances constitute a search. It will most certainly not "escape scrutiny moving forward".

e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Am...