How tf can a meter shut of an applience? Did you also have smart breakers from them?
Anyway absolutely ridiculous
It's separate from the main meter and connected directly at the condenser unit.
It monitors power draw and acts as a relay when the provider sends a shutoff signal. The thermostat thinks the system is still going, and the fans still push air through the vents, but the coils aren't being cooled anymore so the air gets hot and musty.
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.
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.
This curve has changed somewhat since this study in 2016. More efficient home insulation, remote working, and energy-efficient cooling systems have large impact in this pattern. But assuming you have a well-insulated home, setting your thermostat to maintain a consistent temperature throughout the day will shift this peak earlier and lower the peak load at sunset, when many people are returning home. More efficient heat pumps with variable pressure capabilities also helps this a lot, too.
Given just how many variables are involved, it's better to assume peak cooling load to be mid-day and work toward equalizing that curve, rather than reacting to transient patterns that are subject to changes in customer behavior. Solar installations are just one aspect of this mitigation strategy, along with energy storage, energy-efficient cooling systems, and more efficient insulation and solar heat gain mitigation strategies.
If we're discussing infrastructure improvements we might as well discuss home efficiency improvements as well.
I watch big state and national grid loads (for fun) and I see two distinct peaks: 7-8AM when everyone goes to work, and then around 5-7 PM when people commute home and heat up dinner.
Otherwise it's a linear diagonal curve coinciding with temperatures.

I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
Why do you want a subsidy for batteries? Installing batteries at a large scale at homes is incredibly expensive compared to an off site battery. Especially with regards to the move towards hydrogen.
For the same reason we want to subsidize solar production in residential construction even though it's more efficient and cost-productive to do it at-scale. Having energy production and storage at the point of use reduces strain on power infrastructure and helps alleviate the types of load surging ayyy is talking about.
It's not a replacement for modernizing our power grids, too - it simply helps to make them more resilient.
Can also just overcool if well insulated.
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.)

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 !Solarpunk@slrpnk.net 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.
I'll write up a post now in !solarpunk@slrpnk.net
Smart meters with this ability are great, when done well. Without them they have the ability to turn off all of your power if they need to. If they can't keep up with demand, they have to turn things off. It's better for them to have the ability to shut off a few appliances or decrease your AC usage rather than shut people down entirely.
People always complain that they don't want to give the energy company power over their electricity, but they already do. However, without this their power is total, and only total. With it they can moderate it. It's better if everyone has a smart meter instead of only people who care about others, and greedy people only look out for themselves.
I agree though, fuck private providers.
I agree though, fuck private providers
If it was a public utility i'd feel very differently.
Just like screens in cars, and MASSIVE trucks. We don't want this. Well, some dumbass Americans do, but intelligent people don't need a 32 ton 6 wheel drive pickup to haul jr to soccer.
Massive trucks? They need those trucks for truck stuff, like this giant dilhole parking with his wife to go to Aldi today. Not even a flag on the end of that ladder, it filled a whole spot by itself.

My couch wouldn't fit in that bed, and every giant truck I see is sparkling shiny and looks like it hasn't done a day of hard labor, much like the drivers.
You underestimate the number of people you wouldn't class as intelligent. If no one wanted massive trucks, they would have disappeared off the market within a couple of years because they wouldn't sell. They're ridiculous, inefficient hulks that basically no one really needs but they sell, so they continue being made.
It's actually because small trucks were regulated out of the US market. Smaller vehicles have more stringent mileage standards that trucks aren't able to meet. That forces companies to make all their trucks bigger, because bigger vehicles are held to a different standard.
So the people who want or need a truck are pushed to buy a larger one.
Do you have any data to support this is actually the case? I see this all the time but absolutely zero evidence but a 2015 Axios survey with no methodology or dataset. Nearly every article cites this one industry group with 3 questions that clearly aren't exclusive categorical and could be picked apart by a high school student.
I ask this question nearly every time I see this comment and in 5 years I have not found a single person who can actually cite where this came from or a complete explanation of even hope they got to that conclusion.
The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.
The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.
Then you put it beside a truck from 30 years ago that's a quarter the overall size but has the same bed capacity and towing power along with much better visibility instead of not being able to see the child you're about to run over. And then you understand what people mean when they say massive trucks - giant ridiculously unnecessary things that are all about being a status symbol and dodging regulations rather than practicality.
Absolutely 100% incorrect on towing. The 95 top f150 towed about 7700 compared to 13500 today. That's an f350 in 95. It'll also fit a family of 4 comparable to a full size sedan eliminating any need of a secondary vehicle. The old f150/1500s were miserable in the back.
As for the safety I find the argument disingenuous not based on reality. Roughly 160 kids were killed in 23 with the EU27. It was 220 in the US. Much of that could be correlated to traffic density as well.
Country / Region Est. Fatalities/Year Child Pop. (0–14) Fatalities per Million
United States ~225 ~61 million ~3.7 United Kingdom ~22 ~11.5 million ~1.9 Canada ~12 ~6 million ~2.0 Australia ~11 ~4.8 million ~2.3 Germany ~20 ~11 million ~1.8 France ~18 ~11 million ~1.6 Japan ~18 ~15 million ~1.2 India ~3,000 (est.) ~360 million ~8.3 Brazil ~450 ~50 million ~9.0 European Union (EU-27) ~140–160 ~72 million ~2.0–2.2
I think we should offer incentives for manufacturers to start reducing size and weight, but things you are saying here aren't really based off of any data nor was it what I was asking.
I just wish I could find one person to show me what they are referencing when they repeat that seemingly false fact.
Let me express it to you with some numbers... The US is ~3.81 million square miles in size.
The F150 has sold 8.810 million units in the US in the last 10 years.
There are ~ 2.3 F150s fewer than 10 years old for every square mile in this country.
There is no way the majority of those trucks are going to job sites, or hauling junk, or pulling a trailer, just look around. That's not even all trucks. Thats just one model, from one brand, for a single 10 yr period.
These trucks are primarily sold as a vanity vehicle, and a minivan alternative, and that's what I think when I see one.
Nonsense. This is some Trump style math.
Oh, and you don't want it and want the stupid model? You can still buy it for 3x the price.
Do the new models even have non-"smart" fittings? I thought all the electronic chip plants closed during covid.
Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
Then I guess it's time to stop using Google!
And including the word "fuck" in your query no longer stops it.
If you can't search for "fuck," you can't search for "fuck google."
With apologies to Lenny Bruce.
I am trying to understand what Google's motivation for this even is. Surely it is not profitable to be replacing their existing, highly lucrative product with an inferior alternative that eats up way more power?
Their motivation is always ads. The ai response is longer and takes time to read so more time looking at their ads. If the answer is sufficient, you might not even click away to the search result.
AI is a potential huge bonanza to search sites, letting them suck up the ad revenue that used to goto the search results
They don't want to direct you to the thing you're searching for anymore because that means you're off their site quickly. Instead they want to provide themselves whatever it is you were searching for, so you will stay on their site and generate ad money. They don't care if their results are bad, because that just means you'll stick around longer, looking for an answer.
To make search more lucrative, they've enshitified it and went too far, but for a short time there were great quarterly resukts. Now they're slowly losing users. So they try AI to fix it up.
It's also a signal to the shareholders that they're implementing the latest buzzword, plus they're all worried AI will take off and they've missed that train.
Someone posted here a while ago - if you use the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 it doesn't include the AI search. I've updated my Google search links to use that instead of the base Google URL.
Both of which are probably training their own AI as middle men or stealing your search terms to tell Walmart what type of peanut butter you're most likely to buy if they could lock it up on a plastic covered shelve.
Probably, but neither automatically opt into AI replies. Ecosia has an AI chat, but it doesn't run until you go to it. Startpage has no AI option that I can see.
Ecosia has the upside of planting trees depending on user search rate. Not sure how true that is, though. I prefer startpage either way. Startpage claims to be privacy first, and I've never received tailored results or ads.
That doesn't mean they don't sell info. We can't know that for sure, but it sure as hell beats using Google and it's automatic AI searching.
Firefox has a plugin that blocks the AI results. It works pretty well most of the time, but it occasionally has hiccups when Google updates stuff or something.
I'll have to look for this, thanks!
I have to look stuff up for medical school (usually trying to find studies and whatnot) so the gemini results are just obnoxious garbage to me.
Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/
You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.
If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is: https:///search?q=%s
I have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.
Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.
There's no money in selling residential energy.
Meanwhile I'm down town I'm my city cleaning windows in office buildings that are 75% empty but the heat or ac is blasting on completely empty floors and most of the lights are on.
When I’m told there’s power issues and to conserve power I drop my AC to 60 and leave all my lights on. Only way for them to fix the grid is to break it.
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.
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.
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.
Bingo.
Altman et al want to kill open source AI for a monopoly.
This is what the entire AI research space already knew even before deepseek hit, and why they (largely) think so little of Sam Altman.
The real battle in the space is not AI vs no AI, but exclusive use by AI Bros vs. open models that bankrupt them. Which is what I keep trying to tell /c/fuck_ai, as the "no AI" stance plays right into the AI Bro's hands.
This is a specious argument.
Once a model has been trained once they don't just stop training. They refine and/or start training new models. Showing demand for these models is what has encouraged construction on 100s of new datacenters.
Thx for doing the math
I'm really OOTL when it comes to AI GHG impact. How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
How do their outputs stack up to traditional emitters like Ag and industry? I need a measuring stick
How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
These two things are so different.
Streaming services are extremely efficient; they tend to be encode-once and decode-on-user's-device. Video was for a long time considered a tough thing to serve, so engineers put tons of effort into making it efficient.
Crypto currency is literally designed to be as wasteful as possible while still being feasible. "Proof-of-work" (how Bitcoin and many other currencies operate) literally means that crypto mining algorithms must waste as much computation as they can get away with doing pointless operations just to say they tried. It's an abomination.
I legit don't know much about tech, and it ts showing. I didn't know streaming was so efficient.
What I. Trying to get at (I still have to read that article in the parent comment) is that how is AI any worse than crypto? As far as I can tell crypto impact, while bad, was relatively minor and it drastically decreased in popularity; it's kind of logical AI does the same, unless it's impact is way higher.
Meanwhile we have cargo ships burning bunker crude .
If you are expecting AI to not have much impact and turn out to be a bubble, then I guess there isn't much reason to believe it it will have much environmental impact. If you expect AI to not be a fad, then yeah it could have big environmental consequences if we can't find renewable power and coolant. If AI is all it is hyped up to be, then it would dwarf the rest of humanity's power consumption down to a footnote. So it really depends on how bullish you are about AI, or at least how bullish you expect the market to be going forward.
Regarding proof-of-work crypto, well, bitcoin is currently at its all-time high in terms of value, exceeding USD$100k/BTC. So I'm not sure I exactly buy the idea that it's less popular, though perhaps people aren't reporting on it as much. If the power consumption of crypto has levelled off, which I don't know if it has, then it might be because it's expensive to build a mining rig and the yield goes down over time as more bitcoin is mined. (It's presumably true of other proof-of-work crypto, too, but as more BTC is mined, the marginal yield of mining more BTC decreases.)
The UC paper above touches on that. I will link a better one if I find it.
But specifically:
streaming services
Almost all the power from this is from internet infrastructure and the end device. Encoding videos (for them to be played thousands/millions of times) is basically free since its only done once, with the exception being YouTube (which is still very efficient). Storage servers can handle tons of clients (hence they're dirt cheap), and (last I heard) Netflix even uses local cache boxes to shorten the distance.
TBH it must be less per capita than CRTs. Old TVs burned power like crazy.
Also, one other thing is that Nvidia clocks their GPUs (aka the world's AI accelerators) very inefficiently, because they have a pseudo monopoly, and they can.
It doesn't have to be this way, and likely wont in the future.
Not only are they cheaper than AC, but doing the math shows that they are more energy efficient than a human doing the same work, since humans operate at around 80-100W, 24 hours a day. (Assuming that the output is worth anything, of course.)
I think that’s going a bit far. ML models are tools to augment people, mostly.
Oh for sure. But if (for example) an artist can save time by tracing over an SDXL reference image, that is energy-efficient as well as time-efficient, despite most people claiming the contrary.
I feel like i've read a very similar argument somewhere recently, but i have difficulty remembering it precisely. It went something like this:

We're going away folks, and nothing of any true value will be lost, except all the species that did live in homeostasis with the Earth that we're taking with us in our species' avarice induced murder-suicide
Carlin had some good material, but this is an absolutely stupid mindset. We can cause an extreme level of ecological damage. Will the planet eventually recover? Quite possibly. But that's not a certainty, and in the mean time we're triggering a mass extinction precisely because irresponsible humans figure there's no way we can hurt the Earth and it's self-important hubris to think that we can.
But the time we're living through and the time we're heading into are all the proof we should need that it's actually hubris to assume our actions have no meaningful impact.
Citations: [1] Human extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction [2] What If Humans Suddenly Went Extinct? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOKTZISXhc [3] How long would it take for all traces of humans to be gone? https://www.reddit.com/... [4] What would happen to Earth if humans went extinct? https://www.livescience.com/... [5] How long before all human traces are wiped out? https://www.newscientist.com/... [6] Vanishing Act: What Earth Will Look Like 100 Years After Humans Disappear - Brilliantio https://brilliantio.com/... [7] If humans became extinct, how long would it take for all ... https://www.sciencefocus.com/... [8] Nature will need up to five million years to fill the gaps caused by man-made mass extinctions, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/... [9] Humans Will Go Extinct on Earth in 250 Million Years; Mass Extinction Will Occur Sooner if Burning Fossil Fuels Continues [Study] https://www.sciencetimes.com/... [10] How long would it take for all evidence of humanity to be ... https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/... [11] What Would Happen If Every Human On Earth Just Disappeared? https://www.scienceabc.com/...
We humans are a virus…a parasite and the earth will be better off once we are extinct.
I've been trying to write this comment the more concise possible, I'm trying my best. "We're going away", yes, that's true. No matter what we are leaving this place, but, that doesn't mean that the last days of humanity have to be surrounded by pollution and trash. All I can get of that quote in the image is that we should let big companies shit on us till we die.
"let"
The sociopath fascist capitalists won. They have multilayered protection from us from propaganda dividing us and turning us on one another without end to government capture and having the exclusive use of state violence to protect the capital markets and literally having state sanctioned murder for for private profit. This isnt a war, this is a well oiled Orwellian occupation. The people surrendered half a century ago without terms and received the delusion that they'll be the rich ones one day herp derp.
We can't do anything about the misery they spread, and that sucks. We don't have to add to our misery by pretending there's hope and we can turn any of it around. They're going to do what we're going to do and short of being a lone "terrorist" that takes a pot shot at them like Luigi there's nothing to be done, because half of us are too cowardly and social opiate addicted(fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc) or too deluded and actually on the robber baron's side out of pick me mentality to take it as a rallying cry.
Only the planet itself, our shared habitat, can stop them. And it will, regardless of all the studies they kill, ecological treaties they betray, and all the propaganda they spread. The capitalists reign of terror will end when enough of their suckers are starving, not before.
Can't be soon enough, really. I'd rather we take fewer other species along with us.
I have a crazy theory that requests like these will actually push people to care more about and take action on global warming.
we had three tiddied aliens in total recall, like 40 years ago. we don't need AI to give us more tits.
we don't need … more tits.
Blasphemy!!

I should have figured the Rick and Morty episode was a reference to something.
Makes me think about South Park and watching it as it aired when I was a kid. There were so many things I missed because I hadn’t seen any of the source material for a lot of the jokes.
Watching it all again 25 years later and damn, even better the second time around when you’ve seen all the shit they’re parodying.
I didn't know Rick and Morty referenced this but I shouldn't be surprised. Same here with the missed references. It makes rewatching older content not just nostalgic but also a fun discovery.
Could someone please help me save some power and just post the image with the 5tits so I don't need to have it regenerated de novo?
I tried to make an image of a woman with 5 tits but got distracted and got married to a rock

That looks like fun. How do I play that AI?
It's from https://perchance.org/welcome and is super cool because it's like half a soul-less AI and half a super cool tool that gets people into programming and they actually care about the Internet because they encourage people to learn how to code their own ais and have fun with it and I would absolutely have DEVOURED it when I was 13 on Tumblr (I forgot my ADHD meds today sorry if I'm rambling)
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).
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.
Where are you getting your false information. Its certainly not the most used. And, the reason it's used at all is from advertising and ownership of the media by the billionaire class to shove the gibbity in our faces at every waking moment so people use it. They're losing money like never before on ai.
This level of collective delusion is crazy. I don't think any amount of stats will change your mind so you're clearly argueing in bad faith but sure:
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users says 5.2B monthly visits compared to Facebook 12.7 and Instagram's 7.5. Chatgpt is literally bigger than X.com already. Thats just one tool and LLM's have direct integrations in phones and other apps.
I really don't understand what's the point of purposefully lying here? We can all hate billionaires together without the need for this weird anti-intellectual bullshit.
People hate AI so much (for many good reasons!) that they can't see or accept the truth: many many people want to use it, not just "billionaires"
A lot of things are solved, but capitalism means that we need a profit motive to act. World hunger is another good example. We know how to make fertilizer and how to genetically alter crops to ensure we never have a crop failure. We have trains and refrigeration to take food anywhere we want. Pretty much any box that we need to check to solve this problem has been. The places that have food problems largely have to do with poverty, which at this point is a polite way to say "I won't make money, so I am okay with them starving"
Im not sure what's the point here? If we dont like LLMs and data centers using power then we use existing strategies that work like taxing their power use and subsidizing household power use which btw we're already doing almost everywhere around the world in some form or another.
The data centers are actually easier to negotiate and work with than something like factories or households where energy margins are much more brittle. Datacenter employs like 5 people and you can squeeze with policy to match social expectations - you can't do that with factories or households. So datacenter energy problem is not that difficult relatively speaking.
I am agreeing with you that the solutions exist, but the will to implement them is going to be the hard part. A big dampener is simply going to be the profit motive. There is more money in siding with the data center than a the households. Are households okay with an increasing in price? Data center is likely to manage that better, or even just pay a bribe to someone. I used food as another example of a problem that is solved. We can grow food without fail and build the rail to get it to where it needs. We just don't because need does not match profit expectation. There are talks of building nuclear power for some data centers, but such talk would not happen for normal households.
People definitely underestimate how cooperative big tech is relative to every other business mostly because big tech has a lot of money and very few expenses so friction is relatively a bigger bottle neck than almost any other industry. So I still think that pressuring openAi into green energy is easier than pressuring Volvo (or any manufacturer) which already is really brittle and has huge negotiation leverage in the form of jobs it provides.
Take a look at any other business niche and no one's comitting to green energy other than big tech. As you said yourself no other niche want to build their own nuclear reactors to satisfy their own green energy need.
I think its OK to hate on big tech because they're billionaires but people really lose sight here and complain about wrong things that distract from real much bigger issues and paints the entire movement as idiots.
Can we not all just organise to go and shut these places down?
I know she's exaggerating but this post yet again underscores how nobody understands that it is training AI which is computationally expensive. Deployment of an AI model is a comparable power draw to running a high-end videogame. How can people hope to fight back against things they don't understand?
She's not exaggerating, if anything she's undercounting the number of tits.
TBH most people still use old SDXL finetunes for porn, even with the availability of newer ones.
It's closer to running 8 high-end video games at once. Sure, from a scale perspective it's further removed from training, but it's still fairly expensive.
You can, but that's not the kind of LLM the meme is talking about. It's about the big LLMs hosted by large companies.
Well that's sort of half right. Yes you can run the smaller models locally, but usually it's the bigger models that we want to use. It would also be very slow on a typical gaming computer and even a high end gaming computer. To make it go faster not only is the hardware used in datacenters more optimised for the task, it's also a lot faster. This is both a speed increase per unit as well as more units being used than you would normally find in a gaming PC.
Now these things aren't magic, the basic technology is the same, so where does the speed come from? The answer is raw power, these things run insane amounts of power through them, with specialised cooling systems to keep them cool. This comes at the cost of efficiency.
So whilst running a model is much cheaper compared to training a model, it is far from free. And whilst you can run a smaller model on your home PC, it isn't directly comparable to how it's used in the datacenter. So the use of AI is still very power hungry, even when not counting the training.
True, and that's how everyone who is able should use AI, but OpenAI's models are in the trillion parameter range. That's 2-3 orders of magnitude more than what you can reasonably run yourself
This is still orders of magnitude less than what it takes to run an EV, which are an eco-friendly form of carbrained transportation. Especially if you live in an area where the power source is renewable. On that note, it looks to me like AI is finally going to be the impetus to get the U.S. to invest in and switch to nuclear power -- isn't that altogether a good thing for the environment?
Yeh but those local models are usually pretty underpowered compared to the ones that run via online services, and are still more demanding than any game.
nice name btw

Not at all. Not even close.
Image generation is usually batched and takes seconds, so 700W (a single H100 SXM) for a few seconds for a batch of a few images to multiple users. Maybe more for the absolute biggest (but SFW, no porn) models.
LLM generation takes more VRAM, but is MUCH more compute-light. Typically one has banks of 8 GPUs in multiple servers serving many, many users at once. Even my lowly RTX 3090 can serve 8+ users in parallel with TabbyAPI (and modestly sized model) before becoming more compute bound.
So in a nutshell, imagegen (on an 80GB H100) is probably more like 1/4-1/8 of a video game at once (not 8 at once), and only for a few seconds.
Text generation is similarly efficient, if not more. Responses take longer (many seconds, except on special hardware like Cerebras CS-2s), but it parallelized over dozens of users per GPU.
This is excluding more specialized hardware like Google's TPUs, Huawei NPUs, Cerebras CS-2s and so on. These are clocked far more efficiently than Nvidia/AMD GPUs.
...The worst are probably video generation models. These are extremely compute intense and take a long time (at the moment), so you are burning like a few minutes of gaming time per output.
ollama/sd-web-ui are terrible analogs for all this because they are single user, and relatively unoptimized.
I compared the TDP of an average high-end graphics card with the GPUs required to run big LLMs. Do you disagree?
Right, but that's kind of like saying "I don't kill babies" while you use a product made from murdered baby souls. Yes you weren't the one who did it, but your continued use of it caused the babies too be killed.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that, but I feel like here is a line were crossing. This fruit is hanging so low it's brushing the grass.
I'm interpreting your statement as "the damage is done so we might as well use it"
And I'm saying that using it causes them to train more AIs, which causes more damage.
I agree with your second statement. You have misunderstood me. I am not saying the damage is done so we might as well use it. I am saying people don't understand that it is the training of AIs which is directly power-draining.
I don't understand why you think that my observation people are ignorant about how AIs work is somehow an endorsement that we should use AIs.
How about, fuck AI, end story.
I did, as a matter of fact, fuck AI.
Two wrongs don't make a right. And if your neighbour is dosing the neighbourhood with gasoline while wildfires are on the horizon, you smack him, you don't go and get your own can.
Agreed, but this is like comparing your neighbor burning 1 million acres to you having a bonfire. The scale is the problem. We should absolutely take individual responsibility; however, our small impact is only felt when we band together.
our small impact is only felt when we band together
It is also offset immediately when unregulated corporations use the saved energy to sell us the next dumb thing.
Switch all traditional AC to being powered by Heat Pumps
Aren't traditional AC's (assuming you are somewhere where AC is a thing used to cool the air) already heat pumps?
In my attempt at brevity, I articulated myself wrong, totally my bad. I would like the old school systems replaced with either air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps, backed up with on-site solar and batteries. Modern heat pump systems can heat and cool and are much more efficient than AC as generally installed.
The efficiency gains from an air source heat pumps are on the heating cycle, not the cooling cycle, since you are moving heat around instead of having to generate heat via combustion or big heating elements. When acting as an air conditioner, the efficiency is the same.
An AC is an “air heat pump”. The only difference between an AC and what we call a “heat pump” is a reversing valve, which can send refrigerant the other way to heat the interior instead of cooling it.
They’re literally the same thing.
AC systems are heat pumps so I'm not sure what you mean there.
Great, now this might work with my neighbor, but how exactly do I smack mega corps and the state? Are we talking eco terrorism here or do you have some other idea that hasn't been tried in the last decades?
I mean, climate change isn't new but humanity still fucks up the planet and that does not seem to change. Why should we have to sweat at home while professionalized greed burns down everything around us? I will gladly take individual responsibility, but not alone.
Actually, a failing power grid here and there might act as a wake-up call and then we can start talking about solutions, not just symptomatic treatment.
Talking about direct action or even a mildly disruptive protest will probably get you moderated here, and in trouble in real life. It feels like the only options "allowed" are stern words. At least a progressive like Zohran won the primary in NYC, but we'll need a lot more of that to make a difference.
On the other hand, Luigi is considered by many a hero.
I'm here waiting for it
Look, we don't mind if you want to make a picture of a dude with five dicks, as an exercise in equality
What are you talking about? I can run pocket pall localy on my phone, and I have this:
I have llama 3.2 on my phone and it's really funny because it's so low powered and dumb but so sweet.
it's like a little friend to talk to when I don't have Internet. he's a lil stupid but he got the spirit
Use Qwen 2.5, that's my recommendation. You can also set "pals". And the best part, is I have a portable battery and solar charger, so I could theoretically (and have in the past) run it from solar alone.
Nwm, Lemmy being Lamey by not allowing the image to load.
Hahahahaha!! I have never heard Lemmy being referred to as lamey, and I am diggin it! Hahaha
Cut back on water! (Parks covered in grass flooded all night so people dont sleep there, golf courses watered as normal)
I wish the afterlife were real, so I could experience a world where God, not man, was in charge.
Sadly that chump aint real either.
I am not liberated by the Death of God, it is something I live in terror of.
Does an image like that exist?! Asking for a friend.
Apparently those flex requests aren't about saving the environment; it mostly has something to do with power grids needing to operate at a certain range at all times and spikes in demand fucks with that. That is to say, if they increase the energy produced, they actually have other problems at times of reduced demand, like at night or winter time. I'm paraphrasing from a pretty brief thing I heard over the radio, though, so I'm sure it's more complicated.
They still cut corners and cause wild fires because they don't update their tech and prefer to have things fail, though. Plenty of reasons to hate your private utility companies, lol
Will 1 image of a girl with 5 tits take more energy to make or 5 images of a girl with only 1 tit
5 tits, that's awesome.
Climate change is unstoppable. Humanity is mostly doomed very, very soon.
So, fuck y'all, my two window units are running 24/7 @ 69F for the foreseeable future.
At what point is self-defence justifiable?
I'd need clarification...
If by "climate change" you mean societal climate, then yes, i'd see your point. Society feels more angry year after year, it's definitely heating up.
If you mean "climate change" as is typically understood, then no. The solar revolution is progressing quite swiftly. We're probably gonna reduce CO2 emissions by 50% in 2032 (my personal guess).
lol
The rapid progress of renewables is barely treading water next to increases in demand. Global fossil fuel consumption has still increased despite lots of that new solar and wind capacity added over the last few years.
The way i see the data renewables are going to have to speed up quite a bit faster to actually start replacing fossil fuels in a significant way. But problem is the fossil fuels will then just get cheap and people will find new or increased other uses for them - so the emissions will probably still happen from one source or another however many solar panels get added.
Oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas, are such a convenient source, store and means of transporting energy that no way are all humans going to leave it underground or put it back down there.
The best proven method to reduce GHG emissions seems to be widespread economic recession (demand reduction) - but the bounce back has been pretty quick after 2008 and 2020 - so it's not all that beneficial in the medium to long term. https://www.iea.org/...
Lets cut to the chase and just reduce overall consumption and change shopping habits (think five times before you buy something). The only people who will be sorry of this in the long term will be billionaires (there will be some withdrawal syndrome for people who use shopping as an anti-depressant).
You're not saving the planet. Obviously, Earth will continue, but, without the human parasites.
Data Center used LOBBYING.
It's super effective!
Data Center's power bill was reduced by 75%!
Please explain what you mean by "letting them [prices?] work correctly".
For starters, how much it takes for thing A to be done - that's how high a price must be. So no such thing as "Sony (or was it some other company) just casually decided that games on this platform will cost more, because fuck you" or in your case: no such thing as lobbying drops down bill by 75% while also shifting resource providing (like water) to third parties
Next - visibility: whatever I get done for me, even if I do not pay exactly for that, I should still see the price. So no such thing as free requests to LLMs, which we know cost fuck ton of resources
Next - whatever I pay, even in taxes, I decide where that money goes. So no such thing as "income tax NN%, government decides to murder children half the globe (or just a country border) away, and you go work harder to make us more money to do exactly the same thing"
There also must be a heap of other problems I do not see, but I lack education and attention to get those on my own
AI without demand but also destroying the planet. Typical complex line of thought on the Internet.
I don't think it follows that the people asking you to reduce your AC usage are also the same people able to control AI power consumption.
We have got a stop treating our institutions as monoliths so we can effectively interact with the individual pieces that construct them. If you go into a place of power ready to heap all your gripes with the system on the single person who's only job is to allow you to interface with that system, you're not going to make headway.
I mean it's usually the power utility telling you to do that and they're the ones making deals with the data centers so I think the criticism is fairly directed.
Energy providers should install smart meters that shut off the power to AI server farms instead of residential air conditioners during peak loads.
Hey, I love my girls how I want them. Don't judge
Soirce: Trust, bro
I think the higher demand for AC is predictable as well, no? Climate change has been known to be a thing for a while now... And every home could have solar to offset the local powersurges (which would lead to problems as well, but what I am trying to say is: its not our fault that the state has not prepared)
I'd love solar to offset electric costs but realistically i don't have a way to get solar. Contacted 4 companies who all told me the shape of my roof is not good for solar (1890's house with several extensions not thinking about roof space.
In Germany there is a discussion going on about a stock exchange price for electricity. Ie cheaper price during overproduction and higher price during high demand. Then you don't need solar to benefit from everyone else having solar. Then you could e.g. "just" fill up a local battery with cheap electricity and use it when power is expensive.
That would be a solution. Public trading of energy by power companies throughout the day has existed for decades (see e.g. EPEX spot). It's just a matter of exposing these dynamic prices to consumers. This already exists in the Netherlands.
You don't have rates like that? In Austria you can just get a rate that will charge the 15 minute spot market price. That can be even negative during the day, but then also might be quite high at other periods.
AI datacenters are very far from the typical electrical load of a cloud datacenter, no existing data center has planned appropriately for this because we're only now discovering the bad effects it's having on the grid
Funnily enough AC usage is very easily modelled because it's a well understood distributed load, directly linked to weather. Plus large modern buildings should be built with grid aware AC that adjusts load based on grid demand anyway. I know Siemens and Ericsson both have commercial solutions for that, so I imagine there's more I don't know about.
The core of the post, regardless of the "like 400W running for a minute" is "why the fuck do I have to suffer in 80°+ inside heat while AI companies don't have to reduce any sort of electrical intake during the heatwave"
If I had to pick between having AC or AI, I'm picking AC every time. Fuck would I even do with AI while im burning up at 104°
"ChatGPT tell me how to prevent heat stroke" "Dinosaurs used to eat rocks. Have you tried eating a rock?"
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.
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!"
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.
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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@lemmy.world
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, Twitter X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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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.
save