31–40 of 124 posts
It's been a while, but I don't recall any of the dotcom startups making deals with nuclear energy companies to buy out entire nuclear power stations: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla... And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude. The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told t…
> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…
Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate. Computers grow cheaper, we rebound by buying ones with higher capacity, but the overall price still shrinks. I bet the computer you used to post today cost much less than Colossus. Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead. You can stream films via 5G that you might not have done via 4G, but you might've streamed via W…
Am I missing something or has the need to vast GPU horsepower been solved ? Those requirements were not in DC's before and they're only going up. Whatever way you look at it, there's got to be an increase in power consumption somewhere no ?
As a counterpoint: look at crypto. The amount of power used by cryptocurrency has _not_ gone down, in fact it's increased.
> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…
Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large. I can easily agree that phones that have internet capabilities use more, as a whole, than those that didn't. The infrastructure needs were very different. But, especially if you are comparing to 4G technology, much of that infrastructure already had to distribute content th…
> But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste. If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market make…
> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy. It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot mo…
If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy. It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste. You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the…
Which is more important? Understanding what happened so far is impossible without data, and those trends can change. It depends on what new technologies people invent, and there are lots of smart researchers out there.
Armchair reasoning isn’t going tell us which trend is more important in the long term. We can imagine scenarios, but we shouldn’t be very confident about such predictions, and distrust other people’s confidence.
I do not accept this. It was once true under Proof-of-Work (typically ~1,000–2,000 kWh per transaction), not so much under Proof-of-Stake (typically 0.03–0.05 kWh per transaction).
Note that proof-of-stake may actually have a lower energy footprint than credit card or fiat banking transactions. An IMF analysis [1] pegged core processing for credit card companies at ~0.04 kWh per transaction (based on data centers and settlement systems), but noted that including user payment means like physical cards and terminals could increase this by about two orders of magnitude—though even then, it doesn't extend to bank branches or employee overhead - an overhead not implicit in decentralized finance.
[1] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/063/2022/006/arti...
At first, DW's estimate was one drop of potable water was consumed for each query (normal queries, not more expensive ones)
The Google, I don't know who allowed the sincerity, God bless him, released a first hand analysis of their water consumption, and it is higher that the one drop estimate: 5 drops
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...