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Cake day: October 6th, 2024

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  • Yeah and the problem I’m pointing to has nothing to with electrical infrastructure and instead the sheer amount of energy wasted on bullshit.

    You could have fantastic electrical infrastructure but if people are consuming literal gigawatt hours and boiling municipal water dry making Garfield and Shrek comics, that’s the problem. Where does this energy come from? How is the copious amount of heat dealth with? Those are the corollaries

    It’s seriously the biggest waste of energy in human existence and it’s staring at you right in the face. Gotta be blind to miss it


  • Infrastructure in this case refers to the data centers and LLMs. It takes hundreds of megawatt hours to train a single current-gen LLM and who knows how many gigawatts of energy are being consumed by the sum of LLMs at any given point but it likely dwarfs the sum of all energy spent training LLMs.

    But then there’s the energy involved in producing those cards, shipping those cards, the data centers themselves.

    It wouldn’t be preposterous to suggest that the sum of energy spent at any given time on generative AI is enough to power New York City. Might even be well more than


  • The whole planet is threatened by AI. If you look at the amount of energy needed not only to power the infrastructure, but the energy needed to create the infrastructure, and compare it to the work produced, and the energy needed for humans to produce equivalent work, it’s totally fucked and dumb as hell

    Edit: to elaborate, there was this commercial for a Google Pixel I saw, people in group chat talking about a football game, person says “create an image of football gloves made out of butter”. .08kWh later that image gets posted in chat for a chuckle. Dude, just say “gloves made of butter? smdh” Lady laying in bed talking to a glorified chatbot, just hop on Lemmy or reconnect with an old friend and save .16kWh. These are the most common use cases for AI, basically finessing a prompt a dozen times to make a Shrek and Garlfield comic that winds up in some Facebook group with 9 likes. Multiply those figures a couple million times tho and it’s like holy shit. We somehow went from extremely low-bandwidth words to high bandwidth Youtube and Tiktok to the messiest bullshit humans have ever invented, to do things we could easily do with characters on a keyboard





  • It’ll implode but there are much larger elephants in the room - geopolitical dumbassery and the suddenly transient nature of the CHIPS Act are two biggies.

    Third, high flying growth, blue sky darlings, they’re flaky. In a downturn growth is worth 0 fucking dollars, throw that shit in a dumpster and rotate into staples. People can push off a phone upgrade or new TV and cut down on subscriptions, but they’ll always need Pampers.

    The thing propping up AI and semis is an arms race between those high flying tech companies, so this whole thing is even more prone to imploding than tech itself, since a ton of revenue comes from tech. Sensitive sector supported by an already sensitive sector. House of cards with NVDA sitting right at the tippy top. Apple, Facebook, those kinds of companies, when they start trimming back it’s over.

    But, it’s one of those things that is anyone’s guess. When you think it’s not even possible for everything to still have steam one of the big guys like TSMC posts some really delightful earnings and it gets another second wind, for the 29th time.

    Definitely a house of cards tho, and suddenly a lot more precarious because suddenly nobody knows how policy will affect the industry or the market as a whole

    They say shipping is the bellwhether of the economy and there’s a lot of truth to that. I think semis are now the bellwhether of growth. Sit back and watch the change in the wind