That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.
Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.
The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.
Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.
If we tame fusion at scale this could become an actual issue in the far future. As it stands we have nothing that can out-scale solar or wind. Fission maybe if we went all in on breeders and stuff but that would not be cost competitive with renewables plus batteries. Breeder cycle fission is complex and expensive.
Hopefully if we get really good at fusion we will go LARP The Expanse with it instead of boiling the ocean.
Only if exponential growth continues, but population growth is already falling off a cliff and that is the ultimate driver.
If population stabilizes or contracts, then the only way this could happen is if per capita energy use continued to increase exponentially to the point that we were radiating enough heat to do this. That seems unlikely.
The only scenario I can imagine where per capita energy use goes that high is the "The Expanse LARP" scenario where people are rocketing around on fusion rockets, and that's not on Earth anymore so it doesn't matter.
What terrestrial products or services would demand power use per capita across the whole population that high?
This assumes the chips don’t get exponentially better.
GPUs are actually bad for AI. TPUs too. They’re available and general purpose but what you really want is something like a specialized tensor FPGA that can be loaded with the model. Memory and compute colocated.
There is research on this and a huge market but it takes a long time to go from design to prototype to production for something really novel. It’s also very expensive.
A lot of people are afraid AI is a big bubble. The more it becomes apparent that financial bubbles or not the tech is here to stay the more people will be comfortable making long term investments in building chips that are really optimal for it.
Even general chips get more efficient. Ten years ago my laptop was a lap roaster when I ran a big build on it. Now it’s barely warm and it’s twice as fast with four times the RAM.
Of course if there’s infinite demand for AI that won’t matter, but there isn’t infinite demand for anything.
This is the thing I don't get - lots of concerns about water shortages, but for some reason the price of water doesn't go up accordingly. In fact, large consumers of drinking water get a discount.
It should be the other way around: consumers and public interest things like hospitals should get preference and low prices for water, corporations should pay more and invest in their own water systems, like collecting rainwater, cleaning surface water (thinking of NL here), or desalinating seawater (and handling the waste responsibly instead of putting it back in the sea).
Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.
The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.
If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.
Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere compared to natural landscapes? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions and we have a lot of opportunity to put PV over asphalt and such, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, colleagues of Jerry Epstein, are committed to protect your children. From whom? Are they going to scan all emails and use AI to rat on their buddies?
It's ok because we're still paying for it. QoS degradation is worth it. No need to have 99.999% then you can have 90.84% and still people to pay for it.
Also, even when using local models in ollama or lmstudio, prompts are proxied via their domain, so never put anything sensitive even when using local setup
To be clear, that seems to be about the webui only, the TUI doesn't seem affected. I haven't fully investigated this myself, but when I run opencode (1.2.27-a6ef9e9-dirty) + mitmproxy and using LM Studio as the backend, when starting opencode + executing a prompt, I only see two requests, both to my LM Studio instance, both normal inference requests (one for the chat itself + one for generating the title).
Everything you read on the internet seems exaggerated today. Especially true for reddit, and especially especially true for r/LocalLllama which is a former shadow of itself. Today it's mostly sockpuppets pushing various tools and models, and other sockpuppets trying to push misinformation about their competitors tools/models.
I don't get it. Shouldn't this be done at the ISP level? (Well, arguably it should not be done at all, but...)
Otherwise each company, everywhere in the world, no matter how small, has to follow the arbitrary demands of every nation state? How does that make any sense?
It’s really kind of unfortunate that people ignore the fact that the ruling powers seem to always follow the same MO, yet everyone falls for it over and over again; first they go after the dregs that they’ve made beyond the pale for pearl clutching polite company, e.g., I think over a year ago, when the German government first went after Gab followed by something like, if not Ofcom itself.
I don’t recall the outcome exact outcome or what has happened since, but I think Gab basically told them off in a similar way, i.e., “ummmm, this is America, silly Europeans” and may have even submitted the foreign demand letters to Congress and for whatever reason may have still geo-blocked the UK and at the same time has blocked VPN IPs because they found it effective at blocking pornography and the bad actors who emanated from a certain country. The effect though is that they’ve effectively barred the UK from participating in free speech in America if that’s still the current state of things. I suspect that is exactly what the tyrannical forces have worked out too, and which is why they’re demanding something other than just geo-blocking.
If you agree to VPN blocking, you effectively enforce the geo-block as well as unmasking users for five-eye de facto domestic surveillance. But they only came after those horrible horrible “Nazis” that insist on their rights to free speech, “…and I did not speak out.”
The point is, regardless of what one thinks of Gab, the powerful and tyrannical elements clearly go after those the mainstream population hates due to the two minutes of hate, so to say, which people have been conditioned to loathe; where the tyrants refine their tactics and the strategy, and practice and normalize the process for when they are ready to go after the mainstream populace… which seems to be approaching. And then the mainstream people are shocked and surprised because they believe it all came out of nowhere, when they just ignored it all along.
This of course is not just limited to the digital realm, the tyrannical forces will always come after scapegoats, and the exposed and low hanging fruit, or and even deliberately cause the “troublemakers” to identify themselves so they can be tracked, monitored, and picked off if need be.
This is not new, and people seem to fall for the same tricks over and over and over.
The fact that unsympathetic targets are the first to be targeted need not be viewed as strategic. Other targets would be defended, which is a reason not to target them. Unsympathetic targets lack defenses and are therefore most likely to be targeted, all other things being equal.
We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.
I don't think it needs to be seen as "strategic", beyond that most effective people start with a proof of concept that is low risk. You are right, being pragmatic is surely the primary motivation to follow that pattern, but that too is inherently strategic. The strategy being; plan, test deploy the process, measure responses, adjust, redeploy, etc. We know this inherently strategic process even if it is a bit different outside of software development.
I mean, this logic is how USA walked itself into fascism. Right wing extremists were poster child for who must be protected at all cost, systematically, regardless of how it affected everyone else. And now they are in government taking a swing on everyone else.
Damn, good luck next time. Maybe use some of the $416 billion 2025 revenue to invest into that project?
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