sj_zero

u/sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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I'm going to say two things that can be extrapolated wrong:

  1. I can run an LLM on a 10 Watt thin client system.
  2. A modern laptop can run under some circumstances all night on batteries.

So the first thing is a very specific claim I could not then extrapolated to say that llms do not burn electricity because they clearly burn and gigawatts of electricity.

The second one is a very specific claim that a certain device can run for a certain period of time it does not mean that I can run my house off of a laptop battery overnight.

This is where scale really matters because specific claims end up being replaced with broad claims intentionally by authors who are hunting for clicks and are really hoping to get the eyeballs of people who are interested in green energy. They will phrase the fact that certain battery Banks were able to run all night to misleadingly lead people to believe that those battery Banks were running the entire State all night when in fact they were just a small portion of the electricity being generated. That matters a lot. Running a frontier model of an LLM versus running a little 1b parameter model are not the same thing. Being able to run specific batteries over the course of a specific night in a state which is world famous for being temperate, that is different than rolling out a certain renewable energy Nationwide to 300 million people who don't live in places that are famously temperate.

These stories are intended to make environmentalism a consumer problem, in the sense that you just aren't consuming enough product and if you consumed the correct product and paid enough money for the environmentalism boxes, then we could solve the problem.

That's applying a very industrial revolution mindset to a problem caused by the excesses of the industrial revolution.

The ecological Armageddon is when you scale up. Scale to the United States, and try to build 3 days of storage so we can fully migrate to green energy, and you'd require more lithium ion batteries than have been manufactured by mankind, or if you use lead acid batteries you'd require more lead than we have known reserves of lead on Earth. Recycling appears at first like it's a solution, but lithium ion batteries are barely economically recyclable as it is at the moment, and lead acid batteries would require massive transportation networks to be continually moving around massive amounts of lead.

You can say "We don't need 3 days of storage", but even if you cut it by 3/4, you're still talking about one of the largest endeavors in human history, and you haven't even built the solar and wind farms yet.

The real solution is to reduce our need for energy by dramatically changing the way we look at how we use energy. Everything from cars to homes is built around a post-war energy economy that isn't sustainable. We can't just drop the exact same things in "but green". You can't consume your way out of this, but a lot of these articles would have you believe just that.

That's always dangerous to say, because it misses a bunch of the equation.

You can run your lights during the day and your heat when there's lots of sun.

Green washed technology would cause ecological Armageddon if adopted at proper scale because the energy needs to go somewhere for when you need it, and that scale of energy storage isn't cheap or clean.

If you make lots of money and save a lot, and your roommate is unemployed and spends tons of money, your apartment might be profitable, but yes ur roommate still needs to balance their budget.

Allegedly, Minecraft has been subsidizing the entire Microsoft games division. If that's actually the case, the question becomes: why? If the game studios aren't profitable except one, isn't it greedy to expect Minecraft's studio to keep paying for them?

Don't get me wrong: I do think there's a greed problem here on Microsoft's part, but it isn't trying to get unprofitable subsidiaries to become profitable. It's the fact that Microsoft bought half the games industry hoping to get massive pricing power by owning many of the best game franchises of all time so they could get us all to rent their library through xbox game pass. The fact that it's failing is unfortunately good on the balance of things.

In that sense, the greed worth attacking isn't the hard times of layoffs when they fail, it's the attempt to leverage game libraries to get us hooked on game subscriptions. That they failed and are now in a bad way is horrible for devs in the short term, bad for gamers in the short term, but ultimately is better for everyone when game subscription stays a niche.

Microsoft already started jamming the price up, if we ended up with a few megacorps renting libraries out to us that's exactly where things were headed.

You do have to remember that the climate has changed a lot since civilization was born. The epic of Gilgamesh talks about the great cedar forests of Syria. Northern Europe was a giant chunk of ice. And once a place has ontological inertia, there's only been a few times in history where that changes, such as the bronze age collapse.

Small appliances rectify AC into DC before using it and therefore what you end up with is a DC supply that can support multiple input voltages and frequencies.

By contrast, larger appliances typically use the AC directly. A motor is designed to be able to connect directly to local AC power, and the voltage is quite important and so is the frequency, because a change from 50 hertz to 60 hertz will make a motor go much faster and a change from 60 hertz to 50 hertz will make a motor go much slower, and resistive loads such as furnace elements which are designed to be able to be connected directly to mains power our engineered with a specific resistance.

For motors changing frequencies, the way you would end up having to retrofit such devices is to rectify the DC signal and then reconstruct it as the proper voltage and frequency using pulse with modulation. That's going to be a fairly expensive thing compared to just connecting some wires across mains. Even changing voltage is using a transformer means that you're going to need transformer capable of potentially converting multiple kilowatts of power, and that's not an inexpensive touch either.

Buddy of mine wanted to go work for Ubisoft Montreal. Took a computer programming course.

I recommended that he should be making video games right now as he wants to make video games because there's going to be thousands of other people who want that job and a lot of them will have made games and he never has.

He's now learning how to be a carpenter. Probably the better bet.

Honestly, the fact that works from thousands of years ago survive and have spread around the world is incomprehensible in terms of what would have to happen over time, particularly prior to the printing press.

The human race really is amazing.

People don't realize how bad things are in Canada right now. Not sure how most people keep roofs over their heads and food in their bellies, though the massive homeless camps I suppose show that a lot of people don't.