BlameThePeacock
@BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent 14 hours ago:
See this is part of the problem, people aren’t paying attention to the words and spin that is being used to deceive you.
It’s not 5% of enegy use, the statistics you see for that number are for “electricity use” which is not the same.
Electricity production/consumption only accounts for around 35% of global energy use (and not all of it comes from fossil fuels). Most global energy use is fossil fuels being burned directly in vehicles or industrial processes.
The US also hosts a very large percentage of the world’s datacenters. That 5% number also includes All types of datacenters, not just AI which still make up a large portion of that number.
So when you actually complete the math, the current AI enegy use is around 0.5% of global energy use.
For comparison, meat production takes around 15% of global energy use.
Feel free to double check the facts and math on this, it’s all available publicly.
- Comment on Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent 19 hours ago:
That is the most defeatist argument I think I’ve heard. You’re essentially suggesting that it’s too late to fix the biggest issues, so you’re going to protest things that won’t actually have an impact just because it’s easier.
You’re right that people could be doing multiple, I’m just pointing out they aren’t doing that.
At this point it’s clearly either just performative activism, or people are using the environment as an excuse to hide their worries about the economic impacts that may affect them (completely valid)
The third option is that people are so poorly educated that they actually can’t think rationally about this issue. I’m not ruling that out at this point.
- Comment on Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent 20 hours ago:
Where’s the protests over golf courses though? Why are you showing up to an Anti-AI protest, but not organizing one for golf courses?
This is the biggest thing that’s pissing me off about these anti-AI for environmental reasons folks. People are literally getting into giant SUVs to drive to anti-AI datacenter protests, then stopping off to get a steak to cook for dinner on the way home.
The amount of fuel they just burned, and the amount of energy and pollution beef production generates for that steak are quite literally orders of magnitude worse for the environment than AI datacenters.
Yet nobody is protesting combustion vehicles, or even oil and gas companies at this point, and very few people choose to not eat meat (and even a lot of those don’t do it for environmental reasons).
Rational people worried about the environment, pollution, or water usage would target the worst offenders. Yet here they are protesting in massive numbers for something that’s less than well under 1% of global energy use.
- Comment on assuming the world is undergoing a complete and radical transformation at the moment, what is preventing more people from "waking up" and seeing the trends happening? 4 days ago:
I would honestly say it’s more Apathy than Propaganda.
Most people simply don’t think they can do anything, that it wastes their time, and therefore just tune it out and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
- Comment on With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom? 5 days ago:
I was looking for this particular users idea, not the broader definition. I work in this field and am well versed on ML.
- Comment on With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom? 5 days ago:
A) most of the pollution from humans doesn’t come from electricity usage, or more specifically the fossil fuels used to make electricity. It comes from direct fossil fuels used in heating, combustion engines, and industrial processes like making fertilizer. Fossil fuels used to make electricity only make up something like 30-35% of global use.
B) while you’re right that humans don’t go away, the entire datacenter industry right now only uses about 0.5% of global energy. Even if we expanded datacenter enegy use by 10x what we currently have it still makes up about the same total global enegy use as what currently goes to raising cows, and meat production as a whole is about 15% of global energy use.
C) Nuclear plants are pretty clean energy. I don’t have anything wrong with building more of them as long as the costs are transferred to the users properly and there isn’t government/business bullshit downloading externalities to individuals.
- Comment on With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom? 5 days ago:
“the environmental costs for mainly doing things humans could have done”
/me checks how much the environmental costs of humans doing those tasks would be…
shocked Pikachu
AI causes a tiny fraction of the environmental impact that a human causes, Humans emit more pollution commuting to offices than the entire datacenter industry will use in the next few years, and transportation is only the third largest way that a human pollutes (on average) with the other two larger cases being home heating/cooling and food consumption.
I’m not saying humans are bad, but you cannot be going around making that comparison that AI is worse for the environment than humans.
The whole who controls it thing is a massive problem, no argument there.
- Comment on With all the bad stuff said about AI can it actually better humanity in some ways or another? Or is it just doom and gloom? 5 days ago:
How do you differentiate AI and Generative AI?
Do you mean Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) as in what we see with large language models?
The investment bubble may collapse on them, but the usage isn’t going anywhere but up. I don’t know why you think it’s some sort of scam. If it was such a scam, companies that have been using it for two years already would be throwing it in the trash and instead they’re buying up more capacity.
I have legitimate business use cases for it today, and my company can’t get hands on hardware or even available compute from the big players because it’s in such high demand.
It used to be that most of the compute was going to training models, but that hasn’t been the case for a year now. The majority (and it’s increasing fast) is inference at this point and while it doesn’t live up to the “It will do your entire job and get you fired” it’s definitely useful in many situations.
- Comment on Is it more accurate to call current 'Artificial intelligence' (AI/LLM) as Counterfeit Intelligence? 1 week ago:
ah, Clearly you have the superior brain. Smarter than all the doctors who study this shit.
Good for you, I hope you get the Nobel Prize for Medicine for enlightening the world on how the human brain actually works.
- Comment on Is it more accurate to call current 'Artificial intelligence' (AI/LLM) as Counterfeit Intelligence? 1 week ago:
If you dig into what we know about human brains, you might find out we aren’t that different. We come up with words based on the previous words just like processing tokens.
We have have a better model, and more advanced hard(wet)ware but it’s still very much a predictive process based on context.
- Comment on PTA went way too hard on the AI flyers. This was the fifth in just over a week. 2 weeks ago:
What exactly is infuriating about this?
Would you rather have just got a text based email?
A PowerPoint screenshot?
They were never going to spend any design time or resources on this kind of thing if AI want available.
- Comment on Why is everyone now so afraid of AI and machines? Machines print the money we live by, machines help us to connect to the internet and so forth. Why now are we all afraid of what they will do? 2 weeks ago:
Nope, Usage inference passed training for usage last year some time and has continued to skyrocket comparatively.
- Comment on Why is everyone now so afraid of AI and machines? Machines print the money we live by, machines help us to connect to the internet and so forth. Why now are we all afraid of what they will do? 2 weeks ago:
What is even your point with this statement? Are you complaining about AI use? Are you trying to imply that AI is bad still?
- Comment on Why is everyone now so afraid of AI and machines? Machines print the money we live by, machines help us to connect to the internet and so forth. Why now are we all afraid of what they will do? 2 weeks ago:
It’s amusing that people think they can stop AI at this point.
Even if they managed to destroy every datacenter in the US or Europe, it would still get built. AI doesn’t really care where it runs, it’s not reliant on being located somewhere specific except in the most real-time scenarios like voice calls.
Not to mention the fact that functional AI can be run on a semi-expensive gaming computer these days.
The only path to zero AI is through zero connected technology, you’d have to destroy the internet itself and that shit’s quite literally in outer space at this point.
People need to figure out how to live with it at this point.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
It is real.
Here’s the biggest rabbit hole you can go down. Alec has multiple videos just about dishwashers.
- Comment on "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry 4 weeks ago:
That is correct.
- Comment on "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry 4 weeks ago:
Not if they’re the only employee left… still CEO.
- Comment on "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry 4 weeks ago:
With the right skills built out first, the CEO absolutely could be the person doing that.
- Comment on "I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry 4 weeks ago:
You HAVE seen it write. You have definitely seen it write poorly. However, you’ve also seen it write at a level where you didn’t even notice it wasn’t human written.
Just because something CAN produce bad output does not mean it can only produce bad output.
I can produce excellent output. I am also fully capable of producing slop. I’m human btw.
- Comment on What is the easiest way to calculate the calories in this bread machine recipe? 5 weeks ago:
Because to do it manually you need to find the sources for each of those values, then put it all in a table, then do the complete math.
Checking involves clicking the source link(s), then doing a quick mental calculation to see if it’s approximately correct.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 5 weeks ago:
Except for Alberta, which totally tracks because it’s the Texas of Canada.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 5 weeks ago:
It’s not a disagreement when someone says something that is objectively and proveably false.
This is something that people need to figure out.
They said I was misleading, then they either just strait up either lied, or didn’t bother to confirm their assumption when trying to prove that. They were wrong.
You call me out for not being nice. What they did is not nice. Call them out for that.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 5 weeks ago:
Are you saying that states can’t regulate this? They absolutely can.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 5 weeks ago:
You say we like it’s everyone. It isn’t.
My province in Canada had the electricity provider cap how much gets allocated to new data centers per year at a sustainable number.
Regulation instead of outright bans are the correct path forward.
- Comment on What is the easiest way to calculate the calories in this bread machine recipe? 5 weeks ago:
Which is still less effort than doing it from scratch yourself.
I know you guys want to hate ai for everything, but it’s not as bad as you think it is.
- Comment on What is the easiest way to calculate the calories in this bread machine recipe? 5 weeks ago:
No they aren’t. I ran it through gemini and it gave me a perfect answer. I double checked it against public values for nutrition.
- Comment on What is the easiest way to calculate the calories in this bread machine recipe? 5 weeks ago:
Ask AI… That kind of task is pretty trivial for modern LLMs.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 5 weeks ago:
You’re wrong. The average yearly co2 output for a car is somewhere between 4-5 tons. Which lines up with the numbers in the article. So no, it’s not actively running vehicles.
I am a fan of AI, that’s correct. That doesn’t change the fact that every single one of you chucklefucks don’t seem to understand numbers, or the scale of things in the real world.
You go on and on about how bad they are for the environment, while continuing to eat meat and drive your cars around. Both of which consume resources in a scale that makes AI look like a rounding error. Until I start hearing people protesting and actually doing something about those, I’m going to assume that your anti-AI stances are bullshit and a cover for hiding your fear that they will take over your job.
If that’s the real reason, just say it, then I will agree with you. Then we can discuss how we need to change society to deal with that problem, rather than banning AI.
- Comment on All AI Data Centers Under Construction Could Emit as Much CO₂ as 24 Million Cars 5 weeks ago:
There are approximately 1.7 billion cars in the world right now.
That’s 1700 million for people who can’t do math.
- Comment on A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics 1 month ago:
Context window not so much. He is pretty solid with the hallucinations though.