diamondap

Amazon recently bought a data center in Pennsylvania that comes with a guaranteed 960 MW of power. (See https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-acquires-talens-nuclear-data-center-campus-in-pennsylvania/)

That one building will consume more power than any city in the US except Miami. More than New York, more than Houston or Chicago or LA! (See https://www.statista.com/statistics/807951/average-monthly-electricity-usage-in-major-us-cities/ for stats on power usage by US cities.)

Today, the Washington Post reports that US power utilities don't know how they're going to meet demand for new data centers in the coming years. They can't build infrastructure fast enough. (Non-paywalled version of Post article: https://archive.is/xmQTg)

We're at the point where a single data center can offset the gains of entire cities switching to LEED certified buildings and energy-efficient bulbs and appliances.

The SaaS products we develop now consume a lot of power because they have redundancy across all components. AI uses massive amounts of power for its fundamental operations.

Given all this, is anyone questioning whether the software and AI we're developing is even worth this level of power consumption? Could that energy be better spent elsewhere?

Are there any search engines out there that limit results to useful sites instead of content farms and SEO-optimized garbage?

There are tons of blogs, forums and hobbyist sites filled with useful info, but they're drowned out in search results by SEO spam sites. It seems search engines could identify quality sites by asking users to click an "is this useful" link.

Or have any dedicated hobbyists created curated search engines in their realm of interest (cooking, gardening, automotive, software, etc.) that limit results to a range of high quality, non click bait sites?