Save The Planet
Save The Planet
292 comments
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Yeah, that thing that nobody wanted? Everybody has to have it. Fuck corporations and capitalism.
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Just like screens in cars, and MASSIVE trucks. We don't want this. Well, some dumbass Americans do, but intelligent people don't need a 32 ton 6 wheel drive pickup to haul jr to soccer.
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Massive trucks? They need those trucks for truck stuff, like this giant dilhole parking with his wife to go to Aldi today. Not even a flag on the end of that ladder, it filled a whole spot by itself.
My couch wouldn't fit in that bed, and every giant truck I see is sparkling shiny and looks like it hasn't done a day of hard labor, much like the drivers.
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You underestimate the number of people you wouldn't class as intelligent. If no one wanted massive trucks, they would have disappeared off the market within a couple of years because they wouldn't sell. They're ridiculous, inefficient hulks that basically no one really needs but they sell, so they continue being made.
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Do you have any data to support this is actually the case? I see this all the time but absolutely zero evidence but a 2015 Axios survey with no methodology or dataset. Nearly every article cites this one industry group with 3 questions that clearly aren't exclusive categorical and could be picked apart by a high school student.
I ask this question nearly every time I see this comment and in 5 years I have not found a single person who can actually cite where this came from or a complete explanation of even hope they got to that conclusion.
The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.
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Oh, and you don't want it and want the stupid model? You can still buy it for 3x the price.
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Do the new models even have non-"smart" fittings? I thought all the electronic chip plants closed during covid.
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Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.
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There's no money in selling residential energy.
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Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
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Then I guess it's time to stop using Google!
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I am trying to understand what Google's motivation for this even is. Surely it is not profitable to be replacing their existing, highly lucrative product with an inferior alternative that eats up way more power?
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Their motivation is always ads. The ai response is longer and takes time to read so more time looking at their ads. If the answer is sufficient, you might not even click away to the search result.
AI is a potential huge bonanza to search sites, letting them suck up the ad revenue that used to goto the search results
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They don't want to direct you to the thing you're searching for anymore because that means you're off their site quickly. Instead they want to provide themselves whatever it is you were searching for, so you will stay on their site and generate ad money. They don't care if their results are bad, because that just means you'll stick around longer, looking for an answer.
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To make search more lucrative, they've enshitified it and went too far, but for a short time there were great quarterly resukts. Now they're slowly losing users. So they try AI to fix it up.
It's also a signal to the shareholders that they're implementing the latest buzzword, plus they're all worried AI will take off and they've missed that train.
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Someone posted here a while ago - if you use the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 it doesn't include the AI search. I've updated my Google search links to use that instead of the base Google URL.
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There is a way to "turn it off" with some search parameters. However there is no guarantee that the AI is not consuming resources at the backend.
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Also the search parameters are undocumented internal things that can change or be disabled at any time.
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Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/
You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.
If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is: https://
<searxng_url>
/search?q=%sI have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.
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Meanwhile I'm down town I'm my city cleaning windows in office buildings that are 75% empty but the heat or ac is blasting on completely empty floors and most of the lights are on.
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The HVAC does serve a purpose, it reduces the moisture in the building, which would otherwise ruin the building
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When I’m told there’s power issues and to conserve power I drop my AC to 60 and leave all my lights on. Only way for them to fix the grid is to break it.
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Literally rolling coal to own the cons
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wow based
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Let’s do the math.
Let’s take an SDXl porn model, with no 4-step speed augmentations, no hand written quantization/optimization schemes like svdquant, or anything, just an early, raw inefficient implementation:
So 2.5 seconds on an A100 for a single image. Let’s batch it (because that’s what’s done in production), and run it on the now popular H100 instead, and very conservatively assume 1.5 seconds per single image (though it’s likely much faster).
That’s on a 700W SXM Nvidia H100. Usually in a server box with 7 others, so let’s say 1000W including its share of the CPU and everything else. Let’s say 1400W for networking, idle time, whatever else is going on.
That’s 2 kJ, or 0.6 watt hours.
…Or about the energy of browsing Lemmy for 30-60 seconds. And again, this is an high estimate, but also a fraction of a second of usage for a home AC system.
…So yeah, booby pictures take very little energy, and the usage is going down dramatically.
Training light, open models like Deepseek or Qwen or SDXL takes very little energy, as does running them. The GPU farms they use are tiny, and dwarfed by something like an aluminum plant.
What slurps energy is AI Bros like Musk or Altman trying to brute force their way to a decent model by scaling out instead of increasing efficiency, and mostly they’re blowing that out of proportion to try the hype the market and convince them AI will be expensive and grow infinitely (so people will give them money).
That isn’t going to work very long. Small on-device models are going to be too cheap to compete.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kc978dg
So this is shit, they should be turning off AI farms too, but your porn images are a drop in the bucket compared to AC costs.
TL;DR: There are a bazillion things to flame AI Bros about, but inference for small models (like porn models) is objectively not one of them.
The problem is billionaires.
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I don’t disagree with you but most of the energy that people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them. Once they are trained it is fast to get what you need out of it, but making the next version takes a long time.
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Only because of brute force over efficient approaches.
Again, look up Deepseek's FP8/multi GPU training paper, and some of the code they published. They used a microscopic fraction of what OpenAI or X AI are using.
And models like SDXL or Flux are not that expensive to train.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but they can get away with it because being rich covers up internal dysfunction/isolation/whatever. Chinese trainers, and other GPU constrained ones, are forced to be thrifty.
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people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them
that's absolutely not true. In fact, most people who complain don't even know the difference.
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This is a specious argument.
Once a model has been trained once they don't just stop training. They refine and/or start training new models. Showing demand for these models is what has encouraged construction on 100s of new datacenters.
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Thx for doing the math
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I'm really OOTL when it comes to AI GHG impact. How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
How do their outputs stack up to traditional emitters like Ag and industry? I need a measuring stick
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The UC paper above touches on that. I will link a better one if I find it.
But specifically:
streaming services
Almost all the power from this is from internet infrastructure and the end device. Encoding videos (for them to be played thousands/millions of times) is basically free since its only done once, with the exception being YouTube (which is still very efficient). Storage servers can handle tons of clients (hence they're dirt cheap), and (last I heard) Netflix even uses local cache boxes to shorten the distance.
TBH it must be less per capita than CRTs. Old TVs burned power like crazy.
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How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
These two things are so different.
Streaming services are extremely efficient; they tend to be encode-once and decode-on-user's-device. Video was for a long time considered a tough thing to serve, so engineers put tons of effort into making it efficient.
Crypto currency is literally designed to be as wasteful as possible while still being feasible. "Proof-of-work" (how Bitcoin and many other currencies operate) literally means that crypto mining algorithms must waste as much computation as they can get away with doing pointless operations just to say they tried. It's an abomination.
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Also, one other thing is that Nvidia clocks their GPUs (aka the world's AI accelerators) very inefficiently, because they have a pseudo monopoly, and they can.
It doesn't have to be this way, and likely wont in the future.
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Not only are they cheaper than AC, but doing the math shows that they are more energy efficient than a human doing the same work, since humans operate at around 80-100W, 24 hours a day. (Assuming that the output is worth anything, of course.)
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Crossposted to fuck ai community
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I feel like i've read a very similar argument somewhere recently, but i have difficulty remembering it precisely. It went something like this:
- If a company kills 5 people, it was either an accident, an unfortunate mishap, a necessity of war (in case of the weapons industry) or some other bullshit excuse.
- If the people threaten to kill 5 billionaires, they're charged with "terrorism" (see Luigi Mangione's case).
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We're going away folks, and nothing of any true value will be lost, except all the species that did live in homeostasis with the Earth that we're taking with us in our species' avarice induced murder-suicide
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Carlin had some good material, but this is an absolutely stupid mindset. We can cause an extreme level of ecological damage. Will the planet eventually recover? Quite possibly. But that's not a certainty, and in the mean time we're triggering a mass extinction precisely because irresponsible humans figure there's no way we can hurt the Earth and it's self-important hubris to think that we can.
But the time we're living through and the time we're heading into are all the proof we should need that it's actually hubris to assume our actions have no meaningful impact.
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Immediate to Short-Term (Days to Centuries)
- Hours to weeks: Power grids fail; nuclear reactors melt down without maintenance[11].
- Months to decades: Urban areas flood as drainage systems fail; buildings decay from weather and plant growth[6][11].
- 100–300 years: Steel structures collapse; concrete buildings crumble[5][7]. Most cities become overgrown forests[6].
Medium-Term (Thousands of Years)
- 1,000 years: Visible surface structures (e.g., roads, monuments) are buried or eroded. Plastics fragment but persist chemically[5][7].
- 10,000–250,000 years: Nuclear isotopes (e.g., plutonium-239) remain detectable in sediments and ice cores[7]. Mining tunnels fill with sediment but leave identifiable "industrial fossils"[7].
- 500,000 years: Microplastics and polymer layers in ocean sediments endure[5][10].
Long-Term (Millions of Years)
- 1–7 million years: Fossils of humans and domesticated animals persist. Geological strata show elevated carbon levels and mass extinction markers[4][8]. Deep mines and landfills remain as distinct layers[7][10].
- 50–100 million years: Continental drift subducts surface evidence; satellites decay or drift into space[3][10]. Only deep geological traces (e.g., mine shafts, isotope ratios) might endure[3][10].
- 250 million years: Next predicted mass extinction eradicates all mammals, including any remaining human traces[9].
Near-Permanent Traces
- Space artifacts: Lunar landers, Mars rovers, and Voyager probes persist for billions of years[3][10].
- Radio signals: Human broadcasts travel through space indefinitely at light speed[5].
Key Factors
- Detection likelihood: Aliens or future species could find traces for 100+ million years via deep geological analysis or space exploration[5][10].
- Total erasure: Requires Earth's destruction (e.g., solar expansion in 5 billion years)[10].
Citations: [1] Human extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction [2] What If Humans Suddenly Went Extinct? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOKTZISXhc [3] How long would it take for all traces of humans to be gone? https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/1azu120/how_long_would_it_take_for_all_traces_of_humans/ [4] What would happen to Earth if humans went extinct? https://www.livescience.com/earth-without-people.html [5] How long before all human traces are wiped out? https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/2215950-how-long-before-all-human-traces-are-wiped-out/ [6] Vanishing Act: What Earth Will Look Like 100 Years After Humans Disappear - Brilliantio https://brilliantio.com/if-people-dissapeared-what-will-happen-to-earth-in-100-years/ [7] If humans became extinct, how long would it take for all ... https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/if-humans-became-extinct-how-long-would-it-take-for-all-traces-of-us-to-vanish [8] Nature will need up to five million years to fill the gaps caused by man-made mass extinctions, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/mass-extinctions-five-million-years-nature-mammals-crisis-animal-plants-pnas-aarhus-a8585066.html [9] Humans Will Go Extinct on Earth in 250 Million Years; Mass Extinction Will Occur Sooner if Burning Fossil Fuels Continues [Study] https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/49951/20240430/humans-will-go-extinct-earth-250-million-years-mass-extinction.htm [10] How long would it take for all evidence of humanity to be ... https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/153618/how-long-would-it-take-for-all-evidence-of-humanity-to-be-erased-from-earth [11] What Would Happen If Every Human On Earth Just Disappeared? https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/life-like-humans-suddenly-disappeared.html
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We do have an impact but the earth will 100% be ok when we are dead and gone eventually. A million years ain't shit to the earth.
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We humans are a virus…a parasite and the earth will be better off once we are extinct.
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I've been trying to write this comment the more concise possible, I'm trying my best. "We're going away", yes, that's true. No matter what we are leaving this place, but, that doesn't mean that the last days of humanity have to be surrounded by pollution and trash. All I can get of that quote in the image is that we should let big companies shit on us till we die.
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"let"
The sociopath fascist capitalists won. They have multilayered protection from us from propaganda dividing us and turning us on one another without end to government capture and having the exclusive use of state violence to protect the capital markets and literally having state sanctioned murder for for private profit. This isnt a war, this is a well oiled Orwellian occupation. The people surrendered half a century ago without terms and received the delusion that they'll be the rich ones one day herp derp.
We can't do anything about the misery they spread, and that sucks. We don't have to add to our misery by pretending there's hope and we can turn any of it around. They're going to do what we're going to do and short of being a lone "terrorist" that takes a pot shot at them like Luigi there's nothing to be done, because half of us are too cowardly and social opiate addicted(fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc) or too deluded and actually on the robber baron's side out of pick me mentality to take it as a rallying cry.
Only the planet itself, our shared habitat, can stop them. And it will, regardless of all the studies they kill, ecological treaties they betray, and all the propaganda they spread. The capitalists reign of terror will end when enough of their suckers are starving, not before.
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Can't be soon enough, really. I'd rather we take fewer other species along with us.
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I have a crazy theory that requests like these will actually push people to care more about and take action on global warming.
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Laughs in total recall
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Could someone please help me save some power and just post the image with the 5tits so I don't need to have it regenerated de novo?
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I tried to make an image of a woman with 5 tits but got distracted and got married to a rock
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That looks like fun. How do I play that AI?
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It's from https://perchance.org/welcome and is super cool because it's like half a soul-less AI and half a super cool tool that gets people into programming and they actually care about the Internet because they encourage people to learn how to code their own ais and have fun with it and I would absolutely have DEVOURED it when I was 13 on Tumblr (I forgot my ADHD meds today sorry if I'm rambling)
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I know she's exaggerating but this post yet again underscores how nobody understands that it is training AI which is computationally expensive. Deployment of an AI model is a comparable power draw to running a high-end videogame. How can people hope to fight back against things they don't understand?
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She's not exaggerating, if anything she's undercounting the number of tits.
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I mean, continued use of AI encourages the training of new models. If nobody used the image generators, they wouldn't keep trying to make better ones.
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It's closer to running 8 high-end video games at once. Sure, from a scale perspective it's further removed from training, but it's still fairly expensive.
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nice name btw
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really depends. You can locally host an LLM on a typical gaming computer.
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Not at all. Not even close.
Image generation is usually batched and takes seconds, so 700W (a single H100 SXM) for a few seconds for a batch of a few images to multiple users. Maybe more for the absolute biggest (but SFW, no porn) models.
LLM generation takes more VRAM, but is MUCH more compute-light. Typically one has banks of 8 GPUs in multiple servers serving many, many users at once. Even my lowly RTX 3090 can serve 8+ users in parallel with TabbyAPI (and modestly sized model) before becoming more compute bound.
So in a nutshell, imagegen (on an 80GB H100) is probably more like 1/4-1/8 of a video game at once (not 8 at once), and only for a few seconds.
Text generation is similarly efficient, if not more. Responses take longer (many seconds, except on special hardware like Cerebras CS-2s), but it parallelized over dozens of users per GPU.
This is excluding more specialized hardware like Google's TPUs, Huawei NPUs, Cerebras CS-2s and so on. These are clocked far more efficiently than Nvidia/AMD GPUs.
...The worst are probably video generation models. These are extremely compute intense and take a long time (at the moment), so you are burning like a few minutes of gaming time per output.
ollama/sd-web-ui are terrible analogs for all this because they are single user, and relatively unoptimized.
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How exactly did you come across this "fact"?
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Right, but that's kind of like saying "I don't kill babies" while you use a product made from murdered baby souls. Yes you weren't the one who did it, but your continued use of it caused the babies too be killed.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that, but I feel like here is a line were crossing. This fruit is hanging so low it's brushing the grass.
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You thought blind anger came from well informed opinions?
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Can we not all just organise to go and shut these places down?
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Let's not forget billionaires in this consideration.
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1 prompt is avg 1Wh of electricity -> typical AC runs avg 1,500 W = 2.4 seconds of AC per prompt.
Energy capacity is really not a problem first world countries should face. We have this solved and you're just taking the bait of blaming normal dudes using miniscule amounts of power while billionaires fly private jets for afternoon getaways.
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They are blaming the billionaires (or their companies), for making the thing nobody wanted so they can make money off of it. The guy making a five-breasted woman is a side effect.
And sure, that one image only uses a moderate amount of power. But there still exists giant data centers for only this purpose, gobbling up tons of power and evaporating tons of water for power and cooling. And all this before considering the training of the models (which you better believe they’re doing continuously to try to come up with better ones).
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nobody wanted according to whom? It's literally the most used product of this century stop deluding yourself.
All datacenters in the world combined use like 5% of our energy now and the value we get from computing far outweighs any spending we have here. You're better off not buying more trash from Temu rather than complain about software using electricity. This is ridiculous.
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A lot of things are solved, but capitalism means that we need a profit motive to act. World hunger is another good example. We know how to make fertilizer and how to genetically alter crops to ensure we never have a crop failure. We have trains and refrigeration to take food anywhere we want. Pretty much any box that we need to check to solve this problem has been. The places that have food problems largely have to do with poverty, which at this point is a polite way to say "I won't make money, so I am okay with them starving"
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Im not sure what's the point here? If we dont like LLMs and data centers using power then we use existing strategies that work like taxing their power use and subsidizing household power use which btw we're already doing almost everywhere around the world in some form or another.
The data centers are actually easier to negotiate and work with than something like factories or households where energy margins are much more brittle. Datacenter employs like 5 people and you can squeeze with policy to match social expectations - you can't do that with factories or households. So datacenter energy problem is not that difficult relatively speaking.
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A 12000 BTUs inverter split system at peak capacity requires less than 1500 W to run. After it reaches equilibrium it drops the power requirement significantly.
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ok so 5 seconds of AC then? my point still stands.
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Didn't some legislation come out banning making laws against AI? (which I realize is a fucking crazy sentence in the first place- nothing besides rights should just get immunity to all potential new laws)
So the cities aren't even the bad guys here. The Senate is.
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From what I can tell it got stripped from the Senate version that was just approved. They barely have the heads to pass it, so they aren't going to play volleyball to add it back.
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I meant to mention the other ones at fault, but I edited what I was typing and backspaced that part.
Thanks
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Two wrongs don't make a right. And if your neighbour is dosing the neighbourhood with gasoline while wildfires are on the horizon, you smack him, you don't go and get your own can.
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Agreed, but this is like comparing your neighbor burning 1 million acres to you having a bonfire. The scale is the problem. We should absolutely take individual responsibility; however, our small impact is only felt when we band together.
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Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps, destroy all private jets, ban recreational flights and power AI responsibly or not at all.
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Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps
Aren't traditional AC's (assuming you are somewhere where AC is a thing used to cool the air) already heat pumps?
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Most domestic flights should be replaced by highspeed rail anyways.
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ban recreational flights
No. Either ban all flights (excluding medical) or none. Otherwise, it will be something only available to those gambling the system.
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AC systems are heat pumps so I'm not sure what you mean there.
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Great, now this might work with my neighbor, but how exactly do I smack mega corps and the state? Are we talking eco terrorism here or do you have some other idea that hasn't been tried in the last decades?
I mean, climate change isn't new but humanity still fucks up the planet and that does not seem to change. Why should we have to sweat at home while professionalized greed burns down everything around us? I will gladly take individual responsibility, but not alone.
Actually, a failing power grid here and there might act as a wake-up call and then we can start talking about solutions, not just symptomatic treatment.
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Talking about direct action or even a mildly disruptive protest will probably get you moderated here, and in trouble in real life. It feels like the only options "allowed" are stern words. At least a progressive like Zohran won the primary in NYC, but we'll need a lot more of that to make a difference.
On the other hand, Luigi is considered by many a hero.
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I can't believe they're not even gonna show us the 5 titty girl.
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I'm here waiting for it
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79 is like my ideal temp. Cities must love me.
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I continuously have to remind myself that Fahrenheit is a thing so I don't get a panic attack when I read comments like yours.
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Look, we don't mind if you want to make a picture of a dude with five dicks, as an exercise in equality
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What are you talking about? I can run pocket pall localy on my phone, and I have this:
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I have llama 3.2 on my phone and it's really funny because it's so low powered and dumb but so sweet.
it's like a little friend to talk to when I don't have Internet. he's a lil stupid but he got the spirit
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Use Qwen 2.5, that's my recommendation. You can also set "pals". And the best part, is I have a portable battery and solar charger, so I could theoretically (and have in the past) run it from solar alone.
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That's cute!
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Nwm, Lemmy being Lamey by not allowing the image to load.
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Hahahahaha!! I have never heard Lemmy being referred to as lamey, and I am diggin it! Hahaha
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...but kittens with 5 tits!
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Apparently those flex requests aren't about saving the environment; it mostly has something to do with power grids needing to operate at a certain range at all times and spikes in demand fucks with that. That is to say, if they increase the energy produced, they actually have other problems at times of reduced demand, like at night or winter time. I'm paraphrasing from a pretty brief thing I heard over the radio, though, so I'm sure it's more complicated.
They still cut corners and cause wild fires because they don't update their tech and prefer to have things fail, though. Plenty of reasons to hate your private utility companies, lol
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I wish the afterlife were real, so I could experience a world where God, not man, was in charge.
Sadly that chump aint real either.
I am not liberated by the Death of God, it is something I live in terror of.
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Does an image like that exist?! Asking for a friend.
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Cut back on water! (Parks covered in grass flooded all night so people dont sleep there, golf courses watered as normal)
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Will 1 image of a girl with 5 tits take more energy to make or 5 images of a girl with only 1 tit
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Conservation work can be confusing I guess
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5 tits, that's awesome.
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Climate change is unstoppable. Humanity is mostly doomed very, very soon.
So, fuck y'all, my two window units are running 24/7 @ 69F for the foreseeable future.
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At what point is self-defence justifiable?
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I'd need clarification...
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If by "climate change" you mean societal climate, then yes, i'd see your point. Society feels more angry year after year, it's definitely heating up.
If you mean "climate change" as is typically understood, then no. The solar revolution is progressing quite swiftly. We're probably gonna reduce CO2 emissions by 50% in 2032 (my personal guess).
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lol
The rapid progress of renewables is barely treading water next to increases in demand. Global fossil fuel consumption has still increased despite lots of that new solar and wind capacity added over the last few years.
The way i see the data renewables are going to have to speed up quite a bit faster to actually start replacing fossil fuels in a significant way. But problem is the fossil fuels will then just get cheap and people will find new or increased other uses for them - so the emissions will probably still happen from one source or another however many solar panels get added.
Oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas, are such a convenient source, store and means of transporting energy that no way are all humans going to leave it underground or put it back down there.
The best proven method to reduce GHG emissions seems to be widespread economic recession (demand reduction) - but the bounce back has been pretty quick after 2008 and 2020 - so it's not all that beneficial in the medium to long term. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-change-in-energy-related-co2-emissions-1900-2024
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You're not saving the planet. Obviously, Earth will continue, but, without the human parasites.
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I like tits.
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Doesn't seem to be a waste of power to me.
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There is this system where we can compare the relative value of an activity and its relative impact on other activities. It's called prices. When you let them work correctly you don't have to guilt people.
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This could be true if the damage of carbon emissions and water use were actually priced in. But they are not, the entire society will bear those costs.
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AI without demand but also destroying the planet. Typical complex line of thought on the Internet.
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I don't think it follows that the people asking you to reduce your AC usage are also the same people able to control AI power consumption.
We have got a stop treating our institutions as monoliths so we can effectively interact with the individual pieces that construct them. If you go into a place of power ready to heap all your gripes with the system on the single person who's only job is to allow you to interface with that system, you're not going to make headway.
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I mean it's usually the power utility telling you to do that and they're the ones making deals with the data centers so I think the criticism is fairly directed.
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Energy providers should install smart meters that shut off the power to AI server farms instead of residential air conditioners during peak loads.
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what would you do if you asked llm master what fourier means and municipal grid said "no" ☝️😑
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Hey, I love my girls how I want them. Don't judge
Soirce: Trust, bro
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I think the higher demand for AC is predictable as well, no? Climate change has been known to be a thing for a while now... And every home could have solar to offset the local powersurges (which would lead to problems as well, but what I am trying to say is: its not our fault that the state has not prepared)
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AI datacenters are very far from the typical electrical load of a cloud datacenter, no existing data center has planned appropriately for this because we're only now discovering the bad effects it's having on the grid
Funnily enough AC usage is very easily modelled because it's a well understood distributed load, directly linked to weather. Plus large modern buildings should be built with grid aware AC that adjusts load based on grid demand anyway. I know Siemens and Ericsson both have commercial solutions for that, so I imagine there's more I don't know about.
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Even if it's predictable, it's still a big strain on energy production and transportation.
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Generating an image of a girl with 5 tits takes like 400W running for a minute. Yet another post showing people who have no idea how AI works, why it uses electrical power and how much power it uses.
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The core of the post, regardless of the "like 400W running for a minute" is "why the fuck do I have to suffer in 80°+ inside heat while AI companies don't have to reduce any sort of electrical intake during the heatwave"
If I had to pick between having AC or AI, I'm picking AC every time. Fuck would I even do with AI while im burning up at 104°
"ChatGPT tell me how to prevent heat stroke" "Dinosaurs used to eat rocks. Have you tried eating a rock?"
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A minute? Wtf kind of model are you running for it to take that long? Are you trying to generate a 16k image or something?
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I'm generalizing for people who don't know how long it takes or how much power it uses. The point is a 3.2kW AC will take a lot more power than a PC generating a picture, going further, training the model will take less power than the millions of ACs people use and try to justify as "but AI uses power, and so can I!"
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You know they have to train AI, right? Thousands of hours devouring our personal data on sites like Reddit and Facebook as well as copyrighted works just to get a LLM that's mostly usable but will still hallucinate...
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Yes, and you do the training once, and then millions of people use it. And it also isn't "thousands of hours". Compare that to AC - where each home runs a 3.2kW device that runs for hours, times a million people. It comes nowhere close.
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292 comments
I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days
The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.
The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.
I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.
The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city's solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn't tried scamming me.
FUCK private energy providers.
How tf can a meter shut of an applience? Did you also have smart breakers from them?
Anyway absolutely ridiculous
It's separate from the main meter and connected directly at the condenser unit.
It monitors power draw and acts as a relay when the provider sends a shutoff signal. The thermostat thinks the system is still going, and the fans still push air through the vents, but the coils aren't being cooled anymore so the air gets hot and musty.
Peak load of households is not during peak solar power generation. Households installing pv isn't a solution to what you described.
Today, you could also use a battery to buy power during mid day and use it in the evening when you need it the most.
In moderate climates in the US, peak loads are typically the hottest and sunniest hours of the day since condenser units are the most energy-hungry appliance in most homes. Clouds notwithstanding, peak solar generation would typically align (or closely align) with peak load time.
Batteries would also help a lot - they should definitely be subsidizing the installation of those as well but unfortunately they aren't yet (at least not in my state).
It sounds like there's two different things there. There's a solar installation (hardware, etc.), and there's likely some kind of net metering program (where they pay you or give you credit for electricity you generate). That paragraph sounds like the first, but the phrase sounds like the second.
You shouldn't have to go through them for the solar installation, if your conditions accommodate it. Granted, the conditions don't apply to everyone. You'll want to have a suitable roof that ideally faces south-ish, own your home, and plan to stay there for at least 10 years. In the US, you also kind of need to get it done within this calendar year, which is a rough ask, before the federal 30% tax credit goes away. But maybe you can find an installer that isn't trying to scam you quite as much.
(It's early and cloudy today.)
Sorry, maybe I wasn't being clear.
My area has solar incentive programs that are run through the energy utility - meaning the state makes available zero-interest loans for the purposes of solar installation, but those loans are only available through an entity partnered with our utility. They limit the number of homes in each area that are eligible through this program so that solar generation never exceeds demand. Our home was eligible through the program, so I had them come out to give us a quote. Our utility is also transitioning to surge pricing and smart metering, so there's a pretty high demand for solar installation in my area and they know that they'd lose out on a lot of revenue if everyone installed their own solar systems.
A part of that process was them asking for the last year of energy bills, along with taking measurements and doing daylighting analysis on our roof area. At the end, they gave us a quote for a 15 year loan for the equipment and installation, and it just so happened that the monthly payment was the same as our average energy bill. I work in AEC and I know what solar panels cost, and they had inflated their price by more than double what it would cost at market rate.
Of course I could install my own panels, but it would be out-of-pocket and I would have to seek out and apply for out-of-state incentive programs myself, but I can't afford the up-front costs and the loan terms don't make sense for how long we'll be in this house. Id love nothing more than to do it myself, even at a loss if that's what it took, but I have a spouse that is less spiteful than I am.
Your HA dashboard derailed this conversation for me. lol.
I would love to know more about the equipment you are using to push this info into your HA.
Smart meters with this ability are great, when done well. Without them they have the ability to turn off all of your power if they need to. If they can't keep up with demand, they have to turn things off. It's better for them to have the ability to shut off a few appliances or decrease your AC usage rather than shut people down entirely.
People always complain that they don't want to give the energy company power over their electricity, but they already do. However, without this their power is total, and only total. With it they can moderate it. It's better if everyone has a smart meter instead of only people who care about others, and greedy people only look out for themselves.
I agree though, fuck private providers.
If it was a public utility i'd feel very differently.