You’ve decided that those don’t matter and you’ve created some other metrics by which you could consider the power use typical.

But just because you’ve found a way to say that they’re typical in one way, that doesn’t mean they’re not excessive in another way. They do use power to excess in some ways, therefore it’s perfectly legitimate to describe them as excessive in that way.

Data centres’ power use is becoming a problem for multiple reasons. The problem isn’t going to be solved by denying that a problem exists, or by taking offense when an adjective is used that draws attention to said problem.

> zealotry (believing your opinions are the only ones that can be correct)

Indeed.

“Excessive: exceeding what is usual, proper, necessary, or normal”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excessive

The power use of data centres is objectively exceeding what is usual or normal. Therefore it is objectively excessive.

Again, I think, citation needed, since conservative media does like to bang on about this a lot, but I’ve not seen actual proof that education standards are falling, or worse than they were when I was at school.

What I think has happened since the close of grammar schools is that the gap between most educated and least educated has closed significantly. This government report from 2023 shows that gap closing, while also showing an improvement from previous years.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/675330e020bcf...

Yes and he’s running against Count Binface

(sorry)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/e...

They can be moved into another public service role, and there are ceremonial roles designed to ‘shelve’ MPs, but other than that, criminal acts and incapacity, they can’t actually stand down. Starmer is resigning as Prime Minister, he is not resigning as an MP.

This is why the other parties see the whole thing as a farce. The chancellor approved the budget for the by-election by saying “if he wants to spend his summer talking to a bin, so be it” but it’s unclear if there’s any constitutional legality to it.

Of course it’s excessive. Ireland’s electricity is not cheap or in such plentiful supply that homes are not affective by this. These data centres are driving up the electricity prices for everyone in Ireland.

Of course it’s excessive. There are only 80 datacentres that used 7.8TWh between them in 2025. That amount of power is used by only the heaviest of industries; it’s 3x more power than the UK steel industry uses, for example.

Of course it’s excessive. The amount of energy used means that more fossil fuels is being used to power them than would otherwise be necessary. Legislation has been written so that new datacentres must in future provide their own [fossil fuel] generators. This in a time of man-made climate change where we all urgently need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It’s not just excessive, it’s deeply irresponsible.

The data scientists aren’t the ones working in the data centres. There’s no real advantage to having the data they’re working on next door unless it’s extremely lag sensitive.

Local proximity of a datacentre is good for fintech, Netflix and gaming servers.

The study shows that they weren’t wrong or right in equal measure, they were right more often, considerably so. But that doesn’t mean that they were always right.

A lead studio with a small headcount can outsource work internationally for often much cheaper than the same job done locally, but also not have to pay those workers in stages of development where there’s not enough work for them.

Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.

There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.

On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.

There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.

You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.

There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)