Womble

Given that I havent expressed a preference and have never voted either Democrat or Republican in a single election (owing to not being American) I believe you may be inventing things about me.

And what I said stands, you functionally dont express a preference and what you do is equivalent to staying in bed and not turning out to vote.

So functionally, you abstain from voting and dont express a preference about how you are goverened.

Sure maybe that’s all true, but even if you make insane assumptions like every single person in the UK is making 100 queries per week, and that the true average cost is 10 times higher than the 3Wh I used for my upper price limit there (this is far more than independent research suggests), and that data centres are paying retail price + taxes: It still only comes out to around 5% of the UK domestic electricity market, so hardly going to be responsible for huge shifts in prices.

LLMs are a tiny energy use, 100 queries to chatGPT type models use about as much energy as a hair dryer for a few minutes. At current UK electricity retail prices (after tax, so significantly more than datacentres pay) 1 query costs somewhere between £0.00015 - £0.001 in power usage.

I cant see that being a significant factor in the price power companies charge over things like moving away from cheap but dirty sources of power or fluctuations of the natural gas price.

UK, France and western Europe more generally getting a bit colder isnt too big an issue with temperatures rising anyway, the more concerning part of it is that it will make the climate much drier and affect what crops can be grown.

The title kinda buries the lede there. I thought it was ridiculous to fine a platform just because a streamer happened to die on camera, but no, they were streaming months long abuse and torture of this guy at the hands of his co-streamers.

You can tell when posts are from mastodon as they are full of twitterisms like hashtags and @User to reply to comments

People make a complete mess of DIY with powertools, that doesnt mean that the powertools are the problem.

The energy usage stuff is just silly, its dwarfed by streaming and video games, never mind actually energy intensive things like heating transport and meat rearing.

You think venture capital dictates to the politburo what its priorities are in China?

Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to throw coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?

ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes transport, heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.

Do you have a source for that? Because given a chatgpt query takes a similar amount of energy to running a hair dryer for a few seconds i find it hard to believe.

It would make a lot more sense nowadays for Europe/NA to east Asia (or would for Europe if Russia were a reasonable country that could be trusted to fly over).

Thank you for posting this, I’ve tried to say the same thing to people quite a few times but to roughly the same reaction as this post has got. Its an entirely emotional reaction, people have convinced themself that AI is bad (arguable) therefore anything bad said about them is true (incorrect).

Unlike those lovely communists who frequently actively worked with the nazis (until '35) in order to weaken the social democrats and whos leader explicitly said “after Hitler, our turn”. Much better eh comrade?

The bit that picture leave out is that first guy is almost certainly killed, as are a good few of those in the third panel. Thats what makes it difficult.

You could even do district heating. Use the hot water output from the data centre and sell it cheap for piping into appartment blocks for heating.

Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.

You’re right that there’s orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that’s far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.

No I’m a meat eater who is anti-car! I’m more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.