this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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The things using the internet is irrelevant. The fact remains that the internet itself is not taking your drinking water
i’m always amazed how it can be so hard for some people to think beyond whatever is immediately in their face
70% of the internet traffic is the fucking internet
just because you don’t like that doesn't matter
Internet traffic is not the internet. Thats like saying cars and trucks are the highway. I can’t believe I have to dumb this down for you, but here goes: T highway is that asphalt thing that sits on the ground between two places, right? And cars and trucks are the things you drive on the highway. So like, in terms of emissions, the highway isn’t producing all those nasty emissions, the cars and trucks are. So if you don’t like those nasty emissions, you can regular the cars and trucks, but the highway isn’t at fault. You could reduce the emissions of the vehicles, replace the cars with more efficient busses, you could even just ride bikes on the highway if you really wanted to. But all these things are separate from the highway itself, see?
Just because you don’t understand how any of this works doesn’t change the fact of the matter which is that the internet is not taking your drinking water.
i don’t care about fucking semantics, life must be complicated for you if you are this hung up on literals
it’s amazing you can be so close as to use cars and highways and yet be so damn blind to history and the parallel implications
It's not semantics you fucking clod. They just gave an incredibly apt analogy in an attempt to explain how things actually work but you continue on with your ass-sourced "70% of the intetz iz botz hurr durr" shit without even attempting to understand why you're dead fucking wrong.
It’s not semantics, the context of this entire thread is about the difference in ecological impact of two entirely different and unrelated technologies. This isn’t a philosophical debate. Life must be so difficult for you if you can’t ever see the forest for the trees because you can’t see things as they are.
By your own definition, then AI is now the internet. Prompts and outputs are the cars and trucks, while the data centers and models are the highway. 70% of the internet is running on data centers and models. What makes more of something, 30% or 70%?
Not even. The internet is the highway. The datacenters running the internet are the department of transportation. Average internet users are the compact hybrids, EVs, and cyclists who use the road. Prompts and outputs are the couriers driving various kinds of vehicles. AI datacenters are the giant trucks with smokestacks that smokescreen all the old grannies behind them.
The prompts and outputs traveling over the internet consume a negligible amount of energy. The bulk of it is consumed by training giant LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters. A lesser portion is consumed by the inferencing those models do to produce outputs, which is done at the AI datacenters, and not what travels over the internet via internet datacenters.
You’ve misunderstood. AI datacenters are not the highway. Prompts and Outputs are the cars and trucks, the AI data centers are the factories making the cars. The highway is datacenters and transmission media that do not house AI and do not require the immense cooling or power that the AI datacenters use. The highway and the things on the highway are two entirely decoupled things.
human transportation in the abstract is the internet
data is people
data packets / rates (related tech) are the various vehicle types
there was a time of no highways, what need do horse drawn carriages have for paved asphalt?
highways are a direct though not immediate consequence of American car and civic planning policy
if instead we had focused on mixed use walkable cities with connected mass transit instead of urban sprawl highways would be much reduced if not gone, just look at existing examples in eu etc
so yes American cars and every nuance that implies in our current American reality are fucking highways
Incorrect. Let me help you out here:
Human transportation in the abstract is computer networking in the abstract.
The highway is the internet, the current physical implementation of the computer networking transportation system we call The Internet.
You can go into minute detail on what the cars and trucks are, horse drawn carriages, people etc, but ultimately, the internet is the highway. It is separate from and fundamentally not responsible for what you choose to put on it.