Microblog Memes

Conservation work can be confusing I guess

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.

Yeah, that thing that nobody wanted? Everybody has to have it. Fuck corporations and capitalism.

Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.

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).

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:

https://www.baseten.co/blog/40-faster-stable-diffusion-xl-inference-with-nvidia-tensorrt/#sdxl-with-tensorrt-in-production

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.

Crossposted to fuck ai community

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

I have a crazy theory that requests like these will actually push people to care more about and take action on global warming.

Laughs in total recall