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Who would win
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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My views of eco terrorism are mostly from reading Zodiac : an ecothriller. The protagonist uses quick acting cement to plug polluting sewage pipes and back up the toxic waste into the polluting facilities.
This could be done in the opposite direction as well. Plug the incoming water pipe to starve the beast pulling hundreds of thousand of liters of water.
Holy shit do NOT DO THIS.
You're assuming the failure point is going to be inside of the facility but it's WAY more likely to be an underground pipe that will speed that that sewage directly into the earth.
This is way worse because it might not be obvious that it's happening for a looong time.
Seriously, find some other way to ecoterrorize. This one is not worth it.
Yeah but isn't that also an easy fix for the datacenter? Like the people running it will just shut things down, discover the cement, remove it, and start up again.
Shutting down a data center for the cost of a bag of cement is a good cost to loss ratio though. It may only be for a day but that is easily repeatable. Shut it down every few days while they are already losing money running at a loss and trying to show some sort of usage stats that will get fucked by the repeated shutdowns.
Obviously you have to find multiple ways to fuck with them like bad additives in their diesel generator fuel tanks. Drones dropping epoxy into the cooling fans on the roof.
I think the hope is that the lack of water for cooling will cause permanent damage by overheating. But the reality is there are failsafes to prevent this.
That is what I figured. Gotta do something with lasting consequences like mixing sugar into the cement.
only works if it ain't finished yet tho
Pour a decent bit of algae into the water supply (freshwater shouldn't have algae, but enough will get past standard biocides used in cooling)
Neal Stephenson. good stuff, before he kinda went... corpo with Termination Shock.
I wonder if he's concluded 'if anyone is gonna stop the cycle it'll have to be a disruptor who just seeds atmospheric blockers', because I wasn't impressed with that book.
Unplugging a pipe is easy
Unknowingly having salt water corrode your cooking system over time is a disaster
I don't think this is at all realistic.
Data centers have an entire staff of people who JUST design and operate the cooling systems. I can promise you, they monitor the condition of the water/coolant.
I spoke with an cooling engineer at great length tho worked in an AWS data center. They know when the water quality is below threshold, they cycle out the old water and replace with fresh on an ongoing basis.
If there were some type of contaminant in the water, it'd probably set off a bunch of alerts pretty fast. Even still, most of the cooling systems are made of copper or aluminum. Neither would be damaged by salt in any meaningful way.
Some acids would corrode copper and aluminum, but it's not like it would happen fast at anything but extreme concentrations.
So you are saying, there are humans in these facilities we could target to disable those systems?
They decided to work for the clankers. They chose to be targets.
Well a data center itself does not exclusively host the computing infrastructure used for ai.
The components that run Lemmy live in a data center. The EFF hosts their content from a data center. Telecommunications that make up the internet host equipment in data centers.
I thought we were talking specifically about recently built data centers for majority use by AI companies
They typically don't just build 'em for AI. Data centers are general purpose buildings. They provide power, cooling, security, floorspace. What goes into 'em doesn't change anything. You can stuff computers in there that are used for cancer research, cryptomining, AI, ecommerce, it doesn't matter.
They don't just blindly use whatever water comes from the lake and put it directly into the loop.
They'll have treatment, filtration, and cossosion-resistant parts, and probably separated loops where the only liquid that directly interacts with anything important is completely isolated from the intake and outflow water.