Thank you for being conscientious about your energy usage this summer
September 24, 2024 1:52 AM Subscribe
Highlighting all the small but powerful steps you’ve taken to conserve energy over the past few months (and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI).
The thing to keep in mind about largely performative personal energy savings choices is that the main effect of them is not and cannot be compensating for flagrant wastage by irresponsible hooligans like Altman, Bankman-Freid and their ilk. They're about setting community norms and expectations in an attempt to drag the Overton window in a direction that ends up having it frame these assholes squarely as the assholes they are.
What we're aiming to build is a community primed to respond to the latest "AI" product announcement more with "fuck off, asshole" than "ooo, shiny". So even though all their numbers are just pulled out of their asses, McSweeney's has done us a service here.
posted by flabdablet at 2:25 AM on September 24 [41 favorites]
What we're aiming to build is a community primed to respond to the latest "AI" product announcement more with "fuck off, asshole" than "ooo, shiny". So even though all their numbers are just pulled out of their asses, McSweeney's has done us a service here.
posted by flabdablet at 2:25 AM on September 24 [41 favorites]
There's some possible world where enough major economies have agreed on a carbon tax of $250 / ton, which ripples throughout markets applying pressure on the real economy to decarbonise, or increase energy efficiency where room to decarbonise is limited. It'd be helpful to figure out how to make incremental progress toward that world from the one we're in.
Regarding "small but powerful steps to conserve energy", there are a few chapters toward the end of David JC Mackay's excellent free book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air focused on the question of if Britain's energy consumption could be met by domestic sustainable energy production, which makes the point that (i) no it can't - after stacking up energy consumption vs all conceivable sustainable energy options, there's still a shortfall, and (ii) this imbalance between supply and demand can't be closed by everyone doing a "little" to cut their energy consumption -- everyone would need to do a LOT. Or Britain would need to import sustainable energy.
posted by are-coral-made at 3:58 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
Regarding "small but powerful steps to conserve energy", there are a few chapters toward the end of David JC Mackay's excellent free book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air focused on the question of if Britain's energy consumption could be met by domestic sustainable energy production, which makes the point that (i) no it can't - after stacking up energy consumption vs all conceivable sustainable energy options, there's still a shortfall, and (ii) this imbalance between supply and demand can't be closed by everyone doing a "little" to cut their energy consumption -- everyone would need to do a LOT. Or Britain would need to import sustainable energy.
posted by are-coral-made at 3:58 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
David JC Mackay's excellent free book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air
Hmm, the book was published 16 years ago. I don't know enough about the state of of green energy to know if it's made enough progress since then to partially or wholly invalidate the book's conclusions, but I wouldn't be surprised.
posted by trig at 4:13 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
Hmm, the book was published 16 years ago. I don't know enough about the state of of green energy to know if it's made enough progress since then to partially or wholly invalidate the book's conclusions, but I wouldn't be surprised.
posted by trig at 4:13 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
Hmm, the book was published 16 years ago. I don't know enough about the state of of green energy to know if it's made enough progress since then to partially or wholly invalidate the book's conclusions, but I wouldn't be surprised.
The issues are mostly as to whether the sums for current use add up, and then whether RE can be done at sufficient scale to meet those needs (and whether the needs can come down via efficiency). Basically the argument is there isn't enough potential capacity to be had given economic and social constraints.
While the price of solar and wind has certainly come down since he published, and the UK is a world leader in offshore wind, onshore wind has stagnated in terms of new capacity in the last decade (political constraints from 2015) and solar installations slowed down considerably (economic/political constraints) after 2019. Heat pumps are not really taking off to any significant level, although they can be argued to be technologically mature, and have strong rates of uptake in some other countries. Nuclear is happening really slowly but apparently happening.
posted by biffa at 6:06 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
The issues are mostly as to whether the sums for current use add up, and then whether RE can be done at sufficient scale to meet those needs (and whether the needs can come down via efficiency). Basically the argument is there isn't enough potential capacity to be had given economic and social constraints.
While the price of solar and wind has certainly come down since he published, and the UK is a world leader in offshore wind, onshore wind has stagnated in terms of new capacity in the last decade (political constraints from 2015) and solar installations slowed down considerably (economic/political constraints) after 2019. Heat pumps are not really taking off to any significant level, although they can be argued to be technologically mature, and have strong rates of uptake in some other countries. Nuclear is happening really slowly but apparently happening.
posted by biffa at 6:06 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Related: 3 Mile Island is reopening to power Microsoft AI.
I'm happy that nuclear power is coming back, but I'm not happy that it is all going to AI. This has very strong Universal Paperclips vibes.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:13 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]
I'm happy that nuclear power is coming back, but I'm not happy that it is all going to AI. This has very strong Universal Paperclips vibes.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:13 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]
By abstaining from eating products derived from methane-emitting ruminants for the past 15 years you allowed a single three-year old to watch a video of Sven the horse farting for 30 seconds for the 7th time.
I just bought a treadle powered Necchi sewing machine that was originally purchased in 1959 so I can "sew more sustainably" but I know that the energy savings from my pedalling will be moot because of the amount of time I have already spent watching videos about sewing machine restoration.
posted by pipstar at 6:27 AM on September 24 [12 favorites]
I just bought a treadle powered Necchi sewing machine that was originally purchased in 1959 so I can "sew more sustainably" but I know that the energy savings from my pedalling will be moot because of the amount of time I have already spent watching videos about sewing machine restoration.
posted by pipstar at 6:27 AM on September 24 [12 favorites]
This is fucking hysterical!
(Yes, dark humor reaches me where it lives, in my dark heart)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:34 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
(Yes, dark humor reaches me where it lives, in my dark heart)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:34 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
I'm happy that nuclear power is coming back, but I'm not happy that it is all going to AI. This has very strong Universal Paperclips vibes.
It's awesome. We're going to solve global warming with VC/investor giant piles of money being committed to utilities up front to getting nukes online and then when the AI bubble bursts power will be so cheap even natural gas won't be able to keep up.
The key thing is getting all this money committed before the bubble bursts. Apple and Microsoft are making "do everything" general models like GPT semi-redundant already. Apple Intelligence for instance uses a much simpler foundation model with adapters that act as force multipliers getting better results out of milliwatts of power. As their on-device NPUs and adapters improve each generation less and less stuff will have to be routed to the cloud. We get to have our cake and eat it too. Minimal energy usage, nobody's job is getting stolen with sloppy prose, while Siri is actually able to answer useful questions.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:07 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]
It's awesome. We're going to solve global warming with VC/investor giant piles of money being committed to utilities up front to getting nukes online and then when the AI bubble bursts power will be so cheap even natural gas won't be able to keep up.
The key thing is getting all this money committed before the bubble bursts. Apple and Microsoft are making "do everything" general models like GPT semi-redundant already. Apple Intelligence for instance uses a much simpler foundation model with adapters that act as force multipliers getting better results out of milliwatts of power. As their on-device NPUs and adapters improve each generation less and less stuff will have to be routed to the cloud. We get to have our cake and eat it too. Minimal energy usage, nobody's job is getting stolen with sloppy prose, while Siri is actually able to answer useful questions.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:07 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]
I'm just disappointed that McSweeneys are on substack now, don't lecture me about the environment when you are on a Nazi supporting website which has so many ads and tracking it takes 5 seconds to render a page of text.
posted by Lanark at 7:20 AM on September 24 [6 favorites]
posted by Lanark at 7:20 AM on September 24 [6 favorites]
To get abstract for a minute, it makes a certain kind of sense see human forms of intelligence competing for resources with non-human forms of intelligence.* Of course, the point of intelligence probably isn't resource expenditure, but maybe it's not far off the mark? Certainly we have minimum requirements for caloric intake, and we'd often prefer to have enormous amounts of energy at our disposal, to show off our evolutionary fitness and help us be lazy.
Essentially this is how capital sees it: capital doesn't care how it gets the job done, whether it's human workers or machines, it just wants the cheaper option. And to a large extent, costs = energy expenditure.
* Yes, including statistical word prediction.
posted by ropeladder at 7:20 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Essentially this is how capital sees it: capital doesn't care how it gets the job done, whether it's human workers or machines, it just wants the cheaper option. And to a large extent, costs = energy expenditure.
* Yes, including statistical word prediction.
posted by ropeladder at 7:20 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
To get abstract for a minute, it makes a certain kind of sense see human forms of intelligence competing for resources with non-human forms of intelligence.*
Tangent, but this reminded me of the 'human batteries' scene in the Matrix... did you know that that scene was originally written as 'computers are using human brains as CPUs, to do their thinking for them' but was rewritten as 'computes are using people as an energy source, as batteries' because studio executives in ~1999 didn't think enough people would know what a CPU was.
posted by subdee at 7:25 AM on September 24 [10 favorites]
Tangent, but this reminded me of the 'human batteries' scene in the Matrix... did you know that that scene was originally written as 'computers are using human brains as CPUs, to do their thinking for them' but was rewritten as 'computes are using people as an energy source, as batteries' because studio executives in ~1999 didn't think enough people would know what a CPU was.
posted by subdee at 7:25 AM on September 24 [10 favorites]
onshore wind has stagnated in terms of new capacity in the last decade (political constraints from 2015) and solar installations slowed down considerably (economic/political constraints) after 2019. Heat pumps are not really taking off to any significant level, although they can be argued to be technologically mature, and have strong rates of uptake in some other countries.
I think in terms of progress it's not just about number of installations but also increases in sheer efficiency/production from a single installation. Which as far as I know has been growing considerably, in some cases beyond expectations.
If MacKay was arguing not that the UK wasn't generating sufficient energy for its needs at the time but that it would never be possible as long as individuals do just "a little", then "the UK doesn't currently have a high uptake of green power production or energy-saving technology" isn't a solid argument to counter "it could increase uptake and then it would generate sufficient amounts". (I don't know whether the math would work out given current efficiencies, but that's what the calculation is about, not the current failure to invest in green energy.) And heat pump uptake is both an example of a pretty small consumer-side change and a change where there's a lot of room to grow in terms of uptake.
I just bought a treadle powered Necchi sewing machine that was originally purchased in 1959
I am jealous. With zigzag??
posted by trig at 7:42 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
I think in terms of progress it's not just about number of installations but also increases in sheer efficiency/production from a single installation. Which as far as I know has been growing considerably, in some cases beyond expectations.
If MacKay was arguing not that the UK wasn't generating sufficient energy for its needs at the time but that it would never be possible as long as individuals do just "a little", then "the UK doesn't currently have a high uptake of green power production or energy-saving technology" isn't a solid argument to counter "it could increase uptake and then it would generate sufficient amounts". (I don't know whether the math would work out given current efficiencies, but that's what the calculation is about, not the current failure to invest in green energy.) And heat pump uptake is both an example of a pretty small consumer-side change and a change where there's a lot of room to grow in terms of uptake.
I just bought a treadle powered Necchi sewing machine that was originally purchased in 1959
I am jealous. With zigzag??
posted by trig at 7:42 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
Basically the argument is there isn't enough potential capacity to be had given economic and social constraints.
195 kWh per day per person is quite high. I think modern heat pumps and insulation / glazing has cut that number dramatically. It lists 37kwh per person per day for heating and cooling, personally my total energy use during work-from-home Covid was 9kwh per person per day, this is across winters with lows of -3°C and summer highs of 44°C. Solar panels are trivially cheap here, $A7000 for a 6.6kw setup on an $A800,000 house was enough to make me a net grid contributor and only uses 1/3 of my roof surface area.
Sure, there's other energy use like, factories that make stuff? That cost is also getting lower and lower. Of the two manufacturing sites we manage in our region, one of them has 30,000 solar panels and the other has 20,000 solar panels, and we're planning to continually add more until we don't need to buy grid electricity any more.
Air travel was never going to offset by renewables. For electric vehicles, I think you could be self sufficient with a 20kw solar system and 13kwh battery which costs about A$30,000 or about 3% of the value of your home.
posted by xdvesper at 7:47 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
195 kWh per day per person is quite high. I think modern heat pumps and insulation / glazing has cut that number dramatically. It lists 37kwh per person per day for heating and cooling, personally my total energy use during work-from-home Covid was 9kwh per person per day, this is across winters with lows of -3°C and summer highs of 44°C. Solar panels are trivially cheap here, $A7000 for a 6.6kw setup on an $A800,000 house was enough to make me a net grid contributor and only uses 1/3 of my roof surface area.
Sure, there's other energy use like, factories that make stuff? That cost is also getting lower and lower. Of the two manufacturing sites we manage in our region, one of them has 30,000 solar panels and the other has 20,000 solar panels, and we're planning to continually add more until we don't need to buy grid electricity any more.
Air travel was never going to offset by renewables. For electric vehicles, I think you could be self sufficient with a 20kw solar system and 13kwh battery which costs about A$30,000 or about 3% of the value of your home.
posted by xdvesper at 7:47 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
What we're aiming to build is a community primed to respond to the latest "AI" product announcement more with "fuck off, asshole" than "ooo, shiny".
Speaking for myself: no. I don’t want to ever be a person who rejects technology out of hand. If something scares me then that’s a sign I have some work to do on myself. My rejection should always be an informed rejection, period.
I hate OpenAI because I’ve read their papers and listened to their interviews and understand what they think the future should look like. I am cautiously willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they appear to be operating in good faith on this topic. And I acknowledge that Zuckerberg is doing the working class a massive favor in terms of leveling the playing field - if only to fuck with Altman and Elon - while he continues to cause a Hitler-scale aggregate-harm-over-time with his social media holdings.
Ignorance is for children, and as adults we’re supposed to help them shed that ignorance. Step 0 of which is informing ourselves.
I dislike and distrust shaped narrative, and that particularly goes for the Twitter-now-Bluesky ignorance-posing-as-progressive-sass. I’m sure it feels good, but I don’t want to feel good nor am I particularly interested in other people feeling good as public performance. I want us to make good, informed decisions together and that means dismissing sassy comeback / hot take “culture” and approaching things with an analytical mindset, not a focus on being cool. Cool is the enemy nearly to the degree that ignorance is, saved only by the fact that it’s pretty cool to be right.
posted by Ryvar at 7:57 AM on September 24 [6 favorites]
Speaking for myself: no. I don’t want to ever be a person who rejects technology out of hand. If something scares me then that’s a sign I have some work to do on myself. My rejection should always be an informed rejection, period.
I hate OpenAI because I’ve read their papers and listened to their interviews and understand what they think the future should look like. I am cautiously willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they appear to be operating in good faith on this topic. And I acknowledge that Zuckerberg is doing the working class a massive favor in terms of leveling the playing field - if only to fuck with Altman and Elon - while he continues to cause a Hitler-scale aggregate-harm-over-time with his social media holdings.
Ignorance is for children, and as adults we’re supposed to help them shed that ignorance. Step 0 of which is informing ourselves.
I dislike and distrust shaped narrative, and that particularly goes for the Twitter-now-Bluesky ignorance-posing-as-progressive-sass. I’m sure it feels good, but I don’t want to feel good nor am I particularly interested in other people feeling good as public performance. I want us to make good, informed decisions together and that means dismissing sassy comeback / hot take “culture” and approaching things with an analytical mindset, not a focus on being cool. Cool is the enemy nearly to the degree that ignorance is, saved only by the fact that it’s pretty cool to be right.
posted by Ryvar at 7:57 AM on September 24 [6 favorites]
They're about setting community norms and expectations in an attempt to drag the Overton window in a direction that ends up having it frame these assholes squarely as the assholes they are.
flabdablet
This is the usual justification but it gets things exactly backwards.
Were I running an oil company or the like I would very much like to shift the focus to individual personal choices rather than what my organization and the general economic/political structure is doing. This would encourage people to squabble and recriminate and point fingers at each other rather than seeing this as a struggle we all need to work together on.
Similarly, by making these lifestyle/culture matters you just end up dividing people into tribes bitterly opposed to each other since they feel personally attacked because one group like to BBBQ or whatever and the other is labeling them assholes for that when literally none of that matters or will make any actual difference on policy or the climate. It alienates people who might otherwise be on board.
And, indeed, this is exactly what has happened, but it is very very hard to get people to accept that their individual preferences and actions don't matter even symbolically and you have to think bigger.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:06 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
flabdablet
This is the usual justification but it gets things exactly backwards.
Were I running an oil company or the like I would very much like to shift the focus to individual personal choices rather than what my organization and the general economic/political structure is doing. This would encourage people to squabble and recriminate and point fingers at each other rather than seeing this as a struggle we all need to work together on.
Similarly, by making these lifestyle/culture matters you just end up dividing people into tribes bitterly opposed to each other since they feel personally attacked because one group like to BBBQ or whatever and the other is labeling them assholes for that when literally none of that matters or will make any actual difference on policy or the climate. It alienates people who might otherwise be on board.
And, indeed, this is exactly what has happened, but it is very very hard to get people to accept that their individual preferences and actions don't matter even symbolically and you have to think bigger.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:06 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
It lists 37kwh per person per day for heating and cooling, personally my total energy use during work-from-home Covid was 9kwh per person per day,
I think his figures are systemic (ie all the heating & cooling used in homes, businesses, industry in the UK/population) not what people get on their home gas bill. It comes out to 800-900 TWh annually, which is loads. Checking it out, that's in line with this data for UK total consumption for all heating & cooling. So he's pretty much on target with that figure, except that there has been a drop of about 20% since it was published and a slight increase in population.
posted by biffa at 8:08 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
I think his figures are systemic (ie all the heating & cooling used in homes, businesses, industry in the UK/population) not what people get on their home gas bill. It comes out to 800-900 TWh annually, which is loads. Checking it out, that's in line with this data for UK total consumption for all heating & cooling. So he's pretty much on target with that figure, except that there has been a drop of about 20% since it was published and a slight increase in population.
posted by biffa at 8:08 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
I'm just disappointed that McSweeneys are on substack now, don't lecture me about the environment when you are on a Nazi supporting website which has so many ads and tracking it takes 5 seconds to render a page of text.
Point taken about Nazis, but in no way did I take this as anything approaching a lecture on the environment...
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:25 AM on September 24
Point taken about Nazis, but in no way did I take this as anything approaching a lecture on the environment...
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:25 AM on September 24
It's awesome. We're going to solve global warming with VC/investor giant piles of money being committed to utilities up front to getting nukes online and then when the AI bubble bursts power will be so cheap even natural gas won't be able to keep up.
I'm not sure the AI bubble is going to burst the way the crypto or NTF or Web3 bubbles did. Certainly the hype around making images and songs at the consumer level is going to fall away, but AI as a fundamental underpinning of how the internet works is here to stay, like it or not. It will eventually stop enshittifying our language distribution and be omnipresent. Like, it is really close to being able to replace every customer service agent, everywhere. It has gotten to the point that I'm never quite sure if I'm communicating with a person or an AI.
What is concerning about AI's power usage is that it is on a trajectory to just keep growing. Governments absolutely want to leverage what AI has to offer, and private industry will give it to them. So unless AI turns out to be actually useless, which is not looking very likely, or the AI machine just runs out of money, which maybe, there is no end in sight.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:27 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
I'm not sure the AI bubble is going to burst the way the crypto or NTF or Web3 bubbles did. Certainly the hype around making images and songs at the consumer level is going to fall away, but AI as a fundamental underpinning of how the internet works is here to stay, like it or not. It will eventually stop enshittifying our language distribution and be omnipresent. Like, it is really close to being able to replace every customer service agent, everywhere. It has gotten to the point that I'm never quite sure if I'm communicating with a person or an AI.
What is concerning about AI's power usage is that it is on a trajectory to just keep growing. Governments absolutely want to leverage what AI has to offer, and private industry will give it to them. So unless AI turns out to be actually useless, which is not looking very likely, or the AI machine just runs out of money, which maybe, there is no end in sight.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:27 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
"...question of if Britain's energy consumption could be met by domestic sustainable energy production..."Although not GB specific, "Seven Chinese solar companies are already providing more energy for the global economy than Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP.". So renewables seem to be scaling up quite well. The graph makes the energy from oil companies look negligible vs the solar giants.
The IEA projections of solar energy have been surpassed by reality by quite a wide margin. So the book may have been well researched and used the best projections at the time, but may still paint an overly pessimistic view.
Specific to the greening of the GB electricity grid, 2009 - 2024, we see more and more of the electricity grid is RE (Renewable Energy). Yes the electricity grid is just a part of the energy used by a country, but the shift in time is dramatic. It doesn't negate an analysis of non-electric energy uses, nor address capacity available in GB. But if GB's electricity is mostly RE now then I imagine there's room to expand REs into other sectors.
The shifts for the electricity sector for other countries; "Two countries in Europe are powered [for electricity] by 100% renewable energy", a table of RE % in electricity grids in various European countries, overall "71% of EU electricity generation was from non-fossil fuel sources over the last 12 months", and "The EU now generates more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels.".
xdvesper I'm jealous of the AU prices for solar. I just spent $27k CDN ($29 AU) for 7kw. A bunch more for heat pumps and now my previous annual 9 tons per year is zero. That investment is dwarfed by the emissions for AI/Crypto. We need curbs on the high users, a carbon tax.
posted by ecco at 8:31 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
I know it's beside the point, but: A modern dishwasher uses less water and less energy than hand-washing dishes generally does. Sure, hand-wash your grandma's antique teacups. But use the dishwasher when you can.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:37 AM on September 24 [11 favorites]
posted by Western Infidels at 8:37 AM on September 24 [11 favorites]
Metafilter: I don't want to feel good
posted by mittens at 8:38 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
posted by mittens at 8:38 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
(I was confused by that dishwasher point as well, as I thought it was a given that dishwashers use less water and energy than hand washing)
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:40 AM on September 24
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:40 AM on September 24
Personal computers got faster and more capable at the same time they were getting cheaper and smaller. Access to the Internet got faster and more capable at the same time it was getting cheaper and more ubiquitous.
Is there any indication that AI is doing the same? More sophisticated models are coming out, but those models need an increasing amount of training data and computation in order to work. And the business for most AI companies seems to be offer a free product then gradually hook people into paying more in the future for better functionality.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:49 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Is there any indication that AI is doing the same? More sophisticated models are coming out, but those models need an increasing amount of training data and computation in order to work. And the business for most AI companies seems to be offer a free product then gradually hook people into paying more in the future for better functionality.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:49 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Is there any indication that AI is doing the same? More sophisticated models are coming out, but those models need an increasing amount of training data and computation in order to work.
Basically look to both Apple and open source AI for advancement here. OpenAI, Google and to some extent Anthropic now are the leaders for more-is-more approach. You could kinda level the same accusation at Meta (still not sure who Llama-3.1 405B is for; universities with a few dozen H100s, I guess) but at least Meta gives their shit away freely to everyone, reducing the number of new foundation models being trained (nVidia is also pretty good in this regard on the synthetic data generation side). LLMs being so dependent on scale is why those who ignore efficiency grab so many “a new milestone!” headlines, but we’re starting to see Llama-3.1 70B fine-tunings surpass GPT-4, and o1 is palpably very early alpha as well as an incomplete Q* implementation based on the model card.
Open source efforts are attention-driven and must cater to more modest hardware - typically whatever’s considered godtier for PC gaming. Apple wants to push as much of their models into your pocket as possible without causing a battery life PR nightmare. It’s a question of incentives, basically, and right now Microsoft-OpenAI / Google / Anthropic have far less incentive to prioritize efficiency. The fact that they’re touting $100 billion compute cluster plans strongly suggests they’ll begin to care far more about efficiency over the next couple years, but they can still rack up a lot of damage between now and then. Finally, nVidia’s new Blackwell architecture (5000 series for gaming GPUs) is supposed to be something like 30% the wattage of A100s/H100s for equivalent TFLOPs when using TensorFlow, so improvement isn’t strictly software-side, either.
posted by Ryvar at 9:24 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]
Basically look to both Apple and open source AI for advancement here. OpenAI, Google and to some extent Anthropic now are the leaders for more-is-more approach. You could kinda level the same accusation at Meta (still not sure who Llama-3.1 405B is for; universities with a few dozen H100s, I guess) but at least Meta gives their shit away freely to everyone, reducing the number of new foundation models being trained (nVidia is also pretty good in this regard on the synthetic data generation side). LLMs being so dependent on scale is why those who ignore efficiency grab so many “a new milestone!” headlines, but we’re starting to see Llama-3.1 70B fine-tunings surpass GPT-4, and o1 is palpably very early alpha as well as an incomplete Q* implementation based on the model card.
Open source efforts are attention-driven and must cater to more modest hardware - typically whatever’s considered godtier for PC gaming. Apple wants to push as much of their models into your pocket as possible without causing a battery life PR nightmare. It’s a question of incentives, basically, and right now Microsoft-OpenAI / Google / Anthropic have far less incentive to prioritize efficiency. The fact that they’re touting $100 billion compute cluster plans strongly suggests they’ll begin to care far more about efficiency over the next couple years, but they can still rack up a lot of damage between now and then. Finally, nVidia’s new Blackwell architecture (5000 series for gaming GPUs) is supposed to be something like 30% the wattage of A100s/H100s for equivalent TFLOPs when using TensorFlow, so improvement isn’t strictly software-side, either.
posted by Ryvar at 9:24 AM on September 24 [5 favorites]
I don’t want to ever be a person who rejects technology out of hand.
Me either. Not out of hand, merely by default.
The first question on exposure to any new technology should always be: OK, neat, but what do I actually need that for? And the answer to that should always come from within and never be provided by salesweasels.
posted by flabdablet at 9:25 AM on September 24 [13 favorites]
Me either. Not out of hand, merely by default.
The first question on exposure to any new technology should always be: OK, neat, but what do I actually need that for? And the answer to that should always come from within and never be provided by salesweasels.
posted by flabdablet at 9:25 AM on September 24 [13 favorites]
It will eventually stop enshittifying our language distribution and be omnipresent. Like, it is really close to being able to replace every customer service agent, everywhere. It has gotten to the point that I'm never quite sure if I'm communicating with a person or an AI.
To me, that says more about how totally fucking useless corporate customer service has become than about how good LLMs are.
Service providers all seem to have made a tacit agreement to treat post-sales service as a pure cost to be minimized rather than a differentiator to compete for custom on. The general calculus seems to be that people will grumble about shit service but still sort by price and postage lowest first and buy from the cheapest vendor, so fuck 'em. Also, modern services exist within an insanely complex ecosystem of interlocking kinda-sorta-mostly-works automation whose failure modes nobody, let alone low-paid overloaded mis-incentivized drones in cheap outsourced call centres, has any real hope of responding to in helpful ways.
I honestly cannot recall the last time any corporate service centre managed to fix any issue more complex than authorizing a warranty replacement before I'd already devised my own workaround or found one online figured out by somebody similarly afflicted. Your call is important to us? My arse it is.
posted by flabdablet at 9:42 AM on September 24 [7 favorites]
To me, that says more about how totally fucking useless corporate customer service has become than about how good LLMs are.
Service providers all seem to have made a tacit agreement to treat post-sales service as a pure cost to be minimized rather than a differentiator to compete for custom on. The general calculus seems to be that people will grumble about shit service but still sort by price and postage lowest first and buy from the cheapest vendor, so fuck 'em. Also, modern services exist within an insanely complex ecosystem of interlocking kinda-sorta-mostly-works automation whose failure modes nobody, let alone low-paid overloaded mis-incentivized drones in cheap outsourced call centres, has any real hope of responding to in helpful ways.
I honestly cannot recall the last time any corporate service centre managed to fix any issue more complex than authorizing a warranty replacement before I'd already devised my own workaround or found one online figured out by somebody similarly afflicted. Your call is important to us? My arse it is.
posted by flabdablet at 9:42 AM on September 24 [7 favorites]
Cool is the enemy nearly to the degree that ignorance is
and the main aim of the advertising industry for at least as long as I've been alive has been to make a virtue of both.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
and the main aim of the advertising industry for at least as long as I've been alive has been to make a virtue of both.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
I've been spending a lot of my time recently familiarizing with the UK retrofit movements, people trying to figure out the order of operations for getting British homes closer to carbon zero in the near future. Since the 80s, the price of electricity has been married to the price of gas, with gas in the cheaper position, no matter how much RE the UK, particularly Scotland, produces. This makes it very cost prohibitive, even if the actual equipment switches weren't a hurdle. Increasing efficiency by 300% by spending loads on a heat pump will currently save just about nothing in actual monthly expenses, and that's a political issue.
posted by droomoord at 10:10 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
posted by droomoord at 10:10 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
TIL that for $40 I can get a "Decorative Gourd Season Motherfuckers" beanie from McSweeney's. Because of course they have merch these days. No word on whether it's made of nicer fiber than the beanie I got at a gas station for $4, or confirming it was not made in some sweatshop hellhole of a workplace.
I could not read too far into TFA. It feels like the real world is beyond parody. Did we see the news about M$ fixing to get a dedicated 1GW nuclear reactor to power AI data centers? The surviving Three Mile Island unit, no less.
I mean, I realize that "know with what little wisdom the world is governed" has been advice to keep a sense of proportion about the folly of the powerful since basically forever. I find that hard to keep in mind, when I'm looking at how insane some of our collective decision-making is.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:14 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
I could not read too far into TFA. It feels like the real world is beyond parody. Did we see the news about M$ fixing to get a dedicated 1GW nuclear reactor to power AI data centers? The surviving Three Mile Island unit, no less.
I mean, I realize that "know with what little wisdom the world is governed" has been advice to keep a sense of proportion about the folly of the powerful since basically forever. I find that hard to keep in mind, when I'm looking at how insane some of our collective decision-making is.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:14 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
I honestly cannot recall the last time any corporate service centre managed to fix any issue
Counter-intuitively, I've noticed the opposite the last few times I've called one -- once you get to a real person, which is increasingly challenging. But when I DO, that person seems really helpful, as if they've got nothing else to do. The last one I got fixed my shit cheerfully even though I was clearly lying (I was refusing to 'simply download the setup app' when they sent me a new cable modem, claiming I didn't have a smart phone - while calling them from a mobile number)
Helpful CSRs can't help if the company doesn't give them any access to information or power to DO anything though. Some of them are just "go ahead and vent on me" targets who can't actually do anything but "open a ticket". Don't need AI for that, a simple web form would do.
posted by ctmf at 10:23 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Counter-intuitively, I've noticed the opposite the last few times I've called one -- once you get to a real person, which is increasingly challenging. But when I DO, that person seems really helpful, as if they've got nothing else to do. The last one I got fixed my shit cheerfully even though I was clearly lying (I was refusing to 'simply download the setup app' when they sent me a new cable modem, claiming I didn't have a smart phone - while calling them from a mobile number)
Helpful CSRs can't help if the company doesn't give them any access to information or power to DO anything though. Some of them are just "go ahead and vent on me" targets who can't actually do anything but "open a ticket". Don't need AI for that, a simple web form would do.
posted by ctmf at 10:23 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Did we see the news about M$ fixing to get a dedicated 1GW nuclear reactor to power AI data centers?
First reaction: OMG do they know how much nuclear maintenance costs? Like a boat or plane, the purchase price is pennies compared to the ongoing cost. Plus lifetime legal liability for the site and all the waste associated with the operating license... quite a gamble AI is going to make THAT much money.
Oh that's a little misleading though. They aren't getting a reactor, they're contracting to buy all the power. Not the same thing at all.
posted by ctmf at 10:29 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
First reaction: OMG do they know how much nuclear maintenance costs? Like a boat or plane, the purchase price is pennies compared to the ongoing cost. Plus lifetime legal liability for the site and all the waste associated with the operating license... quite a gamble AI is going to make THAT much money.
Oh that's a little misleading though. They aren't getting a reactor, they're contracting to buy all the power. Not the same thing at all.
posted by ctmf at 10:29 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]
Plus lifetime legal liability for the site and all the waste associated with the operating license
Relax, that liability is less of an issue than you might think, thanks to the wisdom and foresight of the US Congress!
posted by nickmark at 11:08 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Relax, that liability is less of an issue than you might think, thanks to the wisdom and foresight of the US Congress!
posted by nickmark at 11:08 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure i agree that the AI (LLMs, in particular) domination of All Tech is a given. I know there are people whose are desperate for that to be true, because it would make them oligarch-level rich if true. See also: the Metaverse. Remember a couple of years ago, when that was inevitable?
See: The Subprime AI Crisis
I agree with flabdablet on this one: The default response for new technologies at this point in our technological development, given the scale of human impact on the planet needs to be skepticism.
The world is warming and we're still burning fossil fuels to create more bitcoin.
posted by chromecow at 11:12 AM on September 24 [7 favorites]
See: The Subprime AI Crisis
I agree with flabdablet on this one: The default response for new technologies at this point in our technological development, given the scale of human impact on the planet needs to be skepticism.
The world is warming and we're still burning fossil fuels to create more bitcoin.
posted by chromecow at 11:12 AM on September 24 [7 favorites]
The issues are mostly as to whether the sums for current use add up, and then whether RE can be done at sufficient scale to meet those needs (and whether the needs can come down via efficiency). Basically the argument is there isn't enough potential capacity to be had given economic and social constraints.
It's been a while since I looked at MacKay, but my primary recollection is that he takes current consumption levels as given and tries to assess whether there's enough renewable energy to meet those levels. But that gives massively short shrift to end-use energy efficiency, which can make a huge dent in the amount of energy we actually consume. I think there's very good reason to be more optimistic about our ability to reduce our energy intensity (setting aside AI for purposes of this sentence), as illustrated by the decline you pointed out in the UK's heating and cooling energy since 2010.
posted by nickmark at 11:22 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
It's been a while since I looked at MacKay, but my primary recollection is that he takes current consumption levels as given and tries to assess whether there's enough renewable energy to meet those levels. But that gives massively short shrift to end-use energy efficiency, which can make a huge dent in the amount of energy we actually consume. I think there's very good reason to be more optimistic about our ability to reduce our energy intensity (setting aside AI for purposes of this sentence), as illustrated by the decline you pointed out in the UK's heating and cooling energy since 2010.
posted by nickmark at 11:22 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
I thought it was a given that dishwashers use less water and energy
According to all the research, commissioned by dishwasher manufacturers, they do. (The topic of dishwasher efficiency has been beaten to death in other threads, the two sides will never agree.)
posted by Lanark at 11:24 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
According to all the research, commissioned by dishwasher manufacturers, they do. (The topic of dishwasher efficiency has been beaten to death in other threads, the two sides will never agree.)
posted by Lanark at 11:24 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Funny, but I'm iffy about the proclaimed power costs of AI. I just saw a serious article claiming OpenAI uses "three bottles of water" for every hundred words produced. Or another claiming it costs them $0.05 per response. Or that various other staggering amounts of energy are required for pictures.
Which I kind of doubt since I can spin up a chatbot almost, but not quite, as capable as GPT4 on my home computer. It's slower, much slower, but it provides answers for a lot less than five cents of electricity. There's a certain breathless style of anti-AI reporting on energy and resources that is clearly false.
And the author is over a year out of date on AI image problems, they fixed the finger thing, and the teeth thing, and the feet thing, a long while back. It's still easy to tell which image is AI generated and which isn't, but it's not just a matter of counting fingers anymore. Or not usually anyway.
Lanark I'm on side "who gives a shit, washing dishes sucks and it's not like making myself miserable doing it is going to actually offset anything".
Like, I hate lawns. I mean I HAAAAAAAATTTTTEEEEEE lawns. I'd be perfeclty happy if a law was passed banning everything but xeroscaping. But I also know that lawns are nothing in comparison to the big water wasters so I can't get worked up over lawns (well, not too worked up, I still hate them).
I'll be delighted to talk about the energy/water efficiency of a dishwasher as soon as Exxon is no longer pumping oil to burn, the big farms in California are paying a fair price for the water they use, water waste in industry has been slashed, and so on. Until the big drains that have a real impact on the problem are gone I don't have enough spoons to care if I'm saving a few cups of water or a few watt hours of power if I wash dishes by hand.
Never forget all that personal carbon footprint shit was invented by BP to try to make you feel guilty for having AC when they're the ones responsible for climate change.
posted by sotonohito at 11:31 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
Which I kind of doubt since I can spin up a chatbot almost, but not quite, as capable as GPT4 on my home computer. It's slower, much slower, but it provides answers for a lot less than five cents of electricity. There's a certain breathless style of anti-AI reporting on energy and resources that is clearly false.
And the author is over a year out of date on AI image problems, they fixed the finger thing, and the teeth thing, and the feet thing, a long while back. It's still easy to tell which image is AI generated and which isn't, but it's not just a matter of counting fingers anymore. Or not usually anyway.
Lanark I'm on side "who gives a shit, washing dishes sucks and it's not like making myself miserable doing it is going to actually offset anything".
Like, I hate lawns. I mean I HAAAAAAAATTTTTEEEEEE lawns. I'd be perfeclty happy if a law was passed banning everything but xeroscaping. But I also know that lawns are nothing in comparison to the big water wasters so I can't get worked up over lawns (well, not too worked up, I still hate them).
I'll be delighted to talk about the energy/water efficiency of a dishwasher as soon as Exxon is no longer pumping oil to burn, the big farms in California are paying a fair price for the water they use, water waste in industry has been slashed, and so on. Until the big drains that have a real impact on the problem are gone I don't have enough spoons to care if I'm saving a few cups of water or a few watt hours of power if I wash dishes by hand.
Never forget all that personal carbon footprint shit was invented by BP to try to make you feel guilty for having AC when they're the ones responsible for climate change.
posted by sotonohito at 11:31 AM on September 24 [4 favorites]
The future is uncertain, but the size of the increments needed for incremental change to give us better that 50% odds of having holocene ecosytems (including us and our crops) surivive, well, those increments are large enough to feel like revolutions.
I love science and tech, but until they clean up their mess, which they never have so far (Hannford anyone?) , they have amounted to a murder-suicide pact, destroying the world for short term hominid aggrandizment.
The mising step between conservation, efficiency and renewable generation (or veganism, etc) is to hold the ground, take up space. So long as the resources saved get offered on the cheap to the wasteful, then McSweenys is right.
The land and water and power you save has to become an endowment for your sustainable society and must be unavailable for the market pleasure-suicide machine.
Remember: babysteps = everyone starved . unregulated, unpriprities consumption = everyone dies.
we are 200ppm CO2e past the point where business as usual isn't genocide.
The Overton window can't move far enough to stop .24C/decade warming. AI doesn't solve any problems that we can't solve by jettisoning the rule by wealthhorders and their industrial polluting partners.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 11:45 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
I love science and tech, but until they clean up their mess, which they never have so far (Hannford anyone?) , they have amounted to a murder-suicide pact, destroying the world for short term hominid aggrandizment.
The mising step between conservation, efficiency and renewable generation (or veganism, etc) is to hold the ground, take up space. So long as the resources saved get offered on the cheap to the wasteful, then McSweenys is right.
The land and water and power you save has to become an endowment for your sustainable society and must be unavailable for the market pleasure-suicide machine.
Remember: babysteps = everyone starved . unregulated, unpriprities consumption = everyone dies.
we are 200ppm CO2e past the point where business as usual isn't genocide.
The Overton window can't move far enough to stop .24C/decade warming. AI doesn't solve any problems that we can't solve by jettisoning the rule by wealthhorders and their industrial polluting partners.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 11:45 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
Is it just me, or does a carbon tax seem like it's too crude to fix this?
The good thing about a carbon tax is that it applies to everybody, so that those who figure out the ways to go the most carbon-free save the most money.
The bad thing is that such a huge I-don't-care-about-the-cost amount of investor money is going into AI that setting carbon taxes high enough to slow them down a little bit would shut down the rest of the economy.
Production of stuff that we need, like food, would come to a halt long before AI investors got discouraged by a carbon tax.
posted by clawsoon at 11:48 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
The good thing about a carbon tax is that it applies to everybody, so that those who figure out the ways to go the most carbon-free save the most money.
The bad thing is that such a huge I-don't-care-about-the-cost amount of investor money is going into AI that setting carbon taxes high enough to slow them down a little bit would shut down the rest of the economy.
Production of stuff that we need, like food, would come to a halt long before AI investors got discouraged by a carbon tax.
posted by clawsoon at 11:48 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]
I'm pretty sure a carbon tax is not even remotely going to fix anything. No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. is 100% correct, any change with a chance of really helping is going to be so huge it'll seem like a revolution.
There's some small shreds of hope, there's good reason to think that temperature increase will top out at around 3.5c based on current trendlines, which is horrible but at least not the 4+ that more or less guarantees human extinction.
But that's nowhere near good enough, and it's no guarantee we'll make it. The best time to have been decarbonizing was in in the 1970's. The second best time is now.
Yet all our "advances" are merely slowing the rate of growth of CO2 emissions. We're not actually in reducing CO2 emissions territory yet.
The Biden jobs and whatever act was the single biggest step forward the US has ever taken on climate and it's still just the tiniet baby step that's still far too little and far too late.
We need a total ban on new drilling and mining. Nevermind frakking, a ban on ALL new drilling mining for any fossil fuel. We can't stop production now, not without 90% or so of us dying, but we can at least put the pressure on the cost side by ending expansion of the fossil fuel extraction industry.
And more!
And instead? We're patting ourselves on the back for pledging to stop increasing our emissions in a few decades.
posted by sotonohito at 12:02 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]
There's some small shreds of hope, there's good reason to think that temperature increase will top out at around 3.5c based on current trendlines, which is horrible but at least not the 4+ that more or less guarantees human extinction.
But that's nowhere near good enough, and it's no guarantee we'll make it. The best time to have been decarbonizing was in in the 1970's. The second best time is now.
Yet all our "advances" are merely slowing the rate of growth of CO2 emissions. We're not actually in reducing CO2 emissions territory yet.
The Biden jobs and whatever act was the single biggest step forward the US has ever taken on climate and it's still just the tiniet baby step that's still far too little and far too late.
We need a total ban on new drilling and mining. Nevermind frakking, a ban on ALL new drilling mining for any fossil fuel. We can't stop production now, not without 90% or so of us dying, but we can at least put the pressure on the cost side by ending expansion of the fossil fuel extraction industry.
And more!
And instead? We're patting ourselves on the back for pledging to stop increasing our emissions in a few decades.
posted by sotonohito at 12:02 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]
Tangent, but this reminded me of the 'human batteries' scene in the Matrix... did you know that that scene was originally written as 'computers are using human brains as CPUs, to do their thinking for them' but was rewritten as 'computes are using people as an energy source, as batteries' because studio executives in ~1999 didn't think enough people would know what a CPU was.
Which instantly turned the whole movie from "oh, cool" to "that's the stupidest fucking thing i've ever heard" to those of us who understand even the first fucking thing about how power generation works.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:21 PM on September 24 [15 favorites]
Which instantly turned the whole movie from "oh, cool" to "that's the stupidest fucking thing i've ever heard" to those of us who understand even the first fucking thing about how power generation works.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:21 PM on September 24 [15 favorites]
It's been a while since I looked at MacKay, but my primary recollection is that he takes current consumption levels as given and tries to assess whether there's enough renewable energy to meet those levels.
Basically, but he does allow for the UK hitting some pretty high targets to decarbonise. For example, if you take offshore wind energy he allows for production of 48 kWh/d (32 deep, 16 shallow). Assuming 60,000,000 people then, that's 2kWh/hr x 60,000,000 = 120,000,000kWh or 120GWh produced every hour. Assuming a capacity factor of 50% (actual typical rate is 41% at the moment) then you would need to have 240GW of capacity installed to achieve that as a typical output. The UK has a target of 50GW by 2030 for offshore wind, and that is regarded as doable but ambitious. This is an area in which the UK led from 2005-2020 and remains in second place globally now.
The Mackay stuff was really a bucket of cold water when it came out. It is possible to shoot some holes in it now, but it remains a depressing read for anyone working in UK sustainable energy.
posted by biffa at 1:27 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Basically, but he does allow for the UK hitting some pretty high targets to decarbonise. For example, if you take offshore wind energy he allows for production of 48 kWh/d (32 deep, 16 shallow). Assuming 60,000,000 people then, that's 2kWh/hr x 60,000,000 = 120,000,000kWh or 120GWh produced every hour. Assuming a capacity factor of 50% (actual typical rate is 41% at the moment) then you would need to have 240GW of capacity installed to achieve that as a typical output. The UK has a target of 50GW by 2030 for offshore wind, and that is regarded as doable but ambitious. This is an area in which the UK led from 2005-2020 and remains in second place globally now.
The Mackay stuff was really a bucket of cold water when it came out. It is possible to shoot some holes in it now, but it remains a depressing read for anyone working in UK sustainable energy.
posted by biffa at 1:27 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]
All of discussion i've seen about the UK vis-a-vi food security and energy independence basically only work if the UK material standard of living shrinks, their population shrinks or they find something of value to export to trade for food and energy. That thing is probably arms and, tax-evasion. Not a great footing for going into a mass extinction. But then again, almost nowhere is locally self sufficient in food and energy. We globalized our necessities for the sake of profit and efficiency. Oops.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 6:11 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 6:11 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]
Decarbonize Your Life (though collective action is better).
posted by sillygwailo at 8:36 PM on September 24
posted by sillygwailo at 8:36 PM on September 24
you just end up dividing people into tribes bitterly opposed to each other since they feel personally attacked because one group like to BBBQ or whatever and the other is labeling them assholes for that when literally none of that matters or will make any actual difference on policy or the climate. It alienates people who might otherwise be on board.
That's indeed a common pattern, but it can be avoided by keeping one's personal virtue signals personal rather than requiring or expecting others similarly disempowered to display the same signals. Asshole labelling is generally best applied up the power gradient.
The point of virtue signalling is to show other people who already have reason to see you as virtuous what virtuous behaviour looks like to you. Productive, positive performative virtue signalling is about inspiring other people to normalize and internalize the virtues concerned. Letting it become all about the scolding just wastes everybody's time. If years of time wasted yelling at fuckwit engineers about climate change or trans issues has taught me anything, it's that.
If virtue signalling were truly ineffective, self-styled conservatives with bully pulpits would not devote so much of their time to contemptuous denunciations of it. Those assholes know full well how propaganda works.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]
That's indeed a common pattern, but it can be avoided by keeping one's personal virtue signals personal rather than requiring or expecting others similarly disempowered to display the same signals. Asshole labelling is generally best applied up the power gradient.
The point of virtue signalling is to show other people who already have reason to see you as virtuous what virtuous behaviour looks like to you. Productive, positive performative virtue signalling is about inspiring other people to normalize and internalize the virtues concerned. Letting it become all about the scolding just wastes everybody's time. If years of time wasted yelling at fuckwit engineers about climate change or trans issues has taught me anything, it's that.
If virtue signalling were truly ineffective, self-styled conservatives with bully pulpits would not devote so much of their time to contemptuous denunciations of it. Those assholes know full well how propaganda works.
posted by flabdablet at 9:03 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]
Is there any indication that AI is doing the same? More sophisticated models are coming out, but those models need an increasing amount of training data and computation in order to work.
The cost of “operating” a model at a given level of performance is definitely decreasing, because more efficient algorithms and techniques for getting the best possible results out of smaller models (and distilling large models down to smaller ones) have been introduced, and because the hardware continues to get more powerful. The cost of training a state-of-the-art model presumably continues to increase because the strategy of most of the top companies has become to throw literally exponentially more computing resources at each generation to see just how far they can take the paradigm of, uh, throwing more computing resources at the problem.
posted by atoxyl at 10:00 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]
The cost of “operating” a model at a given level of performance is definitely decreasing, because more efficient algorithms and techniques for getting the best possible results out of smaller models (and distilling large models down to smaller ones) have been introduced, and because the hardware continues to get more powerful. The cost of training a state-of-the-art model presumably continues to increase because the strategy of most of the top companies has become to throw literally exponentially more computing resources at each generation to see just how far they can take the paradigm of, uh, throwing more computing resources at the problem.
posted by atoxyl at 10:00 PM on September 24 [3 favorites]
While these companies are hardly averse to setting money on fire, I suspect the usual pricing trend of a big bump up for the new generation followed by repeated cuts does reflect some underlying economic realities.
posted by atoxyl at 10:06 PM on September 24
posted by atoxyl at 10:06 PM on September 24
I think his figures are systemic (ie all the heating & cooling used in homes, businesses, industry in the UK/population) not what people get on their home gas bill.
Yes Biffa that is correct however the way I'm looking at it, I'm comparing my 9kwh for 24 hour heating / cooling doing work from home in one house, versus the 37kwh which seems to be population level data where people generally use heating while they're at home, then turn it off and go to work and use the heating there instead. Workplace heating must surely be more efficient, unless I'm totally wrong somehow, that heating a single office with 200 workers would be more efficient than heating 200 individual homes. I'm assuming that many homes won't get heated during the day, and almost all workplaces won't be heated during the night.
xdvesper I'm jealous of the AU prices for solar. I just spent $27k CDN ($29 AU) for 7kw.
Ekko, I've tried to look into it before and I don't think there's a definitive answer why solar is so cheap in Australia. This article seems to say "The higher price tag in the US is primarily driven by the significant soft costs associated with purchasing the system, including the sales tax, permitting, inspection, interconnection, and profit margins. All these soft costs in the US account for 64% of the total cost, or USD 3/WDC for the 3-kilowatt system,”
Though I'm sure tariffs also play a part, Australia being such low population can't really sustain many domestic industries so we're all in on this free trade thing, while the US and Canada heavily tax products coming out of Asia.
posted by xdvesper at 2:00 AM on September 25
Yes Biffa that is correct however the way I'm looking at it, I'm comparing my 9kwh for 24 hour heating / cooling doing work from home in one house, versus the 37kwh which seems to be population level data where people generally use heating while they're at home, then turn it off and go to work and use the heating there instead. Workplace heating must surely be more efficient, unless I'm totally wrong somehow, that heating a single office with 200 workers would be more efficient than heating 200 individual homes. I'm assuming that many homes won't get heated during the day, and almost all workplaces won't be heated during the night.
xdvesper I'm jealous of the AU prices for solar. I just spent $27k CDN ($29 AU) for 7kw.
Ekko, I've tried to look into it before and I don't think there's a definitive answer why solar is so cheap in Australia. This article seems to say "The higher price tag in the US is primarily driven by the significant soft costs associated with purchasing the system, including the sales tax, permitting, inspection, interconnection, and profit margins. All these soft costs in the US account for 64% of the total cost, or USD 3/WDC for the 3-kilowatt system,”
Though I'm sure tariffs also play a part, Australia being such low population can't really sustain many domestic industries so we're all in on this free trade thing, while the US and Canada heavily tax products coming out of Asia.
posted by xdvesper at 2:00 AM on September 25
Yes Biffa that is correct however the way I'm looking at it, I'm comparing my 9kwh for 24 hour heating / cooling doing work from home in one house, versus the 37kwh which seems to be population level data where people generally use heating while they're at home, then turn it off and go to work and use the heating there instead. Workplace heating must surely be more efficient, unless I'm totally wrong somehow, that heating a single office with 200 workers would be more efficient than heating 200 individual homes. I'm assuming that many homes won't get heated during the day, and almost all workplaces won't be heated during the night.
Sure, but Mackay is the sum of the heat you use at home (and in the UK, home heating is 80% of your home consumption, ~zero for AC) + daytime heating and AC for offices, schools, shops, etc + food heating at home & businesses + industrial scale process heat + other refrigeration/chilling in the food supply chain, etc + other things I'm not thinking of. So, heat per cubicle is most likely lower than heat per house, but you are using heat at both places at different times of the week, and there is a lot more heating and cooling across society, so the overall listing per person per day is so much higher than just home consumption.
posted by biffa at 4:14 AM on September 25 [1 favorite]
Sure, but Mackay is the sum of the heat you use at home (and in the UK, home heating is 80% of your home consumption, ~zero for AC) + daytime heating and AC for offices, schools, shops, etc + food heating at home & businesses + industrial scale process heat + other refrigeration/chilling in the food supply chain, etc + other things I'm not thinking of. So, heat per cubicle is most likely lower than heat per house, but you are using heat at both places at different times of the week, and there is a lot more heating and cooling across society, so the overall listing per person per day is so much higher than just home consumption.
posted by biffa at 4:14 AM on September 25 [1 favorite]
The cost of training a state-of-the-art model presumably continues to increase because the strategy of most of the top companies has become to throw literally exponentially more computing resources at each generation to see just how far they can take the paradigm of, uh, throwing more computing resources at the problem.
So it's really just Moore's Law II: The Revenge? We keep throwing exponential amounts of processing power in order to achieve modest results?
I know there are people whose are desperate for that to be true, because it would make them oligarch-level rich if true.
This. It's the same fucking business strategy behind Uber. Keep throwing resources at something until you win the winner-take-all contest. It's like the world's shittiest Highlander reboot.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:45 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
So it's really just Moore's Law II: The Revenge? We keep throwing exponential amounts of processing power in order to achieve modest results?
I know there are people whose are desperate for that to be true, because it would make them oligarch-level rich if true.
This. It's the same fucking business strategy behind Uber. Keep throwing resources at something until you win the winner-take-all contest. It's like the world's shittiest Highlander reboot.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:45 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
It's awesome. We're going to solve global warming with VC/investor giant piles of money being committed to utilities up front to getting nukes online
This is sort of where I am with the "AI" nonsense, which is really just yet another turn of the Silicon Valley investment-hype wheel.
Ever since "blockchain" popped, the usual SV suspects have been looking for their next big pump-and-dump, and LLM-based AI seems to be what they have settled on.
And these guys are very much on the "all publicity is good publicity" train. Creating controversy, pissing people off, threatening an entire economic sector or two, a smattering of Congressional hearings, maybe getting some laws passed to "contain" this "powerful" new magic they've created… it's all good for them.
Having seen this show before, now at least half a dozen times in my adult life, I've lost any faith I probably never had in our society actually regulating this sort of behavior. It's das capital's world, and the rest of us just live here.
The trick to living in a society that is defined by this ridiculous hype cycle is to try and siphon off any personal and social good that you can from the SV froth as it waxes and peaks, and then buy the cheap surplus shit that gets dumped as it wanes and retreats before the next cycle starts.
And I don't mean just Herman Miller Aeron chairs (although those are nice—are the SV d-bags still into them?) or free 20-minute delivery of single candy bars, although you should get stuff like that while the getting is good. But if we can direct even a small amount of that frothy more-money-than-sense capital into building useful shit that outlives the boom/bust hype cycle, we should definitely do that.
If we can make Microsoft take some of its dumb AI money and put it into refurbishing a nuclear power plant, which will certainly outlast the AI hype—and in all likelihood, Microsoft in general—we would be stupid not to do that.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:25 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
This is sort of where I am with the "AI" nonsense, which is really just yet another turn of the Silicon Valley investment-hype wheel.
Ever since "blockchain" popped, the usual SV suspects have been looking for their next big pump-and-dump, and LLM-based AI seems to be what they have settled on.
And these guys are very much on the "all publicity is good publicity" train. Creating controversy, pissing people off, threatening an entire economic sector or two, a smattering of Congressional hearings, maybe getting some laws passed to "contain" this "powerful" new magic they've created… it's all good for them.
Having seen this show before, now at least half a dozen times in my adult life, I've lost any faith I probably never had in our society actually regulating this sort of behavior. It's das capital's world, and the rest of us just live here.
The trick to living in a society that is defined by this ridiculous hype cycle is to try and siphon off any personal and social good that you can from the SV froth as it waxes and peaks, and then buy the cheap surplus shit that gets dumped as it wanes and retreats before the next cycle starts.
And I don't mean just Herman Miller Aeron chairs (although those are nice—are the SV d-bags still into them?) or free 20-minute delivery of single candy bars, although you should get stuff like that while the getting is good. But if we can direct even a small amount of that frothy more-money-than-sense capital into building useful shit that outlives the boom/bust hype cycle, we should definitely do that.
If we can make Microsoft take some of its dumb AI money and put it into refurbishing a nuclear power plant, which will certainly outlast the AI hype—and in all likelihood, Microsoft in general—we would be stupid not to do that.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:25 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
food security and energy independence basically only work if the UK material standard of living shrinks, their population shrinks
This is really the sustainability endgame, right there.
And oddly, it's really the only direction that developed, high-tech economies are even vaguely on-track for. (Which, ironically, is less because of any overarching technocratic policies, but because of the sum of individual choices that we've just barely enabled reliably this century.) And therefore, to some minds, it's an unacceptable crisis.
You can have a high-tech, high-energy society sustainably, but you just can't have too much of it. And it sure as hell can't grow indefinitely. But there is presumably a standard-of-living (which we can view as largely a function of the amount of usable energy a person can command) that is achievable with sustainable sources. But the more people you have who want to live at that level, the more pressure there is going to be to invoke non-sustainable primary sources.
Being something of a fan of midcentury environmentalism, I think there was a vague consensus among technological optimists, at least up until the 1970s, that the world would eventually balance population against energy sources, with the "overshoot" into unsustainable territory managed through nuclear power—which isn't technically sustainable, but is sustainable over the period of a few human generations if managed properly—while we got the whole world comfortable with the idea of birth control and not pumping out more children than parents. If you read some books from the 50s and 60s, some authors apparently thought we could hit a global population inflection point by the turn of the millenium. (Based on somewhat rosy projections of the world uptake of contraception, based on how quickly it became commonplace in the US and Europe once widely available postwar. Oops.)
We certainly shot through that particular finish line, but overall, population peak-and-decrease via widespread voluntary contraception still seems like the best path to sustainability that doesn't involve magical thinking, pin our hopes on technologies that don't exist and never may (carbon capture, superefficient solar, fusion power, etc.), or involve mass death through engineered famine or warfare.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:47 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
This is really the sustainability endgame, right there.
And oddly, it's really the only direction that developed, high-tech economies are even vaguely on-track for. (Which, ironically, is less because of any overarching technocratic policies, but because of the sum of individual choices that we've just barely enabled reliably this century.) And therefore, to some minds, it's an unacceptable crisis.
You can have a high-tech, high-energy society sustainably, but you just can't have too much of it. And it sure as hell can't grow indefinitely. But there is presumably a standard-of-living (which we can view as largely a function of the amount of usable energy a person can command) that is achievable with sustainable sources. But the more people you have who want to live at that level, the more pressure there is going to be to invoke non-sustainable primary sources.
Being something of a fan of midcentury environmentalism, I think there was a vague consensus among technological optimists, at least up until the 1970s, that the world would eventually balance population against energy sources, with the "overshoot" into unsustainable territory managed through nuclear power—which isn't technically sustainable, but is sustainable over the period of a few human generations if managed properly—while we got the whole world comfortable with the idea of birth control and not pumping out more children than parents. If you read some books from the 50s and 60s, some authors apparently thought we could hit a global population inflection point by the turn of the millenium. (Based on somewhat rosy projections of the world uptake of contraception, based on how quickly it became commonplace in the US and Europe once widely available postwar. Oops.)
We certainly shot through that particular finish line, but overall, population peak-and-decrease via widespread voluntary contraception still seems like the best path to sustainability that doesn't involve magical thinking, pin our hopes on technologies that don't exist and never may (carbon capture, superefficient solar, fusion power, etc.), or involve mass death through engineered famine or warfare.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:47 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
Sure, but Mackay is the sum of the heat you use at home (and in the UK, home heating is 80% of your home consumption, ~zero for AC) + daytime heating and AC for offices, schools, shops, etc + food heating at home & businesses + industrial scale process heat + other refrigeration/chilling in the food supply chain, etc + other things I'm not thinking of. So, heat per cubicle is most likely lower than heat per house, but you are using heat at both places at different times of the week, and there is a lot more heating and cooling across society, so the overall listing per person per day is so much higher than just home consumption.
Its not the done thing to quote oneself here, but I think this is interesting as a discussion point because the difference between what we get in our energy bills and the sort of figures that Mackay generates are similar to the distinction that needs to be made in addressing organisational national emissions from the Scope 1, 2 and 3 inventories. Scope 1 is basically what an organisation uses directly; Fuel in cars & trucks, fuel for heating premises, fuel in any manufacturing process (plus "fugitive emissions " like cow farts if you are a dairy farmer. Scope 2 is indirect emissions, arising from energy you buy in. Scope 3 is also indirect but way more difficult to measure and address. All the emissions relating to the making and transport of anything you buy: tables, pasta, toothpaste, car, beer, fancy pants, girders, courgette spiralizers - anything). Mackay is inventorying energy across society and averaging it per person, not just counting what comes in to the central heating in a pipe.
posted by biffa at 8:56 AM on September 25 [1 favorite]
Its not the done thing to quote oneself here, but I think this is interesting as a discussion point because the difference between what we get in our energy bills and the sort of figures that Mackay generates are similar to the distinction that needs to be made in addressing organisational national emissions from the Scope 1, 2 and 3 inventories. Scope 1 is basically what an organisation uses directly; Fuel in cars & trucks, fuel for heating premises, fuel in any manufacturing process (plus "fugitive emissions " like cow farts if you are a dairy farmer. Scope 2 is indirect emissions, arising from energy you buy in. Scope 3 is also indirect but way more difficult to measure and address. All the emissions relating to the making and transport of anything you buy: tables, pasta, toothpaste, car, beer, fancy pants, girders, courgette spiralizers - anything). Mackay is inventorying energy across society and averaging it per person, not just counting what comes in to the central heating in a pipe.
posted by biffa at 8:56 AM on September 25 [1 favorite]
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posted by autopilot at 2:00 AM on September 24 [18 favorites]