Thanks!

Damn, that sounds like something to satisfy the doomer in me. Do you happen to have a link?

Since we’re already drifting off topic - all big tech companies make a lot of money by selling hardware, compute, or some other service to the oil and gas industry, they just don’t go out bragging about it. Before the AI boom the oil and gas industry was among the biggest customers of the tech industry, just a quick search gives:

https://www.amd.com/en/solutions/energy.html

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/energy-resources/oil-gas

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/industries/energy/oil-gas-operations/

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/energy/oil-gas

https://www.ibm.com/industries/oil-gas

https://www.intel.co.uk/content/dam/www/central-libraries/us/en/documents/2025-06/aramco-executive-brief.pdf

Completely agree, saying that solar is heat sensitive when talking about not being able to power ACs is pretty far out there.

Adding to what you said, ambient temperature only has a slight impact on solar’s efficiency. Solar’s efficiency usually mainly goes down due to self-heating which is due to higher irradiance. So in some sense they are less efficient because they generate more power.

However your example numbers are way off, solar panels generate much more peak power during summer than during winter, they aren’t close to being similar (depending on lattitude, but I guess that’s a given when talking about “summer” and “winter”).

^[1]

And the other part that should not be overlooked is that there tends to be some correlation between hot weather and long sunshine, which can also be seen in the plot. So not only is peak power of solar higher during the time when heatwaves are more likely, they also generate power longer.

My gaming machine is still using DDR3. Never really saw a reason to upgrade, games mostly became more demanding in the graphics-sector, even the first-gen i5 is doing reasonably well with most games, even newer ones. And if not, I blame badly optimized games.

RAM speed usually is the last thing you have to worry about in games.

In case you are being serious, there are ways around faulty RAM sticks, usually just a few cells/rows are affected. In case anyone needs to know this, here is a pretty good summary on stackoverflow on how to deal with this on linux. In general, look for “memmap”.

Keep your hardware running as long as possible! Iirc newer RAM is unfortunately somewhat more susceptible to failing. My DDR3 is still working fine.

Hell yeah, another fellow user of DDR3. It’ll live forever!

I don’t really see a reason to upgrade, my i5 from 2009 is still running fine. Damn, now that I’m writing it out, that does sound old

This is your example of capitalism working? Then I don’t want to see it failing.

Sure, I basically agree with everything you said. The thing is that even without data centers we’d be in this mess. I’m not trying to defend them, they definitely undo the little progress that was made. However, Trump would have undone the regulations with or without the data centers.

It’s just that it’s not only data centers that are fast tracking climate change. I mean… gestures broadly at everything basically everything is fast tracking climate change.

I guess you definitely are right in the sense that it’s one of the sources that’s among the easiest to get rid of.

That is the part that pains me to admit - running local LLMs is not a solution to the RAMpocalypse. In that case we’d just have more GPUs and RAM idling for ~90% of the time in someones basement, without being shared. As bad as it sounds, having data centers for AI stuff is actually the more ecological solution. I can’t believe I said that. Excuse me, I have to take a shower now *shudder*

Nice of you to side-track with current emissions (per capita even), and not cumulative historical emissions, which were actually mentioned.

Feel free to compare different countries yourself: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics (I’m not sure why ourworldindata doesn’t just put all of this on one page instead of splitting it up. It’s always a hassle to find the right one it even is on the same page, I just didn’t look close enough) The more interesting comparison might be high-income vs low-income countries.

To get back to the discussion: Yes, Europes share is not as huge as it used to be, and it’s getting lower, but what can be seen from @[email protected] graph is that that’s less due to Europe behaving better and rather due to other countries polluting more. Not a good argument for saying “Europe is doing better now”

Don’t blame everything on the data centers. Everything else is doing its part in contributing to climate change.

Apart from that data centers, at the scale at which we seem them pop up now, are way too young to have a considerable effect on the current heat wave. Which doesn’t mean that they won’t in the future. Climate change is, after all, a decades long project