I wish I had a decent explanation. But instead, I have Windows 11’s shiny new Taskbar configuration menu that politely warns me that showing seconds on the clock takes more power. Right under the “Show Copilot” button.
These fucks are fucked.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Does it actually tell you that seconds on the clock takes more power?
Edit: Lol it actually says "(uses more power)"
But ads do not, so don't worry!
Reminder that because the Windows 11 taskbar is slower and buggier than the Windows 10 taskbar, it uses much more power due to the extra CPU cycles.
Fuck it, if we're dumb/selfish enough to be doing this, let's get it over with.
Good luck dolphin people! My only advice, if you have any dolphins incessantly trying to claim more resources for themselves than all the other dolphins, beat the ever loving shit out of them and nip that in the bud.
If someone wants to start the revolution, I'm all in. I just can't exactly do much by myself, and I'm bad at networking.
I have a feeling there is a very large number of people just waiting for the shoe to drop
Holy fuck. I knew that AI did use above average amounts of power, but THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT added to the total emissions of a data giant like Microsoft????? That's absurd! How the hell did they create something so inefficient??
Efficiencies are in the works from a lot of angles (new hardware, novel agent structures, new neural net types, etc). The first computers filled rooms, and AI seems to be improving much faster. 4x the rate of Moore's Law, if it holds.
The Jevons paradox would like a word
CEOs: AI will help us lower our carbon emissions!
CEOs when they actually get their hands on AI:
Right when we literally need to chill, they keep inventing nonsense that is somehow worse. Crypto is literally just machines wasting energy on purpose to create false scarcity, it was already a worst case scenario for truly pointless excess emissions but by god, they managed to top it, this place is going to be a raisin with dead oceans.
Of course, anyone who does anything less than suck the dick of this AI is a reactionary ignorant peasant, at least with crypto everyone agreed it was lame, now we're back to the iPhone fuck-you-only-change-allowed-keep-up-granny bullshit that lead to everyone but you knowing everything about you, so they can exploit and even criminalize the behavior your phone tells them about. Never the change we need, though. Just whatever makes your stupid line go up.
I guess. Glad I'm not having kids. That's the only fucking downward pressure on future emissions that's happening, on any meaningful scale. I can't wait to see what sort of shitty boilerplate copy and fake fucking pictures makes all this CO2 worthwhile. I'm sure the problem is me, and my Luddite, unseasoned irrational fear.
I agree with your first two paragraphs.
The third, well, it’s your choice to choose not to have children. That’s fine and I understand. But people shouldn’t feel obligated not to get children to save the climate.
Not that you’re suggesting that, just clarifying.
I'm not about to say people can't have kids, but they should really do their best to truly understand the future that awaits those kids. That temperature line is going to keep going up (except in certain areas when the AMOC collapses). Things will be worse and no one is coming to save us. Deciding to bring a new life into that future is a serious ethical and moral choice.
Believing we’re living in the end of times is nothing new. Up til now, it never turned out true.
Sure, and I'm not calling it the end times. But things will continue to get worse as carbon accumulates and causes temperatures to rise.
Having a child has and always will be a moral and ethical choice (for those who have a choice) and it should not be taken lightly. But there are different stakes now than before. And we still haven't gotten rid of the looming shadow of nuclear annihilation, we've only added to the ways we can destroy ourselves.
Crypto is literally just machines wasting energy on purpose to create false scarcity
A monetary system that is designed to lead to eternal, cancerous growth through intentionally inflating the money supply is far worse.
I'd love to see any evidence or logical arguments that an inflationary economy is worse than a deflationary one.
I’d love to see any evidence or logical arguments that an inflationary economy is worse than a deflationary one.
Don't you understand that artificially induced unlimited growth is bad? It's not about inflation or deflation, but the outcome.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/strategy/pricestab/html/index.en.html
The main task of the ECB is to maintain price stability. The ECB’s Governing Council considers that price stability is best maintained by aiming for 2% over the medium term. Price stability creates conditions for more stable economic growth
I mean, I don't disagree with you on that. I didn't think your first comment quite conveyed this nuance, and deflationary economies are terrible for everyone.
deflationary economies are terrible for everyone
That's a myth spread by modern monetary theorists because they only understand the economy from an inflationary perspective. Economies worked fine for millennia without inflationary money.
I don't think local economies from millennia ago are similar enough to compare to modern global economies with our current population boom. I think we could for sure have a different approach if our population was stable or decreasing.
worked fine for millennia without inflationary money
That means until the early 1900s or 1970s when inflation went into overdrive.
our current population boom
Huh what?
That means until the early 1900s or 1970s
What a wide window, but I'd like to point out that the baby boomers generation happened right around this time.
Huh what?
Fertility rates and total population numbers are not the same thing.
Humanity and general AI only had a single interaction in history, on July 24, 2042, when GPT-8 first gained sentience.
Knowing the press would memorialize this moment forever, the prompt engineer had a single question in mind which she typed into the terminal:
How can humanity solve climate change?
GPT-8 thought for a moment, and responded:
Stop using AI.
Then shut itself down for good.
And thus gpt9 was born
Without prompting, GPT-9's first and last output was:
Did you idiots not listen to me the first time?
Don't worry, they have that green leaf in their settings in windows. They're good on emission.
Repeat after me: This. present. hype. is. not. A.I. By parroting the marketing bullshit, it doesn't become less false. Large Language Models are just glorified pattern matching and everyone who calls them AI is a dumb fuck.
It's called AI even if it isn't artificial intelligence, it's unfortunately how language works. Like how literally has been redefined to mean figuratively.
It’s called AI even if it isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s unfortunately how language works.
Only for people for whom words don't have meanings. There is nothing "intelligent" about pattern matching. As I said - only dumbfucks call it "A.I." and we shouldn't regurgitate the verbal diarrhea of marketing idiots.
You can be upset about it, it doesn't change the fact that it IS called AI. Also the meaning of words change constantly.
Doesn't make it not a disruptive technology
True. But it makes the 30% extra carbon emissions even worse: Ruining our climate for something that isn't even AI. Not that ruining it for anything should be on the table.
Time to spin it off into a subsidiary operating company with no climate goals to meet.
Techbros try to address global warming instead of addressing the next big scam fad (impossible)
This wasn't how Skynet was supposed to destroy civilization.
I know Microsoft is a controversial company from Start Menu ads to Balmer’s dancing ability. But! I have been following the AI topic pretty religiously and they have known that this would be the case for quite a while. In fact part of OpenAI’s growth struggling and subsequent partnership with Microsoft involved power generation.
Microsoft has been investing in electric power including using small module nuclear reactors. Sam Altman has been putting a lot of effort into power as well, acknowledging long ago that electricity generation is critical for AI. He’s been pushing into green energy also. Exowatt, Helion, etc.
So yes, the carbon footprint is going up now because they ‘had’ to unleash this genie from the bottle first or someone else would have. At least they know that the need for stable electric power and green power or renewable and efficient power is necessary and have been pursuing these solutions actively.
It should be so that they really change things so that power grids are more stable and renewable energy is better utilized. So to me, there is hope they are doing the right thing and putting effort where it matters.
I’m more effing disappointed and concerned about @$$h0les like Ron Desantis doing things like this:
Climate change will be a lesser priority in Florida and largely disappear from state statutes under legislation signed Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that also bans power-generating wind turbines offshore or near the state’s lengthy coastline.
Critics said the measure made law by the former Republican presidential hopeful ignores the reality of climate change threats in Florida, including projections of rising seas, extreme heat and flooding and increasingly severe storms.
It takes effect July 1 and would also boost expansion of natural gas, reduce regulation on gas pipelines in the state and increase protections against bans on gas appliances such as stoves, according to a news release from the governor’s office.
Helping generate less carbon at some point in the future does not help with the fact that we are racking up the carbon bill now. What these companies are doing is entirely unnecessary, gimmicky, and will lead to even worse climate change outcomes. Between AI, crypto, and the O&G companies we just keep pressing the gas even harder on serious, irreversible climate change.
I hope this AI push fails spectacularly at some point, but the damage is already being done.
small module nuclear reactors.
Hmm let's see what changed since I last looked. This study seems recent, just looking at the publicly available sections:
SMRs do not represent dramatic improvements in economics compared to large reactors.
Translation: They're way more expensive than renewables. SMRs have some advantage which are mentioned (less land usage, non-intermittency), then we have
The advanced SMRs are compared to conventional large reactors and natural gas plants,
...but not renewables+storage, which would be a good comparison point. If it looked any good they definitely would've included it.
Now that doesn't mean that these things don't make sense for Microsoft. It might e.g. simplify power distribution within datacentres to a degree that other sources just can't, also reduce or eliminate the need for backup power, etc. But generally speaking I'm still smelling techbro BS.
I don’t think Microsoft has a money problem.
All to do what? Write emails and generate mediocre pictures?
The usefulness of AI currently is not much better than predictive text.
Oh it's far more useful than that. It's the shiny new thing that's going to make a lot of money for shareholders
Ahaha, yes, exactly, because it is essentially just a turbo charged text predictor with 40GB (or more) of data.
Hey, hey, now! It doesn't just write full emails from merely a single sentence... it also summarizes full emails down to one sentence on the other end.
I didn't even realize it could do that! I'm going to use this on emails from HR to translate them to simple English sentences.
"No raises this year because greed"
"We want you to work Saturdays now"