MagicShel @ MagicShel @lemmy.zip

25+ yr Java/JS dev

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8 mo. ago

It is shocking sometimes. I used to lean conservative. You'd think every once in a while some Republican would say something I agree with just based on probability, but no. If words have come out of a Republican mouth in the last 6 years, I can be nearly certain I disagree with them.

Most people don't care about decentralization

I think that's largely not the case for people that are currently on Lemmy/Mastodon, but I think you're right that it prevents larger adoption. I'm okay with that, though. I don't need to talk with everyone. There's room for more growth, probably especially for more niche communities, but at least for me Lemmy has hot critical mass.

Everything else I either like the things you dislike or disagree that they are problems.

My work computer of connected to an IMAX projector. Have fun, fuckers!

Not really but that would be something.

🍿 This is just going to continue getting better. Any bets on when ICE comes for Elon?

Sure. Let me just go check something....

"Joe Walsh represented Illinois's 8th Congressional District from 2011 to 2013. The district currently leans Democratic (Cook PVI: D+5) and is represented by Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi, who has announced a 2026 U.S. Senate bid."

I'm gonna wait until 2026 before I let him off the hook.

I'm struggling too hard with the first part to get any satisfaction from the second part.

Groucho Marx said: "I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members."

And I can identify with that. But I also don't want to belong to any party that would accept Musk.

Michael Cera would probably be a better younger me than I was. Though, I'm not sure I'd want to see his portrayal. Might hit too close to home.

I don't want to interfere. I just want everyone to be able to put folks into categories of "decent people" and "monsters."

Any time a politician switches parties my first instinct is their district flipped, and it's just opportunism. It's not always true, but you could make a lot of money betting on it.

Today's projection is next month's news article about Trump.

We can tell the difference between AI slop and people. That's why it's called slop. I've seen a number of folks get called out just for using an AI to edit their post (and letting it rewrite it wholesale instead of retaining their own voice).

This is an Occam's Razor scenario: the simplest explanation is that people are assholes and a lot of work to moderate, and not every server is going to be able to make it. But that's why federation is a good thing. It'll be interesting to see if everyone migrates and remains on the fediverse or if the community shrinks.

Those fuckers aren't affronted my words are being used to train AI, they are just pissed about not getting paid for it. I hereby revoke all licenses and agreements with Reddit regarding my intellectual property. Furthermore, go fuck yourselves. With a rake. Sideways.

I have the honor to be your obedient servant
M dot Shel.

Plebes can only take so much before they start building guillotines. I'm not looking forward to that day, but it seems they've forgotten and it will probably take a few years of horrors to remind them. When you want to send a message and you feel like you've got nothing to lose, that's when Luigi acts.

Maybe. This country has gone through some dark times before. I have to operate on the belief that things will get better because the alternative... the alternative obviates the need to worry about that money in any event. Because I'm too old to go anywhere else and I will not suffer under the boot of a domestic enemy.

I appreciate this in return. Online I tend to throw around colorful epithets and I know that can come across as aggressive, and a couple of time I might've phrased things more enthusiastically than I aspire to. I appreciate that you were able to look past that and stay engaged on the topic.

cut deficits by $2.8 trillion over a 10-year period

by taking that money out of your wallet.

I mean I guess every deficit reduction implicitly comes out of taxpayers wallets, but this is about consumers paying more for the same stuff while at the same time the government is massively reducing services which also will cost us more. We are being absolutely fleeced.

We are going to have much lower quality of life for a given income. And then the next Republican administration is just going to run up the deficit further because that's all they do.

I think it's fair to discuss the energy. I'm not sure where the math comes from that 100 words takes .14kWh. My video card uses 120W pegged and can generate 100 words in let's say a nice round 2 minutes. So that works out to 4W or .004kWh. But of course they are running much more advanced and hungry models, and this is probably generating the text and then generating the voice, and I don't know what that adds. I do know that an AI tool I use added a voice tool and it added nothing to cost, so it was small enough for them to eat, but also the voices are eh and there are much better voice models out there.

So that's fine, I can pretty well define the lower bounds of what a line of text could cost, energy-wise. But this strategy doesn't get us closer to an actual number. What might be helpful.... is understanding it from EA's perspective. They are doing this to increase their bottom line through driving customer engagement and excitement, because I haven't heard anything about this costing the customer anything.

So whatever the cost is of all the AI they are using, has to be small enough for them to simply absorb in the name of increased player engagement leading to more purchases. The number I just found is $1.2 billion in profit annually. Fuck, that's a lot of money. What do you think they might spend on this? Do you think it would be as high as 2%? I'll be honest, I really don't know. So lets say they are going to spend $24million on generative AI and let's just assume for a second that all goes to power.

I just checked and the average for 1KWh nationally is $0.1644 but let's cut that in half assuming they cut some good deals? (I'm trying to be completely fair in these numbers so disagree if you like. I'm writing this before doing all the math so I don't even know where this is going.) That looks like about 291 million KWh (or... that's just 291 GWh, right?)

I read global energy usage is estimated at 25,500 TWh, and check my math that works out to about 1/87,000th of the world’s annual electricity consumption. Kinda a lot for a single game, but it's pretty popular.

But the ask is how that compares to video cards and.... let's be honest this is going to be a very slippery, fudge-y number. I was quoted 1.5 million daily players (and I see other sources report up to 30 million which is really wide, but lets go with the lower number). So the question is, how long do they play on average, and how much power do their video cards use? I see estimates of 6-10 hours per week and 8-10 hours per week. Let's make it really easy and assume 7 hours per week or 1 hour per day.

I have a pretty low end video card, but it's probably still comparable to or better than some of the devices connecting to fortnight. I don't have a better number to use, so I'm going to use 120W. There should be a lot of players higher than that, but also probably a lot of switches and whatnot that are probably lower power. Feel free to disagree.

So 1.5m players x 1 hour per day = 120MWh x 365 = 43.8GWh.

By these numbers the AI uses about 6x the power of the GPUs. So there is that. But also I think I have been extremely generous with these numbers everywhere except maybe the video card wattage which I really don't have any idea how to estimate. Would EA spend 2% expecting to recoup that in revenue? What if it's 1%? What if it's .5%? At .5% they are getting pretty close.

Or if the number of daily players is 15 million instead of 1.5, that alone is enough to tip the scale the other way.

And device power is honestly a wild-ass guess. You could tell me the average is 40W or 250W and I'd have no real basis to argue.

If you have any numbers or suggestions to make any of this more accurate, I'm all ears. The current range of numbers would lean toward me being wrong, but my confidence in any of this is low enough that I consider the matter unresolved. I also didn't dive into how much of AI cost is power vs. infrastructure. If only half the cost of AI is power (and it's probably lower than that) it changes things significantly.

I'm going to stick with my assertion, but my confidence is lower than it was.

You start by saying no, but your elaboration says yes.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so. shrug

Not sure what else there is to say at this point. AI uses energy. So do lots of things—video cards in this example. My point is really to put things into perspective here. If the number of video cards running Fortnite weren't cause for worry 3 years ago, why would this use of AI be concerning today?

Okay. So, your position is that 6 year olds are going to join Fortnite to spam the funny-man-speak button and because of that AI energy usage will be higher? Okay. Maybe. I'd argue the novelty of AI wears thin really quickly once you interact with it a lot, but I'll grant you some folks might remain excited by AI beyond reason.

So now they are logging into Fortnite and rather than playing the actual game they are just going to talk to characters? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But once we throw out the other commenter's numbers and suppose it's not 7 generations to equal 30 minutes of play, maybe it's 20. Maybe it's 40. Maybe it's 100. I honestly don't know. But we're definitely in the realm where I think betting the video card uses more energy than the AI for a given player (and all video cards use more energy than AI for all given players) is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

I bet that is the case. I don't know it. I can't prove it right or wrong without actual numbers. But based on my ability to generate images and text locally on a shit video card, I am sticking with my bet.