this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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I don't want to be all "I told you so" but I have been saying they're building all these data centers for surveillance reasons for a while now. Like people aren't using LLMs enough for any reason to justify all the data centers and the numbers aren't growing, but Surveillance Data? That's always growing.
Yup. It's a scary time. You take some LinkedIn data, some Walmart shopping habits, a Spotify user catalog, a Google timeline, combined with Flock footage - mix it all together with "AI" - and suddenly you've got an extremely detailed profile of any individual you want. And we're only in the early stages. That is, spying, prediction, eavesdropping... The only logical conclusion to the surveillance apparatus is an evolution towards an apparatus for control. And it will be the most sinister, subtle, and undetectable type of coercion imaginable.
I just want to grill for gods sake.
And this is the biggest problem of all. Nobody can explain why the AI picked a specific record to escalate its "suspicion". Nobody is accountable when it picks the wrong person, or when it creates suspicion without any actual wrongdoing taking place.
All the better when they start going after whoever they want because "AI" said so. The reality is this is just the excuse they were looking for.
Lying AI decided to pull you over today sir, would you mind telling me why?
Knowing you can be disappeared any time, even if you do nothing wrong, will certainly keep you down, and subservient.
I bet that's what Epsteins experiments were...torturing and breaking children in various ways to see at what point they would co-operate with anything, including their own deaths.
I heard someone say the other day that most of the time when there's a 'bad' technology it starts off as something good that everyone likes, and gradually becomes bad over time, like social media. But AI is something a bit more rare in that it came out and the majority of people didn't especially want or like it, but it really feels like it's being 'forced' into existence, so to speak. Which makes me think there's something else going on.
That's just because it's your bubble AI was used excessively before with stuff like deepl for translation, dragon speak for speech to text, in medicine it was used all the time for images, like CT or met scans and a lot in ultrasound. Further most vocaloids are basically AI too.
i tend to call that stuff “ML” (machine learning) instead if AI thanks to the dumbass marketing of today. been working in ML for decades.
Anyone talking about AI in any context in a normal forum nowadays is discussing LLMs. Nobody cared about machine learning or neural nets that were actually being used for their designed purpose.
Yeah ml has a lot of good uses and purposes.
I cared. Feelsbadman
I did remember that people did sorta liked it during the days it was still just AI Dungeon and AI-Generated anime girls. Though AI has always been around, being used for simple chatbots (remember BEN Drowned Cleverbot?)
People talk shit about Palantir's valuation but if it's the new Stasi OS, it's relatively cheap looking forward to a totalitarian police state.
They’re definitely not. Hard drives use a fraction of the energy a single LLM prompt does. A study calculated that every 100 words uses an entire water bottle’s worth of water. That’s a lot of cooling for 100 words. It’s very likely that these companies use several gpus for every single prompt, meaning huge servers for just a few users.
Meanwhile the internet archive has archived a significant portion of the internet with nary a data center in sight.
You can compress video. You can’t compress the energy needed to generate output.
All the hard drive do is storing the data, they do need the data centers to comb through them for any patterns they deemed to be a threat to them
Which still doesn’t require as much energy as LLMs do. I run exactly that on my own server at home. And my unifi system does it on video all locally with no GPU at all. Video processing for identification is incredibly cheap and easy from a computer processing standpoint these days. You literally can do it on a raspberry pi.
What on Earth are you doing that for...
What on earth am I doing what for?
Combing for patterns in people on your own server. Think about what it sounds like.
I’m just gonna hope you’re joking and not that your username is an accurate description.
Knowing when someone is at your doorbell without ringing the doorbell is pretty useful. Same for knowing if your dog got out, or a number of other things. I don’t like sharing my neighbors data with Amazon or the Feds, so running it all locally is perfect. I get to control how long any data is kept for, what it scans for, and none of it leaves my property.
Creepy but...yeah, I'd like to know when someone is at the doorbell too, saves a lot of problems.
And? It doesn't matter what solution is optimal. The only thing matters is this is the solution their rich friends sold them.
just fyi the internet archive storage is most definitely in a data center or 3. your hospitals use data centers, schools too. just not at the scale of ai types.
The Internet archive doesn’t have an entire data center just for archiving is what I’m saying. Not that they don’t use data centers.