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masterspace

@masterspace@lemmy.ca

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masterspace ,

It's not tho.

masterspace ,

I mean, it's all runing on general purpose hardware. If we decoded 4k video on general purpose hardware we'd use more power than every AI company put together, but once that became popular we developed chips capable of decoding it at the hardware level that consume barely any power.

And the exact same thing is starting to happen with dedicated machine learning chips / NPUs.

masterspace ,

This is a bad article, with a misleading headline.

It shows no direct connection between the two, it just talks about how AI models are less power efficient than search engines, and then talks about how all industries including normal, non AI data centers, manufacturing, etc, are all increasing power usage.

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....

masterspace ,

"aI AnD cRyPtO aRe ThE sAmE bRo"

You know that your take that they both must suck in the exact same ways just because tech bros get hyped about them, is literally just as shallow, surface level, and uninformed as most tech bros?

Like yeah man, tech hype cycles suck. But you know what else was once a tech hype cycle? Computers, the internet, smartphones. Sometimes they are legitimate, sometimes not.

AI is solving an entirely new class of problem that computers have been literally unable to solve for their entire existence. Crypto was solving the problem of making a database without a single admin. One of those is a lot more important and foundational than the other.

On top of that, crypto algorithms are fundamentally based on "proof of work", i.e. literally wasting more energy than other miners in the network is a fundamental part of how their algorithm functions. Meaning that with crypto there is basically no value prop to society and it inherently tries to waste energy, neither is the case for AI.

Plus guess how much energy everyone streaming 4K video would take if we were all doing it on CPUs and unoptimized GPUs?

Orders of magnitude more power than every AI model put together.

But guess what? Instead we invented 4k decoding chips that are optimized to redner 4k signals at the hardware level so that they don't use much power, and now every $30 fire stick can decode a 4k signal on a 5V usb power supply.

That's also where we're at with the first Neural Processing Units only just hitting the market now.

masterspace ,

Crypto and proof of work algorithms inherently waste energy.

AI using a lot of energy is like 4k video using a lot of energy, yeah, it does right now, but that's because we're not running it on dedicated hardware specifically designed for it.

If we decoded 4k videos using software at the rate we watch 4k videos, we'd already have melted both ice caps.

masterspace ,

Sure, uninformed tech hypebois suck in the same way, but the arguments around crypto and AI, especially around energy usage, are fundamentally not the same.

masterspace ,

Someone posted a shitty article about AI and power usage, someone pointed out that literally every industry uses a ton of power but AI gets clicks, you said AI and Crypto bros are the same.

If you don't mean to imply that the counter arguments around AI and Crypto in terms of energy use are the same then write better given the context of the conversation.

And posting another shitty article that just talks about power usage going up across literally all types of industry, including just normal data centers and manufacturing plants, and then vaguely talking about chatGPT's power usage compared to Google search to try and make it sound like those things are connected, is not having a serious discussion about it.

It's skimming a clickbait headline of a clickbait article and regurgitating the implication in it like it's a fact.

masterspace ,

So it takes 700,000 litres of water to cool a machine eh? Think about a water cooled PC, now, is that water cooled PC hooked up to your sink and continuously draining water? Or did you fill it up one time and then at the end when you're done with it, dump the water back down the drain?

700,000 litres of water in a closed loop cooling system is not a problem in any way shape or form.

masterspace ,

We can solve entire new classes of problems that we never could before.

Your problems are with capitalism and how we distribute our resources, not with advancements in automation.

masterspace ,

This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it's competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world, and highly structured coding languages are just the easiest lowest hanging fruit.

Yes we are heading to a climate disaster because of greed, but that has nothing to do with AI.

masterspace ,

I mean, that's also all you or I am.

masterspace ,

Ban all 4K video then.

First gen, 4k video rendering without hardware support also consumed orders of magnitude more power than any other common thing before it, good thing we banned it, instead of you know, just letting the technology mature and develop for a couple years til we had hardware chips that could do it for almost no power.

Hell, video games are less useful for the world than AI and they consume orders of magnitude more power than ChatGPT, so let's ban them too right?

masterspace ,

So we absolutely should pay special attention to industries that are hogging a lot of energy. Xboxes and especially vibrators spend way less energy than data centers - though again, moving gaming on PCs and developing better dumb gaming terminals to use this computing power while playing with controllers in a living room is an absolute win for the environment.

Bruh, this is flat out a lie.

No, xboxes do not use less power when they are in your house then when they are in a data center. Servers and data center computers (including the xboxs powering xcloud), are typically more power efficient when running in optimized and monitored data centers, where they are liquid cooled with heat pumps, than when running in your dusty ass house running a fan and your houses' AC to cool them.

The power consumption of video games, if you add up every console while playing them, every server running the multiplayer and updates, and every dev machine crunching away, is a massive waste of economically unproductive energy.

The person above is right. If you want to address the climate crisis, slap a carbon tax on the cost of pollution, don't artificially pick and choose what you think is worthwhile based on your gut.

masterspace ,

I mean ChatGPT can't do it but humans can and are... Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?

The new ARM powered surface laptops that consume like 30W of power are more capable of running an AI model than my gaming PC from 2 years ago that consumes ~300W of power.

masterspace ,

Cars collectively emit far more carbon than ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is only going to get more optimized from here.

Ultimately the answer should be in a heavy carbon tax, rather than having a divine ruler try and pick and choose where it's worth it to spend carbon.

masterspace ,

Yes and manufacturing an Xbox for every single household, boxing it and shipping it to them, and then having it sit unused for 90% of the time, has a much bigger carbon cost than manufacturing a fraction of the number of Xboxes, shipping them all in bulk to the same data center, and then having them run almost 24/7 and be shared amongst everyone.

And the same thing about optimizing gaming hardware is true for AI. The new NPUs in the surface laptops can run AI models on 30W of power that my 300W GPU from 2 years ago cannot.

masterspace ,

Yes, electricity still costs companies money so at a base level they are incentivized to minimize its usage, and then on-top of that carbon taxes should be helping to cover the environmental and incentive costs for further energy reducing innovations.

If you just want to ban electricity consuming industries I don't know why you'd start with AI, which is brand new and has genuine useful value to society, and not say, something like advertising which is just an economic distortion and massive drain on society.

masterspace ,

Dude, if you've never used copilot then shut up and don't say anything.

Don't pretend like you write code that doesn't benefit from AI assisted autocomplete. Literally all code does. Just capitalization and autocompleting variable names with correct grammar is handy, let alone literally any time there's boiler plate or repetition.

Lmao, the idea that you having an NDA makes you work on super elite code that doesn't benefit from copilot if hilarious. Ive worked on an apps used by hundreds of millions of people and backend systems powering fortune 10 manufacturers, my roommate is doing his PhD on advanced biological modelling and data analysis, copilot is useful when working on all of them.

masterspace ,

People here hate AI with a literally blind passion and I don't get it.

masterspace , (edited )

Every story is somewhat about wealth distribution. Your argument is fundamentally that AI is not worth it to spend the resources we are spending on it. If wealth was distributed more fairly, that would not be an argument since the money and carbon taxes spent on it would be an accurate representation of the will of the average person and its utility to them. That argument makes the most sense in the context of an inordinate amount of r sources being controlled and directed by the wealthy.

So if this technology has major problem when combined with capitalism, then we should either stop using capitalism, or stop using the technology - or both, until we make up our mind which we prefer to keep!

Except that it doesn't. AI is no more frivolous and power hungry than any other industry. Video games consume far more power for instance and provide no economic value back.

masterspace , (edited )

You know that Microsoft doesn't just sit there and burn electricity for fun right?

Microsoft data centers are doing what consumers ask them to do. They are burning data at the request of users, no different than your personal PC.

Actually the main difference is that he computers in their data centers are far more energy efficient than your PC.

masterspace ,

Do you have a source to counter stack overflow's developer survey?

masterspace , (edited )

Explain to me how we're not or kindly go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself.

masterspace ,

Sure, a lot of computing power goes into, say, console gaming, but that's not what I originally talked about. I talked about data centers training AI models and requiring ever more power and hardware as compared to what we expend on gaming, first of all.

But they don't. Right now the GPU powering every console, gaming PC, developer PC, graphic artist, twitch streamer, YouTube recap, etc. consumer far far more power than LLM training.

And LLM training is still largely being done on GPUs which aren't designed for it, as opposed to NPUs that can do so more efficiently at the chip level.

I understand the idea that AI training will always inherently consumer power because you can always train a model on bigger or more data, or train more parameters, but most uses of AI are not training, they're just users using an existing trained model. Google's base search infrastructure also took a lot more carbon to build initially than is accounted for when they calculate the carbon cost of an individual search.

masterspace ,

If capitalism is a forest fire, than the industrial revolution was like hitting a cache of kerosene, computers were like hitting a cache of gasoline, and AI is like hitting a smaller pile of gasoline. Yes it will accelerate things, but that's it. It's not causing any new effects we haven't already seen.

masterspace ,

Its utility to society is more than counterbalanced by the dangers that it and its unregulated expansion poses to that same society

People said the same things about computers for the same reasons. I'm glad we didn't listen to them.

masterspace , (edited )

I'm just saying that at that point, when we're talking maybe 1% of 700,000 litres across an entire industry, then we have a lot of lower hanging fruit to save water. That amount of water is just flat out wasted at like a single industrial plant on a Tuesday.

masterspace ,

Oh do tell us again how you haven't used copilot without saying the words 'i haven't used copilot'. Stackoverflow's professional developer survey found that 70% of devs are using AI assistants, you think none of them have heard of an IDE or Intellisense before?

masterspace ,

So then you realize that it's not Microsoft burning that electricity, but individual consumers?

masterspace ,

That's cool, free will doesn't exist, whats going to happen is going to happen. I've accepted that, so I might die poor, but you're the only one here with a chance of dying truly unhappy.

You know what's funny? What negative prompts you'd have to give an LLM to get it to respond the way you do.

masterspace ,

You're really trying yourself in knots to try and blame the big bad corpos and no one else.

Yes they are shoving it in people's faces, and when the average person uses their default browser with a default search engine and searches on Bing and it uses AI in addition to a search index they are to blame, but every single user who intentionally seeks out ChatGPT or Copilot is also to blame.

It's a new technology, people are going to use it and burn energy with it and then eventually we will make a more efficient version of it as it matures, similar to everything else, including traditional search.

masterspace ,

Yes there are pros and cons to both, but that does not mean they are the same or equal.

Renting inherently adds an extra middleman to the process, (someone still has to buy it), who is incentivized to rent-seek and drain everyone from as much of their money as possible.

Renting really only works in scenarios where you have a bunch of different rental companies to drive down costs, but now you're starting to get back to the original problem of duplicating everything.

masterspace , (edited )

In North America you don't see many home improvement stores downtown where people are most likely to rent.

Most Lowe's, Home Depots, etc do have tool rental options, but they're located out in the burbs where land is cheap and everyone has space to store tools.

masterspace ,

This is a terrible summary, it feels like you just summarized the first 3 paragraphs.

masterspace ,

Renting stuff makes sense, but there are still lots of inherent problems with tool libraries and the like.

They're great for a carpet shampooer or chainsaw you need once a year, but if you actually want to fix and build stuff around the home then booking a tool, taking perfect measurements, hauling your stuff over to a tool library, building it, hauling everything back home to check it, is simply an infeasibly onerous process. The instant you make a mistake and need a different tool, or check a measurement, etc, you're wasting hours of time, which is most often the biggest limiter for home projects anyways.

You also don't get to learn on the same tool and build up instincts and understanding of how it behaves.

masterspace ,

Libraries are non profits, everyone who works there just gets paid a wage, no one makes more money if libraries make more money.

Or from a systemic standpoint, the library system is effectively separate from the capitalist system we use for distributing everything else. In capitalism if you have no competition you raise prices so you get richer, so functioning capitalism requires multiple copies of everything and a lot of redundancy all actively competing. The library being non-profit sidesteps that effect.

masterspace ,

I'm conflating a tool library and a maker space but the same issues apply to both. Either way, for home projects you end up with a whole lot of extra transportation.

masterspace ,

It provides its method isn't good enough to provide value then and it's just a waste of compute time.

masterspace ,

Cool beans bro, learn how to read a full comment and you'd see the part where it doesn't matter since theyre basically the same and have the same drawbacks.

masterspace ,

You cut the first piece, realize you actually need a different type of saw for the next cut, it's booked out, now your project is indefinitely delayed.

They are similar because in both cases you are sacrificing resiliency (multiple copies of a resource), for efficiency (a singular shared copy).

A tool library is still a great idea / resource for when you're doing a project and need one weird tool that youll never use again, but most people who do any real amount of DIY over their lives will want their own set of tools that cover most of the bases.

masterspace ,

Counterpoint: You go to the store to buy the saw you think you'll need, come home, cut the first piece -- boom, same realization. Same time-sink to go back to the store. I don't think that's a concern unique to tool libs.

Yes, except that when your buying tools, that only happens once. The next project that happens you have that tool sitting there waiting for you.

Well, yeah. We're talking more expensive things that you only need for one project, or maybe a couple of times. Not the screwdriver set that you use for everything from box-cutting to adjusting the screws on your cabinet doors when they seem wonky.

By basic DIY tools I don't just mean screw driver, I mean probably something along the lines of: screwdriver set, socket set, hammer, wrench set, drill / driver, circular saw, multitool, jigsaw, tape measures, clamps, level, plus basic painting tools, basic drywalling tools, basic electrical tools.

masterspace ,

And Canada as a whole has a massive real estate affordability crisis, with Toronto housing being exceptionally unaffordable relative to real wages.

masterspace , (edited )

Probably because this came out 16 years ago, before HomeAssistant even existed, it will still maintain wifi support for checking and controlling with your phone even after they cut off the cloud connection, and all their new products do have a local API and can still be used with HomeAssistant or whatever other local home automation server you have.

masterspace ,

The solution is to get a better trash can that has a rim that locks the bag in place. It would be crazy to over engineer every single disposable bag when a $2 plastic rim works for any bag.

masterspace ,

Shit video OP

masterspace ,

Pancake keggers happened before all the big football games at university.

masterspace , (edited )

I'd disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who's fucking up technologies for the sake of profit.

Well you can disagree all you want but I don't see how you can read his snarky comments and think that.

His criticism of the code yellow is not because anyone involved in the code yellow procedure, invention, or naming deserves anything. He just hates everyone in tech so much that a whimsical name must be a bastard move, and not just people at their job trying to make the most of it.

I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry

Yeah, cause you're accepting his characterizations of everyone as bastards at face value despite not knowing them and despite knowing that Ed Zirtron thinks everyone is a bastard because it makes his world simpler. Yes it is "refreshing" to stop thinking about complex chains of actions and consequences and just think "he's an evil bastard man and it's all his fault".

masterspace ,

Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided

No, far from it. Noone involved with the naming of the code yellow name has any evidence of bastardry presented at all.

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