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frezik

@frezik@midwest.social

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The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates (www.theguardian.com)

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....

frezik ,

The water is because datacenters have been switching to evaporative cooling to save energy. It does save energy, but at the cost of water. It doesn't go away forever, but a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can't use it again without desalination and using even more energy.

frezik , (edited )

The Sam Altman fans also say that AI would solve climate change in a jiffy. Problem is, we already have all the tech we need to solve it. We lack the political will to do it. AI might be able to improve our tech further, but if we lack the political will now, then AI's suggestions aren't going to fix it. Not unless we're willing to subsume our governmental structures to AI. Frankly, I do not trust Sam Altman or any other techbro to create an AI that I would want to be governed by.

What we end up with is that while AI might improve things, it almost certainly isn't worth the energy being dumped into it.

Edit: Yes, Sam Altman does actually believe this. That's clear from his public statements about climate change and AI. Please don't get into endless "he didn't say exactly those words" debates, because that's bullshit. He justifies massive AI energy usage by saying it will totally solve climate change. Totally.

frezik ,

We're already going to have to deploy wind and solar at a breakneck pace to solve global warming. Why do we need a technology that would force us to install even more?

frezik ,

Yes, Sam Altman himself.

frezik ,

You mean the ones Sam Altman is actually saying?

frezik ,

Dude, please. If this were true, we wouldn't have water issues piling up with the rest of our climate catastrophe.

frezik ,

Chinese batteries are plenty good enough for e-bikes. For that matter, CATL makes some of the best batteries for electric cars.

Iron and sodium based batteries are coming on the market, and those all e-bikes need.

frezik ,

It does come out. All the time. 5-8% per year, compounding.

There's a toxic positivity in how the news presents battery tech advances that leads people to think it's never coming. I'm not talking about stuff that's in a lab that may or may not be practical for mass production. I'm talking about stuff starting to come out of factories today.

frezik ,

Historically, Google had a give-and-take with SEO. You can't make SEO companies go away, but you can curb the worst behavior. Google used to punish bad behavior with a poor listing, and you had to do some work to get it back into compliance and tell Google it's fixed up.

It wasn't ideal, but it functioned well enough.

The drive to make search more profitable over the past few years seems to have meant dropping this. SEO companies can get away with whatever. If they now have the whole manual, game over. Google of a decade ago might have done something about it. Google of today won't bother.

frezik ,

Why is there always at least one European in these threads misunderstanding how North American power works?

frezik ,

KiCAD has also improved greatly over the last few years. It still has an opinion on how the work flow should be, but that work flow moves pretty well. It's gotten easier to find pre-made footprints, too.

If only library management didn't suck.

frezik ,

Long time Xcom player here, back to the original series.

No.

frezik ,

The music of Holst's "The Planets", if we want to complete our list of things Star Wars superficially plagiarized.

frezik ,

If you're the right person, you'll already know who to contact.

frezik ,

Which this very story proves. The AI voice that they generated was specifically based on "Her", a movie about a guy who falls in love with an AI voice assistant. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm going out on a limb to guess this is another "don't make the torment vortex" situation.

frezik ,

AI might be the one to say "solving global warming needs a drastic reduction car-based infrastructure, plus heavy government regulation and investment in new infrastructure". They'll throw out that answer because it isn't what they wanted to hear.

frezik ,

An invasion would be incredibly costly, and would accomplish . . . what exactly? A final resolution to a civil war that barely anyone has a living memory of?

China wants TSMC. Rigging the whole thing to blow in the event of an invasion, and making it very public and very obvious that this is what will happen and cannot be stopped, is the best strategy to avoid that invasion.

frezik ,

Who apparently lived in Plato's Cave and only has descriptions of how women dress to go on.

frezik ,

What's the center of this copper wire even for, anyway? I'm going around the edges.

frezik ,

Your lips do important work in making a trumpet play. Dolphins don't have the fine control over their lips that would be necessary. Maybe the blowhole does?

frezik ,

Like "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", its full meaning has been cut off in order to support the opposite point.

frezik ,

"You don't actually read the bible, you just cherry picked some bits out of the atheist meme book" - actual response I've gotten when I've brought this up.

frezik ,

It's not just nudes, though. This could happen for any deleted picture. I'm not really expecting them to zero out the file system block or anything, but this implies they're not even doing file system level deletion.

frezik ,

No rent? Can I at least extract their surplus value for myself? I can't get hard unless I'm extracting surplus value.

frezik ,

That's only one factor in a high control organization.

There's a theory that the longevity of a commune comes down to making costly sacrifices. This signals to the group that you're not going to be a freeloader. Things like praying at a set time every day, or going to services tends to make religious communes last longer. The tasks don't have to do anything in themselves; they just have to exist and take up some of your time and effort. Religion has an easier time mandating these things, because you can put the whole reason for it on an ephemeral deity rather than something more concrete. In fact, this signaling to the group may have been the reason religion developed in the first place.

The data on this is mixed, however.

http://cognitionandculture.net/wp-content/uploads/Sosis_2003_CommuneLongevity.pdf

frezik ,

Except for that damn owl. That's the one thing.

frezik ,

Miles O'Brian: most built character.

frezik ,

You should come to the United States, where hot women sleep with you for not voting for Biden. Or so I'm told from the very authoritative OP.

frezik ,

"Due to current market conditions . . ." is the line my group has been given. There never seems to be market conditions where the workers get to win.

frezik ,

Thomas Kinkade agrees. Or his ghost-artists do, anyway.

frezik ,

It was done for largely sensible reasons.

https://youtu.be/WaJFudED5FQ?si=7j005FmfJVr_JQL_

In short, a 2x4 was originally 2x4 inches, full stop, but it was found that this size wasn't necessary for the strength being applied to them in construction. We were wasting lumber for no reason. They went through a few cycles of sizing down as the actual needed strength was understood better. The naming convention stuck, though.

frezik ,

The 2x4s that have been sized this way do meet structural code. It was found that a full 2x4 is way over spec'd for what they were used for, so why bother wasting extra parts of the tree?

Pretty much everything built with dimensional lumber in the last century has been done with undersized 2x4s, and it's fine. The name stuck for historical reasons. Companies that build houses and order this stuff by the pallet all know what the real size is, and so do building inspectors.

frezik ,

What part of this has to do with dimensional lumber?

frezik ,

Perhaps they'd like to rollback all the times we've bailed out the auto industry. We don't want the government to be choosing winners and losers, after all.

frezik ,

OK, let's just get rid of cars altogether, then.

frezik ,

Do you know if the model is running locally or some cloud shit? If locally, the actual energy usage may be modest.

Energy spent training the model initially may have been prohibitive, though.

frezik ,

Improving the models doesn't seem to work: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125?

We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and five standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend.

It's taking exponentially more data to get better results, and therefore, exponentially more energy. Even if something like analog training chips reduce energy usage ten fold, the exponential curve will just catch up again, and very quickly with results only marginally improved. Not only that, but you have to gather that much more data, and while the Internet is a vast datastore, the AI models have already absorbed much of it.

The implication is that the models are about as good as they will be without more fundamental breakthroughs. The thing about breakthroughs like that is that they could happen tomorrow, they could happen in 10 years, they could happen in 1000 years, or they could happen never.

Fermat's Last Theorem remained an open problem for 358 years. Squaring the Circle remained open for over 2000 years. The Riemann Hypothesis has remained unsolved after more than 150 years. These things sometimes sit there for a long, long time, and not for lack of smart people trying to solve them.

frezik ,

None of those had close to the range of the Model X in 2015. Having less than 200mi range makes things difficult. Doubly so because the charging infrastructure wasn't there (and barely is now). The infrastructure that did exist was put there by Tesla.

Though with proper charging infrastructure, having more than 400mi isn't really necessary, and is almost silly.

frezik ,

Probably, yes.

My wife goes to work and back on a Mini EV, which is around 110 mi range. Basically a BMW i3 dropped into the chassis of a Cooper S. It's not suitable for road trips in the US. If L3 charging was a little more reliable, you could almost do it, but it would still suck and I wouldn't choose to do it except in a pinch.

frezik ,

It's not a solution by itself, but a library economy can form part of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk

frezik ,

Let me guess, hardened steel? Because that's how you keep your bike from getting stolen in New York. Kryptonite calls it the "fahgettaboudit" lock for a reason.

frezik ,

I was going to ask how WSL gets installed without the Windows Store, but looks like the install path doesn't use the store anymore. That was one of the few things I ever used the store for.

frezik ,

i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

Sure, it can, because I'm going to blow your mind: businesses aren't about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.

None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company's best long term asset--they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs--yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it's still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn't going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn't really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.

All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it's not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla's ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.

Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn't look like it's going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.

None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.

If it doesn't make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.

frezik ,

Oh, no, they're not exactly the same. They wouldn't come into conflict if they were the same.

As another example, unions. Employees often see issues early on; perhaps a machine needing maintenance. A union can bring this up to management and put the pressure on to get it done. The business will save money in the long run with machines in proper maintenance.

If it doesn't get done, best case scenario is that it fails and the whole production line is shot until it's fixed. Worst case, it fails more catastrophically and damages other equipment, or injures workers.

Despite plenty of stories like this, companies will fight unionization efforts every time. Why? Because money doesn't always align with power.

frezik ,

"Wealth and power are exactly the same". This is the claim I'm disputing. If there are places where money and power are in conflict, then they can't be the same. Your analysis of a situation will be have holes in it if this is not considered.

frezik ,

Then let me attack it from a different direction: can you have power in a society that does not have money?

frezik ,

I'm working outword to find a path in.

If a society can have power without money, then can the two overlap perfectly in any society?

To use a more concrete example, how do unions ever have power in our society? They tend not to have money, or at least very little in proportion to the business owners.

frezik ,

Nah, ignoring them doesn't work past a certain point. If it did, it would have worked with Internet trolls back in the 90s.

You don't want to give small time versions of Musk or Trump a platform. That's when ignoring them works. Weird ass flat earther channel with 12 subscribers? Maybe don't post them on Xhitter as outrage porn; just let it be. Once they have a hundred thousand subscribers, though, you can no longer ignore them and hope they go away. If you try, they will yell louder.

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