I'm familiar with Next DC. I spent a weekend moving our data centre into P1. We've spread to P1 and P2, now. I didn't know they fired up their genies every month, though. That actually seems like overkill. Before moving into Next DC, we used to do it annually during the September long weekend, coinciding with power works in the building that always happened that weekend.

I've tried to reply to this a couple of times and not come off as condescending. I truly have. But I'm sorry, it just makes me laugh. Hottest UK summer on record "peaked at 38.1C"?

I mean, yes - that's hot. I'll grant you that. But we get a whole season of that. Hell, parts of Australia (not the cities) get above 50. I think all the cities will see days in the 40s every year.

So, I stand by my previous comment. You probably haven't had to deal with water restrictions in the UK.

They are not inevitable, but they need us to believe that they are.

I hope you are right, and I come back to this in the coming years and apologise to you for my insistence that these things are coming. I don't believe you are right, though.

And how successful has any luddite movement in history been, ever?

AI is just getting started. In fact, what we have now isn't even AI yet. That's just the term used for Language Learning Models. It isn't intelligent at all, it's kind of a turbo Google, which is good at aggregating human knowledge into something that sounds coherent. Do I love it? Not really. Could I personally live without it? Easily and happily. Will I be employable in 10 years if I choose to live without it? Doubtful. It is here, and it won't go away.

Even if Australia gets zero AI data centres, it won't stop it being widely available to Australians. It is already widely used in Australia. So, at best you can say we saved Australia from the environmental impact of AI, while Australians actively contribute to the impact AI data centres make in other nations.

What? No they don't. Holy hell, that would cost 100x what running on the grid costs them.

They have diesel generators as a backup they can fire up in the case of a power outage to maintain their service. But most of the time those generators are used once a year to test their systems. They certainly don't run on them all the time.

You say this like rain wasn't falling on the paddocks and farms where the cows are. Hell, loads (if not most) of Australia's cattle stations aren't even on the town water schemes in the first place.

There is a point here that you are making, and it is even worth talking about to an extent - we do eat beef at a rate that is unsustainable long-term. But in the context of what we're talking about where discussion is about connecting these buildings up to our drinking water supplies, your point isn't really very relevant just now.

…because most businesses do not need their own power stations and huge amounts of water to dissipate the heat.

You know how when your computer gets super busy, it's fans fire up and it starts to get hot? That's what a server in an AI data centre is doing - 24/7.
You know how most of the time, your PC is just chilling, doing its thing without all that noise? That's what a server in a regular data centre is doing. They're a lot noisier than your PC, but nothing like one in a Data Centre. Servers in these places are of course using power and water, but it's a fraction of the requirements of an AI data centre.

Who cares if it’s drinking water? We’re talking about avoiding droughts. In this context water is water.

We all care. That's the entire point. If the Data Centre is using drinking water, we can't. If you are in the UK, you probably haven't had to worry about water restrictions and droughts like we have. This is a massive factor in our thinking. I can't drink grey water. But a data centre can use it to cool a server. Water that is evaporating and going into the atmosphere will rain down again. And with a nation as big as ours, it'll likely still land in our country. We aren't too bothered about water evaporating - that's what it does. Heat and pollution in the atmosphere are a bad thing. Water, not so much.

These data centres are coming. There's no point being a luddite about it and trying to stop that entirely. There is however serious value in making them as clean as possible with a view to the future. Especially if we can get some smart rules in-place before they arrive.

Let's be clear here: Australia does not at present have any AI data centres. All the data centres and their woes as described in the article are in other countries. This is not happening here.

No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. And even if they do, the cooling process generates toxins hard to get rid of.

You could say this of any business. It's a nothing-burger. There are dozens of data centres in Australia providing regular hosting to all sorts of companies, and articles like this never really talk about how good normal data centres are. I worry that all these fearmongering articles are going to taint all data centres with the same brush as AI data centres. There genuinely are valid concerns to raise and discuss. But these articles only talk about the worst-case impact, never educating people about potential steps to mitigate those concerns before they happen here.

There are solutions to the power and water issues. They are complicated, though. These things can be largely sustainable, though it is a lot more expensive to build them that way. Will they be built with sustainable infrastructure attached? Who can say. Proposals for this have been raised and ministers even agree it's a good idea.

Will Australia get AI data centres? Yes, we'll probably end up getting a few in the next decade or so.
Will these issues matter as they are constructed? Yes.
Do they have to use so much water? Actually no. The water used for cooling does not need to be drinking water. A private dam that cycles water around the data centre is a possible solution to drastically reduce water requirements as the water is used over and over.
What about power? This is a true concern. AI data centres use crazy amounts of power. As much as a medium sized town.

Ideally, any Data centres with these requirements will also be placed away from suburbia, and be mostly self-sufficient with their power and water requirements. We have the space and the technology. It is yet to be determined whether we have the will to force them to be built this way. Their owners are not going to want to do it, they will need to be compelled.

Hello everyone,

First up, this site was Lodion's baby. We are all here because of him. He decided a Lemmy instance for Australians needed to exist, mostly free of the dramas of the wider Internet. He set up the whole show and like the Field of Dreams, we all came. I was just a regular user sign-up. I didn't know he had set any of this up, I was just a Reddit exile when they brought in their API changes that both killed third-party apps, and essentially began the whole "We're going to sell all your comments to AI companies". Lodion and I go way back more than 20 years, and when I spotted he was the admin, I volunteered to help out with running the site.

It's you. All of you. You all have made this community what it is. Take you guys away and it's all just a bunch of files on a disk and an empty database. Together, we have all built the site that I still see as an oasis that connects to the globe, but you can dip in as little or as much as you like. Even in Lemmy space, Aussie.Zone is not a huge instance. We've never tried to be. I still don't especially want us to be. I'd rather grow by 10 regulars per month who are all chill and easy to help out than see an influx of 20,000 people who would cause a whole pile of new problems that we just aren't equipped to deal with. I've been the more visible of the two of us on the site, but in terms of "management", my load is maybe 15 minutes per day. Which is great! Because I don't always have much more than that to give on any given day. 90% of the time, I'm just a regular user with that little red "A" next to my name - nothing more.

Lodion and I have been chatting about him stepping away for a while now. I'm willing to take on the stuff he's been doing - but he's been funding the site out of pocket to the tune of around $60ish per month (I haven't seen the raw finances yet, but the last time Lodion mentioned it, the site was costing something in the ballpark of $100 per month to run) for about a year now - and I am not in a place where I can do that. For what this site is, $100/month is a bargain!

So, I disagree with Lodion. This is going to end up being a call for donors. We (all of us) are going to need to find that money. I would say that personally, I easily get $5/month value from the site - and there's 5% all by itself. I believe we can find 20 people who would chip in that much. Frankly, I reckon we could find twice that without getting whiny. Ads are off the table. I hate them. Users hate them. Our users are all smart enough to run adblocks anyway, so I'd only annoy prospective people who aren't members. I have a couple of ideas for incentives for donors, to hopefully make donating more attractive.

There are a couple of things I could use a hand with, and I might take a few of you up on these offers to help. Things like monitoring finances and reporting incoming/outgoing costs. The Molly project also needs help as well. Stuff I haven't really had the chance to prioritise.

Before Lodion fades away, I would love to see this thread turn into a bit of a love fest. Shit's real in his world right now - and a bombardment of love from us all, telling him how much of a difference this site makes to us all, and how grateful we are to him for what he built is in order.

Thank you, mate. I know very well that you don't personally feel like you have done all that much to make this site what it is - and in some aspects, that is true. But it also wouldn't be what it is without you. I have laughed, cried, but most importantly, I have found a community here that I love. This instance has been a daily part of my life for over three years now, and perhaps you didn't make all that - but you made that possible. 100% you. Truly, thank you. ❤️

In 2019, Mr Nugent replied to Ms Haines directly on the platform and appeared to compliment her, describing her as a "politician who takes climate change seriously".

Since that first interaction, he posted four other replies mentioning her on X, with the most recent being in 2021.
None indicate any anger or malice towards the independent MP.

He does not appear to show consistent support for any political party and has been critical of the major parties at state and federal level.
In recent years, he has posted on X in support of Gaza, posting fundraisers and being critical of Israel.

The West Australian has gone all-in on the "Anti Israel" angle. I guess they only went back the last couple of years. They certainly didn't mention his playing in the High School footy team. According to The West, he's super mega hateful toward Israel and this is all about Gaza. Front page, and a Page 3-4 spread.

Yesterday, all the newsheads were reporting that the family were friends with Helen Haines.

In the statement, Mr Nugent's father Rod Nugent and Rod's partner Christine Cunningham said Ms Haines had been their friend for more than 20 years and Monday's events were "devastating and unfathomable".

"Helen Haines is a deeply respected, valued and much loved member of our local community," the statement said.

Also from the bits and pieces released so far, it appears he was just driving by. He saw Helen in the street and let the dark thoughts through. There doesn't appear to be a master plan behind his actions - no 'what next?' or 'what will this achieve?' or anything. I'm not sure we're going to get a coherent reason why he did this or what he was trying to achieve.

Police said they believe a 43-year-man driving a white Toyota Landcruiser struck Ms Haines outside her office on Murphy Street about 3.35pm.

"When he exited the Toyota the driver, a 43-year-old Tarrawingee man, was arrested at the scene by a passerby," Victoria Police said.

"The woman was taken to hospital with critical injuries."

Police said a knife was located by officers and seized from inside the Toyota.

Are you fucking serious? So angry at a politician that you try to kill her? She isn't even a member of a political party - so you can't pin it on overall anger at Labor/Libs for something or other.

A thought experiment with an Anti-Vaxxer:

1. We place your kid onto a field with 1,000 other kids.
2. A predator is going to come along and eat three of the kids. It probably won't be yours, but your kid will be affected by the incident all the same.
3. If your kid survives, you get to tell people the whole experience was no big deal.

No parent would agree to this. And yet, that's pretty-much what happens. The only difference is when their kid survives, they don't see the three who are taken.

To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:

• Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called "Starfield".
• They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
• Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
• Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
• Nexus decided they don't want to host this mod. It's hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.

That's about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don't even play the game. They're just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they'd just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.

I'll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can't just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there's no such thing. There's x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted "4% milk") in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you've gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I'm not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it's like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they'd last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it's sugar or preservatives in it, I don't know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it's 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I'd much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a "I'm better than this person" way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there's a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone's worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I'll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it's weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They're mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it's train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what's going on. Most of you couldn't name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don't know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I'll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I'm white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I've ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don't seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as 'good' by default. There's a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I've been to.

I hate this law. Not because I think people should be saluting like Nazis, but because it was actually needed. We should be better than that. Have we learned nothing from 80-90 years ago?

Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You'd think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.

As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they'd never get in.
2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn't get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren't forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. "You can't make me vote, that's against the constitution or something".

This is actually something being debated in Australia. Until a few years ago, Dingoes were considered the same species as the regular dog Canis familiaris. Recent DNA studies have shown them to be distinct, however. So now there's Canis dingo. Only, Dingoes can interbreed with the regular dog, which normally is the test for them being the same species. Maybe that makes them a subspecies?

So, yeah - even we don't know what they are. If they were raised by humans, they are happy friendly doggos. If in the wild, then they're dingoes.

Dance. In a troupe full of girls. Honestly, it was me and 15-20 girls.

Other boys literally called me gay for dancing, while they went and played whatever sports they did and then all went into a locker room and showered together etc.

I honestly never understood how they thought dance was gay. I don't understand it now.

I think if I only made 300 Million dollars in three years, I'd probably wonder what on earth I was even doing with myself as well. What is even the point? 😔

This is itself a sad picture of what has happened to that site. A medium sized sub goes down and everyone's immediate expectation is that the cause is a management decision rather than a technical problemm

The administration of Reddit has shown enough times that it's interests are not aligned with its users'.