Save The Planet
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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.
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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.
ok so 5 seconds of AC then? my point still stands.
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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.
I'm factoring in labor. It was an extremely bad deal - they were praying on the fact most home owners do not have familiarity with solar installation pricing.
Like I said, I would love to still do it on my own, but it just doesn't make sense for our household.
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Only because of brute force over efficient approaches.
Again, look up Deepseek's FP8/multi GPU training paper, and some of the code they published. They used a microscopic fraction of what OpenAI or X AI are using.
And models like SDXL or Flux are not that expensive to train.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but they can get away with it because being rich covers up internal dysfunction/isolation/whatever. Chinese trainers, and other GPU constrained ones, are forced to be thrifty.
And I guess they need it to be inefficient and expensive, so that it remains exclusive to them. That's why they were throwing a tantrum at Deepseek, because they proved it doesn't have to be.
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If your meeting requires you to go to the Bahamas, so be it. But there are doctors and nurses that have been travelling around the world, educators that travel, carers, archeologists. Yes, some will attempt to game the system, but there's a lot of good people doing vital work that need to travel.
Man, this is one I've tried to wrestle with multiple times. I feel like there are monumental benefits to trans-Atlantic/trans-Pacific recreational flights (really just most long international flights). Banning those would almost certainly increase feelings of isolation, and probably make the already-rampant xenophobia plaguing the world even worse. There really aren't viable alternatives to flying for getting across a multi-thousand-mile-wide ocean - boats are too slow for the average person, and building trains over the ocean is impractical. Maybe the focus should be on making planes more environmentally friendly, instead of outright banning them?
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Nah dawg im pretty sure the most used product this century is food.
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Look, we don't mind if you want to make a picture of a dude with five dicks, as an exercise in equality
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our city’s solar electric subsidy program
It sounds like there's two different things there. There's a solar installation (hardware, etc.), and there's likely some kind of net metering program (where they pay you or give you credit for electricity you generate). That paragraph sounds like the first, but the phrase sounds like the second.
You shouldn't have to go through them for the solar installation, if your conditions accommodate it. Granted, the conditions don't apply to everyone. You'll want to have a suitable roof that ideally faces south-ish, own your home, and plan to stay there for at least 10 years. In the US, you also kind of need to get it done within this calendar year, which is a rough ask, before the federal 30% tax credit goes away. But maybe you can find an installer that isn't trying to scam you quite as much.
(It's early and cloudy today.)
Your HA dashboard derailed this conversation for me. lol.
I would love to know more about the equipment you are using to push this info into your HA.
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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).
This is incorrect. Look up the “duck curve” or if you prefer real-world examples look at the California electricity market (CAISO) where they have an excellent “net demand curve” that illustrates the problem.
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Nah dawg im pretty sure the most used product this century is food.
the most used product of this century is actually your momma
