I would love a (solar-powered) community datacenter that hosts services for the local population. Community bulletin board or forum to share event notices, lost pets, road closures etc, simple messaging and filesharing utilities for those not technical enough to host their own, maybe some simple games like chess or cards.
The problem with the current explosion of datacenters is that they don’t benefit the community at all, they’re just digital oil rigs that drain the community of resources while also actively poisoning the area they’re in. Small wonder communities are against them.
You know, I think we could try building libraries with a dedicated community server that has just enough LLM voodoo to summarize the books in stock for the public to get an idea of what’s available
Maybe it’s a huge overstep versus what we can already do with more “analog” technology, but I could see potential in this
Eh, if it ran on solar and all it was trained on was maybe the library’s own database of book summaries or something, then why not? That could be cool.
Honestly that doesn’t really need a datacenter, a single solar panel and a low power computer or couple of PIs.
I think the scale of these AI datacenter build out is part of the problem, that level of compute is really only useful for AI and Ai-adjacent loads like mass surveillance!
I guess it depends on how much equipment is needed before something becomes a “datacenter”. I don’t really see a community hub being a massive supercomputer, maybe a small office or a room in a local library. I’d argue that a single server could be called a datacenter if it centralizes data, but I don’t think that is the common understanding of the word. Maybe the word needs to be reclaimed.
literally no one calls a single server a datacenter, and there is no reason to. If you did, then you’d just need to come up with a new term for datacenters. for what? Just use the term the way everyone else does.
I would love a (solar-powered) community datacenter that hosts services for the local population. Community bulletin board or forum to share event notices, lost pets, road closures etc, simple messaging and filesharing utilities for those not technical enough to host their own, maybe some simple games like chess or cards.
The problem with the current explosion of datacenters is that they don’t benefit the community at all, they’re just digital oil rigs that drain the community of resources while also actively poisoning the area they’re in. Small wonder communities are against them.
This is what libraries should evolve into.
You know, I think we could try building libraries with a dedicated community server that has just enough LLM voodoo to summarize the books in stock for the public to get an idea of what’s available
Maybe it’s a huge overstep versus what we can already do with more “analog” technology, but I could see potential in this
Eh, if it ran on solar and all it was trained on was maybe the library’s own database of book summaries or something, then why not? That could be cool.
Honestly that doesn’t really need a datacenter, a single solar panel and a low power computer or couple of PIs.
I think the scale of these AI datacenter build out is part of the problem, that level of compute is really only useful for AI and Ai-adjacent loads like mass surveillance!
I guess it depends on how much equipment is needed before something becomes a “datacenter”. I don’t really see a community hub being a massive supercomputer, maybe a small office or a room in a local library. I’d argue that a single server could be called a datacenter if it centralizes data, but I don’t think that is the common understanding of the word. Maybe the word needs to be reclaimed.
literally no one calls a single server a datacenter, and there is no reason to. If you did, then you’d just need to come up with a new term for datacenters. for what? Just use the term the way everyone else does.