crispyflagstones
@crispyflagstones@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though. 6 months ago:
Counterpoint: if you, personally, can save some dollars so you’re mainly spending on the things you can’t grow, that’s hardly a bad thing. Also, working with soil is known to be good for you. Exposes you to soil bacteria that are known to boost mood.
And it sounds corny as fuck and I didn’t really take it seriously until I did it, but homegrown produce can be so incredibly much better than what you get off an industrial farm.
Just let people feed themselves and be happy, fuck.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
I usually do, when the other person in the conversation doesn’t seem like an insincere ass
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
Yeah, you were trying to argue AWS is basically for the NSA and cops. That hilariously false claim is what I’ve been consistently rebutting this entire time. You’re moving the goalposts and continuously have this entire conversation, which is why this is a dull and bad conversation. You didn’t start out arguing that 1% is “substantial.” You made a rather different argument. I never disputed that a contract amounting to 1% of a company’s annual revenues is significant, I disputed that that 1% means AWS is “just a cop shop.” Because it’s not.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
Uh huh, over the whole 10 year lifetime of the contract. This was explained in the article. If you take that $100 billion/yr gross revenue * the whole 10 year time frame, plus the $10 billion original ~$half billion, the proportion becomes $10.5 billion out of $1 trillion, which is, drumroll please… 1.05%
Staggering.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
And I don’t know that by comparing it to ENIAC I intended to suggest the exponential gains would be identical, but we are currently in a period of exponential gains in AI and it’s not exactly slowing down. It just seems unthoughtful and not very critical to measure the overall efficiency of a technology by its very earliest iterations, when the field it’s based on is moving as fast as AI is.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
I don’t like defending Amazon, but your arguments are shockingly ignorant. Stop making things up on the spot and do a shred of research. The cost of the Wild and Stormy contract is half a billion, while AWS’s annual revenues are projected to top $100 billion this year.
Less than half a percent of AWS’s annual revenues.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
I don’t like these companies for their cooperation/friendly attitude towards nation-states either, but your comments are insipid. AWS has like 2 million businesses as customers. They have 30% marketshare in the cloud space, of course they provide cloud services to cops and militaries. They’re cheap, and one of the biggest providers, period. I can’t find any numbers showing their state contracts outweigh their business contracts.
And, sure, plenty of those business contracts are for businesses that don’t do anything useful, but what you don’t seem to understand is that telecoms is vital to industry and literally always has been. It’s not like there’s a bunch of virtuous factories over here producing tons of steel and airplanes, and a bunch of computers stealing money over there. Those factories and airlines you laud are owned by businesses, who use computers to organize and streamline their operations. Computers are a key part of why any industry is as productive as it is today.
AI, and I don’t so much mean LLM’s and stable diffusion here, even if they are fun and eye-catching algorithms, will also contribute to streamlining operations of those virtuous steel foundries and airlines you approve so heartily of. They’re not counterposed to each other. Researchers are already making use of ML in the sciences to speed up research. That research will be applied in real-world industry. It’s all connected.
Its not for you to worry about. The decision to rapidly consume cheap energy and potable water is entirely beyond your control. Might as well find a silver lining in the next hurricane. By the same token, you shouldn’t worry about it either, and should log off and cower under your bed.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
There’s an entire resurgence of research into alternative computing architectures right now, being led by some of the biggest names in computing, because of the limits we’ve hit with the von Neumann architecture as regards ML. I don’t see any reason to assume all of that research is guaranteed to fail.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
Yeah, uh huh, efficiency isn’t really a measure of absolute power use, it’s a measure of how much you get done with the power. Let me answer this very quickly: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all together could not get anything done as companies if they all had to split an ENIAC (vastly less powerful than an older model iPhone) between them. This is a completely meaningless comparison.
Absolute power consumption does matter, but global power consumption is approximately 160,000 TWh, so the doubling means all the largest cloud providers all together are now using less than 0.05% of all the energy used across the world. And a chunk of that extra 36 TWh is going to their daily operations, not just their AI stuff.
The more context I add in to the picture, the less I’m worried about AI in particular. The overall growth model of our society is the problem, which is going to need to have political/economic solutions. Fixating on a new technology as the culprit is literally just Luddism all over again, and will have exactly as much impact in the long run.
- Comment on AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says 6 months ago:
The ENIAC drew 174 kilowatts and weighed 30 tons. ENIAC drew this 174 kilowatts to achieve a few hundred-few thousand operations per second, while an iPhone 4 can handle 2 billion operations a second and draws maybe 1.5w under heavy load.
Like, yeah, obviously, the tech is inefficient right now, it’s just getting off the ground. Think about this: you think OpenAI likes the idea of paying more money to deliver the same amount of AI services, when in theory they could be paying less to deliver so many services? It’s just silly to assume there will be no efficiency improvements in AI, like the same industry that took us from ENIAC to where we are today is just going to sit on its ass and twiddle its thumbs because they don’t like doing research or making money…?
- Comment on The Affordable Connectivity Program Kept Them Online. What Now? 6 months ago:
The Lifeline program is still available. The way they explain it is confusing, but the “discount” covers the complete cost of service for most Lifeline providers, so it works out to free. You just need to be receiving any federal public assistance – Medicaid, food stamps, TANF, anything.
- Comment on @pixelfed: Loops is a new platform for sharing short videos, and it's open source + federated Using #ActivityPub 6 months ago:
Bet the killer feature here is pluggable recommendation algorithms
- Comment on You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet 6 months ago:
:'(
- Comment on You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet 6 months ago:
A dwarf planet is a type of planet, right?
- Comment on Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone 6 months ago:
Yeah, they do the compatibility mode thing for older apps, but it seems like a lot of work to maintain separate shims for each older version that still have compatibility problems when you could just refactor everything with a reasonable amount of legacy support, and push all the users of really old software to start using VM instances of their old OS’s.
- Comment on Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone 6 months ago:
When your business model revolves around indefinitely maintaining backwards compatibility with every weird bug and quirk your enterprise customers baked into their workflows back in 1983 while also trying to be on the cutting-edge and constantly overhauling your products, it’s hard to develop and maintain a modern operating system that isn’t a completely horrible shitshow.