311–320 of 337 posts
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yea lets not do that. if we all decided not to have kids we would not have to worry at all about the fucking environment eh? :)
I’m not saying people shouldn’t have children. Just that if you do, you have to stop flying, go vegan, and sort your recycling properly for ever after!
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What's the upside of moralizing energy consumption, especially once it's 100% renewable. Why not just let the market decide? If I'm paying for it, why does anyone else get a say in how I use it?
Isn't that kind of a non-sequitur? The claim made was that renewable energy would still be a finite resource to some degree. It's possible that the available energy surplus will be too big for any decisions about usage to matter, but that's a strong claim and you're doing nothing to make it here. A lot of people believe in a higher power. If trusting in this supposed "market" brings you comfort and clarity in a compl…
The section on training feels weak, and that's what the discussion is mainly about. Many companies are now trying to train models as big as GPT-4. OpenAI is training models that may well be even much larger than GPT-4 (o1 and o3). Framing it as a one-time cost doesn't seem accurate - it doesn't look like the big companies will stop training new ones any time soon, they'll keep doing it. So one model might only be use…
I am sure that’s intentional, because this article is the same thing we see from e/acc personalities any time the environmental impact is brought up. Deflection away from what actually uses power and pretending the entire system is just an API like anything else.
"personal carbon footprint" is a term invented by BP and is the single hack that derailed the environment discussion by making people personally responsible and removing the actual polluters from the discussion.
The part on training is misleading and full of shit. Training is not a "one-time cost". There is an implied never-ending need for training. LLMs are useless (for one of their main purposes) if the models get stale. I can use Musk's own argument on this one. Each model is a plane, fully built, that LLM researchers made into a disposable asset destined to be replaced by a newly built plane on the next training. Just in…
what does "water used by data center" even mean? Does it consume the water somehow? What does it turn into? Steam? So uploading a 1GB file boils away nearly 1 liter of water? Or is it turned into bits somehow in some kind of mass to energy conversion? I sorta doubt that. Also this means data centers would have cooling towers like some power stations. Are we talking about the cooling towers of power stations? I think…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yea lets not do that. if we all decided not to have kids we would not have to worry at all about the fucking environment eh? :)
I’m not saying people shouldn’t have children. Just that if you do, you have to stop flying, go vegan, and sort your recycling properly for ever after!
Also beware telling people "not to have children". I know population is the biggest treat because it's a multiplicative factor on hour lifestyle, that we don't like to downgrade. However saying "not having children" is easily arguable as bdangubic did and he's still a bit right: we don't want everybody stop having children altogether. However talking about population have the power to seed ideas in others head, and let themselves make the relation with the number of children they'll have.
You convince people by making them convince themselves :)
The part on training is misleading and full of shit. Training is not a "one-time cost". There is an implied never-ending need for training. LLMs are useless (for one of their main purposes) if the models get stale. I can use Musk's own argument on this one. Each model is a plane, fully built, that LLM researchers made into a disposable asset destined to be replaced by a newly built plane on the next training. Just in…
If we're trying to figure out a reasonable number for how much energy a single ChatGPT search uses, it seems weird to factor in all future training of all future models. It would be like trying to figure out the carbon cost of a single plane ride and trying to figure out what fraction of additional plane flights that one ticket incentivizes. It's too murky to put a clear number on and probably doesn't add much to the…
The environment is not a personal issue. You can't solve it just for you. The whole idea of making it personal is so that a collective aspect of it would flourish. What are you trying to flourish in people's minds?
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Voluntary conservation was only working by accident and guilt tripping never works. The grid needs to become clean so that we can have new industries.
Yep, this is the real answer. It's also the only answer. The big fiction was everyone getting hopped on the idea that "karma" was going to be real, and people's virtue would be correctly identified by overt environmentalism rather then action. Fossil fuel companies won , and they won in about 1980s when BP paid an advertising firm to come up with "personal carbon footprint" as a meaningful metric. Basically destroyed…
~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion. point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating m…