Save The Planet
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Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.
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They’re literally the same thing.
A traditional air conditioner provides only cooling by moving heat out of your home, primarily contributing to summer electricity peaks. In contrast, a heat pump offers both heating and cooling by simply reversing the refrigerant flow, making it a more versatile and energy-efficient solution for year-round comfort. While heat pumps increase overall electricity demand by electrifying heating, they also shift energy consumption patterns, creating a new winter peak for the grid to manage. However, this increased electrical load presents an opportunity for demand response, allowing smart heat pumps to adjust usage during peak times to balance the grid. Ultimately, widespread heat pump adoption, powered by a decarbonising electricity supply, is crucial for reducing fossil fuel reliance and achieving a greener energy system, albeit requiring significant grid infrastructure upgrades.
Is this an AI-generated response? On a post demonizing AI? Lol bold
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I don’t disagree with you but most of the energy that people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them. Once they are trained it is fast to get what you need out of it, but making the next version takes a long time.
people complain about AI using is used to train the models, not use them
that's absolutely not true. In fact, most people who complain don't even know the difference.
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There is this system where we can compare the relative value of an activity and its relative impact on other activities. It's called prices. When you let them work correctly you don't have to guilt people.
Data Center used LOBBYING.
It's super effective!
Data Center's power bill was reduced by 75%!
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You know they have to train AI, right? Thousands of hours devouring our personal data on sites like Reddit and Facebook as well as copyrighted works just to get a LLM that's mostly usable but will still hallucinate...
Yes, and you do the training once, and then millions of people use it. And it also isn't "thousands of hours". Compare that to AC - where each home runs a 3.2kW device that runs for hours, times a million people. It comes nowhere close.
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1 prompt is avg 1Wh of electricity -> typical AC runs avg 1,500 W = 2.4 seconds of AC per prompt.
Energy capacity is really not a problem first world countries should face. We have this solved and you're just taking the bait of blaming normal dudes using miniscule amounts of power while billionaires fly private jets for afternoon getaways.
A 12000 BTUs inverter split system at peak capacity requires less than 1500 W to run. After it reaches equilibrium it drops the power requirement significantly.
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I'm going to run my AC all day (thermostat set to 75-76° F) no matter what the AI companies do anyway. Because it's hitting 90° F at 9:00am already by the end of June. July will be hotter as usual.
I'm not using AI for anything and I don't need it for anything. They can go ahead and turn off their bullshit for all I care. I may even buy a second AC unit for a backup in case my main one fails.
Yes, yes you will. But you (and other people like you) running your AC contributes more power draw than the boogeyman AI does. The point is "limit your AC usage" is valid and saying "but but but AI!!!!" isn't.
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Sorry, maybe I wasn't being clear.
My area has solar incentive programs that are run through the energy utility - meaning the state makes available zero-interest loans for the purposes of solar installation, but those loans are only available through an entity partnered with our utility. They limit the number of homes in each area that are eligible through this program so that solar generation never exceeds demand. Our home was eligible through the program, so I had them come out to give us a quote. Our utility is also transitioning to surge pricing and smart metering, so there's a pretty high demand for solar installation in my area and they know that they'd lose out on a lot of revenue if everyone installed their own solar systems.
A part of that process was them asking for the last year of energy bills, along with taking measurements and doing daylighting analysis on our roof area. At the end, they gave us a quote for a 15 year loan for the equipment and installation, and it just so happened that the monthly payment was the same as our average energy bill. I work in AEC and I know what solar panels cost, and they had inflated their price by more than double what it would cost at market rate.
Of course I could install my own panels, but it would be out-of-pocket and I would have to seek out and apply for out-of-state incentive programs myself, but I can't afford the up-front costs and the loan terms don't make sense for how long we'll be in this house. Id love nothing more than to do it myself, even at a loss if that's what it took, but I have a spouse that is less spiteful than I am.
more than double what it would cost at market rate
I definitely paid more for labor than for materials. My payoff time is about 13 years with a Tesla Powerwall 3, maybe a bit less now that I have an EV. I had a team of 4 guys plus an electrician here for about five days.
I did go with a slightly more reputable company that charged slightly more, but I would have gone elsewhere if it was a huge difference.
Maybe I should get around to making a post in [email protected] or something, even though it isn't very punk.
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79 is like my ideal temp. Cities must love me.
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Data Center used LOBBYING.
It's super effective!
Data Center's power bill was reduced by 75%!
Which is why the "let them work correctly" part. It gets completely botched over and over again
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Classic neo-liberalism - privatize the benefits, socialize the costs.
Corporations : "We should get to gobble all power with our projects... and you should have the personal responsibility to reduce power usage even though it would - at best - only improve things at the very edges of the margins... and then we can get away with whatever we want."
Just like with paper straws. You get crappy straws and they hope you feel like you're helping the environment (even though the plastic straws account for like 0.00002% of plastic waste generated) ... meanwhile 80% of the actual pollution and waste being generated by like 12 corporations gets to continue.
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I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days
The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.
The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.
I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.
The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city's solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn't tried scamming me.
FUCK private energy providers.
Peak load of households is not during peak solar power generation. Households installing pv isn't a solution to what you described.
Today, you could also use a battery to buy power during mid day and use it in the evening when you need it the most.
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AC typically provides real value. (Not counting when people air condition empty rooms, but that's also a thing corporations typically do more).
AI is often worthless or counter productive.
That's your opinion. Fact is that AI is used worldwide by lots of people to great success. It doesn't work everywhere, it isn't "a tool to end all tools", but saying AI is worthless when using air conditioning isn't, is straight up false, especially if you take into account how much power is used by people / businesses using AC and how much power is used by AI.
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Let’s do the math.
Let’s take an SDXl porn model, with no 4-step speed augmentations, no hand written quantization/optimization schemes like svdquant, or anything, just an early, raw inefficient implementation:
So 2.5 seconds on an A100 for a single image. Let’s batch it (because that’s what’s done in production), and run it on the now popular H100 instead, and very conservatively assume 1.5 seconds per single image (though it’s likely much faster).
That’s on a 700W SXM Nvidia H100. Usually in a server box with 7 others, so let’s say 1000W including its share of the CPU and everything else. Let’s say 1400W for networking, idle time, whatever else is going on.
That’s 2 kJ, or 0.6 watt hours.
…Or about the energy of browsing Lemmy for 30-60 seconds. And again, this is an high estimate, but also a fraction of a second of usage for a home AC system.
…So yeah, booby pictures take very little energy, and the usage is going down dramatically.
Training light, open models like Deepseek or Qwen or SDXL takes very little energy, as does running them. The GPU farms they use are tiny, and dwarfed by something like an aluminum plant.
What slurps energy is AI Bros like Musk or Altman trying to brute force their way to a decent model by scaling out instead of increasing efficiency, and mostly they’re blowing that out of proportion to try the hype the market and convince them AI will be expensive and grow infinitely (so people will give them money).
That isn’t going to work very long. Small on-device models are going to be too cheap to compete.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2kc978dg
So this is shit, they should be turning off AI farms too, but your porn images are a drop in the bucket compared to AC costs.
TL;DR: There are a bazillion things to flame AI Bros about, but inference for small models (like porn models) is objectively not one of them.
The problem is billionaires.
Thx for doing the math
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let's not use the term "efficiency" with humans making art, please. you're not helping anyone with that argument, you're just annoying both sides.
Humans at least run on renewable energy.
The computer you draw your art on, not so much. Reject modern art, embrace traditional carvings and cave paintings!
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Generating an image of a girl with 5 tits takes like 400W running for a minute. Yet another post showing people who have no idea how AI works, why it uses electrical power and how much power it uses.
A minute? Wtf kind of model are you running for it to take that long? Are you trying to generate a 16k image or something?
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1 prompt is avg 1Wh of electricity -> typical AC runs avg 1,500 W = 2.4 seconds of AC per prompt.
Energy capacity is really not a problem first world countries should face. We have this solved and you're just taking the bait of blaming normal dudes using miniscule amounts of power while billionaires fly private jets for afternoon getaways.
They are blaming the billionaires (or their companies), for making the thing nobody wanted so they can make money off of it. The guy making a five-breasted woman is a side effect.
And sure, that one image only uses a moderate amount of power. But there still exists giant data centers for only this purpose, gobbling up tons of power and evaporating tons of water for power and cooling. And all this before considering the training of the models (which you better believe they’re doing continuously to try to come up with better ones).
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A minute? Wtf kind of model are you running for it to take that long? Are you trying to generate a 16k image or something?
I'm generalizing for people who don't know how long it takes or how much power it uses. The point is a 3.2kW AC will take a lot more power than a PC generating a picture, going further, training the model will take less power than the millions of ACs people use and try to justify as "but AI uses power, and so can I!"
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Peak load of households is not during peak solar power generation. Households installing pv isn't a solution to what you described.
Today, you could also use a battery to buy power during mid day and use it in the evening when you need it the most.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]In moderate climates in the US, peak loads are typically the hottest and sunniest hours of the day since condenser units are the most energy-hungry appliance in most homes. Clouds notwithstanding, peak solar generation would typically align (or closely align) with peak load time.
Batteries would also help a lot - they should definitely be subsidizing the installation of those as well but unfortunately they aren't yet (at least not in my state).
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They are blaming the billionaires (or their companies), for making the thing nobody wanted so they can make money off of it. The guy making a five-breasted woman is a side effect.
And sure, that one image only uses a moderate amount of power. But there still exists giant data centers for only this purpose, gobbling up tons of power and evaporating tons of water for power and cooling. And all this before considering the training of the models (which you better believe they’re doing continuously to try to come up with better ones).
nobody wanted according to whom? It's literally the most used product of this century stop deluding yourself.
All datacenters in the world combined use like 5% of our energy now and the value we get from computing far outweighs any spending we have here. You're better off not buying more trash from Temu rather than complain about software using electricity. This is ridiculous.
