5 ms·

“I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid that computation is too carbon intensive”

48 points by edent 3y ago

romusha 3y ago
I wish there was also this environmental HAL for golf field, yachts, private jets and meat consumption
- exe34 3y ago
  It's pretty amazing how the same people who insist on the paper straws in their little plastic bags get so triggered when you mention reducing meat consumption. It's like they just won't survive if they can't have some taste of body parts every single meal.
  - mechagodzilla 3y ago
    This feels like a (paper) straw man - there's probably a lot of overlap between people that intentionally reduce or eliminate meat consumption and also worry about plastic waste/pollution. Similarly there is probably a lot of overlap in terms of people that don't care about either. There are probably some people that worry about plastic waste more than the negative impact of meat consumption, but it's probably one of the smaller sections on that venn diagram.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    Really? The people interested in those two issues have a wide overlap in my experience.
  - lebean 3y ago
    Have y'all noticed that the same people who insist on paper straws also want us to use compostable plastic utensils? Like come on, pick a lane!
  - LightHugger 3y ago
    meat consumption, particularly beef is the easiest way to be healthy and get complete nutrition. veganism is impractical for almost everyone and requires a lot of careful balance of nutritional intake as well as supplementation to stay healthy. For some nutrients, stores in your body are built up and deplete over long periods of time (years). Many classes of diseases completely go away just by eating plenty of meat.
    - kemotep 3y ago
      I’m interested in learning what disease beef cures that beans do not provide any nutritional benefits towards solving as well. Or that could not also be supplemented to provide a diet that is equally healthy to beef consumption. If the costs (environmental, health, or money-wise) are a major factor in your choice of diet, it seems clear that beans provide more for less.
      - chongli 3y ago
        Iron, for one. Beans contain iron but so little of it that you’d have to consume 1.2kg to get your recommended daily intake. Similarly for a lot of other essential minerals.
        harimau777 3y ago
        This suggests that kidney beans have a higher iron to calorie ratio than beef does. https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietary-guidelines-online-materials/food-sources-select-nutrients/food-1 https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietar...
        chongli 3y ago
        Iron is not protein. You can get protein from many sources but iron is very difficult to get from a vegan diet.
        harimau777 3y ago
  - belorn 3y ago
    People who care about plastic waste has better alternatives than paper. Reusable metal straws (the large ones) are superior to both paper and plastic straws, with the only draw side that you got to wash them as any other reusable eating utensils. The main reason why plastic eating utensils are common is that it reduces the labor costs of serving food, which in turn allow fast food restaurants to charge lower price. Reusable travel utensils and reusable drinking cups seems to also gained some traction for drivers, an otherwise large consumer of single-use utensils. A bit more work but far superior to paper and plastic in their feel and use. (I prefer both utensils made from metal and eating meat. Eating meat with plastic utensils is just a terrible experience. Being against plastic has nothing to do with food culture or diet).
    - timeon 3y ago
      > People who care about plastic waste has better alternatives than paper. Best alternative is no straw.
- noobermin 3y ago
  While the usage per capita shoots up for the very rich, a huger fraction of CO2 output is from those below them, not exactly the poorest but people in the middle. Per capita doesn't help, you could execute the very rich tomorrow and still have irreversible climate change in 10 years.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Per capita doesn't help, you could execute the very rich tomorrow and still have irreversible climate change in 10 years. The thing is, getting rid of the very rich and their indulgence in climate-devastating actions moves the goalposts/acceptable excuses for the lower classes ("but the rich are doing it too") as well.
    - mr_00ff00 3y ago
      Maybe there’s some term or phrase for this, but I feel like those being wasteful aren’t gonna change because suddenly the goal post is moved. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I feel like most human behavior we decide what we are gonna do and then find the reasons to justify it.
  - CM30 3y ago
    It's less the absolute effect and more the feeling of "why should our lives be made significantly less convenient while those with seemingly unlimited wealth and power get to pollute as much as they like?" If you want regular people to care more about the environment and pollute less, than you should have the rich and powerful lead by example, not push laws that seemingly do nothing while acting as wasteful as ever.
  - timeon 3y ago
    > per capita shoots up for the very rich This can be huge population. US CO2 output per capita is pretty big even if you compare it with EU.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Then out a carbon tax on those things. I can’t bring myself to care because I know individual choice isn’t enough. It’s a global systems problem.
- analognoise 3y ago
  I care less about the environment than I do authoritarians being in power.
hgh 3y ago
The mechanism that can shift supply to less polluting sources of electricity and shape demand for computation/electricity is pricing. Measurement, pricing and reducing pollution externalities is a major challenge, but I don't think that's as unknown of a problem as the article seems to suggest.
seydor 3y ago
Just tell them to cut animations and you ll have the same impact
irusensei 3y ago
> I also wonder if a games console could drop its FPS, or outsource some of its processing to the cloud, when domestic electricity becomes too expensive. No. Go to China to protest against their impact on the planet instead.
- palata 3y ago
  After you have realized that your game console was made in China, you mean? Because the CO2 emission does not happen in your backyard does not mean that it does not happen for your own comfort.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  I'm not sure we regularly let off the second-worst offenders from the consequences of their actions. "Oh, you mean he's only the second-most prolific serial killer? I don't know why you're mad at him when there's Axe Killer Joe running about as well."
_visgean 3y ago
> I also wonder if a games console could drop its FPS, or outsource some of its processing to the cloud, when domestic electricity becomes too expensive. I don't think that is neccessary, but there is a lot of applications that could reduce / slow their workflow to less demanding times. This coud be priced into cloud costs per hour. And then there are some things that should stop existing: bitcoin.
briantakita 3y ago
The largest polluter in the world is the US Military.
- harimau777 3y ago
  Do you have a link to information on that? It doesn't surprise me that the US Military produces a lot of pollution; however, I'm surprised that they are the largest.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    They are the largest single entity polluter in the world according to a recent-ish estimate [1]. It does make sense, as with the exception of aircraft carriers all of the US military naval assets run on fossil fuels, and so does all other hardware (trucks, tanks, planes, construction equipment, power generators, ...). And almost all of that is exempt from emissions regulations, a lot of it is so old that it predates modern regulations anyway. [1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-cli...
    - maeil 3y ago
      Their competitors - which like the US military will be state-controlled entities - for burning the most fossil fuels aren't exactly known for their transparency. They're generally going to be in China. And then to be able to burn any, you first need to take them out of the ground. If we count those indirect emissions, obviously Saudi Aramco causes orders of magnitudes more emissions than the Pentagon. Sure, this comparison may be "cheating", but put it this way; it's much worse for global emissions to have Aramco improve their barrels/day rate by 10% than the Pentagon's budget increase by 10%.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > Their competitors - which like the US military will be state-controlled entities - for burning the most fossil fuels aren't exactly known for their transparency. They're generally going to be in China. China has orders of magnitude less logistics to accomplish. They only run three small overseas military sites, in contrast to the (at least) 1.000 sites the US operates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...
SamBam 3y ago
It would be nice to get some accurate measurements for how carbon-intensive LLMs and image models are. I've started to cut way back on just randomly noodling with image prompts once I read that each image generated might produce the same amount of carbon as driving four miles. That really adds up.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  There is quite literally no way that math is correct. Even in the absolute worst case scenario where your server farm was powered by coal plants exclusively this would not be the case.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Using a Kill-a-watt to measure, my M2 Max will pull around 60 watts for 10-15 seconds while running stable diffusion, and the Apple chips aren’t even especially suited for the task. Hosted services in data centers with Nvidia GPUs are probably more efficient per image. There’s no chance I’m using more energy in a month of playing with stable diffusion with 10 second bursts of load than there is in an hour of playing a AAA game which will have my gaming system pulling about 260 watts sustained.
- sapiogram 3y ago
  > I read that each image generated might produce the same amount of carbon as driving four miles I can safely assure you that this is bullshit. Any electric car will use well over 1 Kwh to travel that distance. You can run two high-end GPUs for an hour with that amount of electricity. You're not spending two hours of GPU-time to generate your images.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Adds up to what? You think not driving 4 miles makes any real difference?
  - nani8ot 3y ago
    Yes, because your not the only one driving four miles in a car and thinking it doesn't matter.
vdaea 3y ago
Nice climatic authoritarianism the author is advocating for here.
stuckinhell 3y ago
All while Taylor Swift is taking 30 min private jet trips.
- echelon 3y ago
  And the rest of us are using paper straws.
  - SmokeyHamster 3y ago
    But still wrapped in plastic. You know. For your protection...
    - passion__desire 3y ago
      And Japan peels away the banana of its natural coating and puts it in a plastic bag.
      - SmokeyHamster 3y ago
        Do you mean the "Mongee" banana? It is wrapped in a plastic bag, but the peel is actually edible. https://www.newsweek.com/you-eat-these-newly-engineered-bananas-skin-and-all-791546 https://www.newsweek.com/you-eat-these-newly-engineered-bana...
        passion__desire 3y ago
        The over-packaging problem in Japan https://univibes.org/blog/over-packaging-problem-in-japan/ https://univibes.org/blog/over-packaging-problem-in-japan/ I actually came across this tidbit while watching a vlog on youtube where the vlogger mentioned that Japan uses too much plastic for everything.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    What's this about? It's at least the third time I've seen some comment about 'paper straws' in some way related to Swift / the 2024 'superbowl' match or something?
PeterisP 3y ago
There's no need to involve carbon here - there is a reason to adjust the time of power consumption due to cost, as at least in certain places the price of electricity during a single day can vary between near-zero to very expensive. And if certain mixes of generation are "too carbon intensive" then the same pricing is the proper mechanism to get electricity users to take it into account; apply a subsidy or tax depending on how polluting some generation is, and then let the market forces optimize which things can wait until a "cleaner hour" and for which it is worth to pay more to not wait.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SmokeyHamster 3y ago
The initial report he's responding to, one saying operating systems will try to schedule non critical tasks to times when electricity is cheaper, is actually a good idea. For most consumers, power is cheap enough where that level of optimization isn't really noteworthy, but for larger industrial systems where power demand is a huge expense, that could actually save you a ton of money
- lukan 3y ago
  And make sense energy wise. Sun is strong at day and sometimes there is strong wind ... sometimes none of both. But the main computation is done already, or soon mainly on GPUs. And there is the limiting factor currently not energy, but avaiable GPUs. So you want what you have to run 24h. I am not sure if CPU tasks can make a huge difference. At least CPU tasks that are not needed now.
- teddyh 3y ago
  The return of batch(1)?
oakwhiz 3y ago
Smart features like this seem to assume a connection to the grid based on location information. What if the device is connected to a microgrid? Is that configurable?

48 points by edent 3y ago

romusha 3y ago

I wish there was also this environmental HAL for golf field, yachts, private jets and meat consumption

exe34 3y ago
It's pretty amazing how the same people who insist on the paper straws in their little plastic bags get so triggered when you mention reducing meat consumption. It's like they just won't survive if they can't have some taste of body parts every single meal.
- mechagodzilla 3y ago
  This feels like a (paper) straw man - there's probably a lot of overlap between people that intentionally reduce or eliminate meat consumption and also worry about plastic waste/pollution. Similarly there is probably a lot of overlap in terms of people that don't care about either. There are probably some people that worry about plastic waste more than the negative impact of meat consumption, but it's probably one of the smaller sections on that venn diagram.
- Angostura 3y ago
  Really? The people interested in those two issues have a wide overlap in my experience.
- lebean 3y ago
  Have y'all noticed that the same people who insist on paper straws also want us to use compostable plastic utensils? Like come on, pick a lane!
- LightHugger 3y ago
  meat consumption, particularly beef is the easiest way to be healthy and get complete nutrition. veganism is impractical for almost everyone and requires a lot of careful balance of nutritional intake as well as supplementation to stay healthy. For some nutrients, stores in your body are built up and deplete over long periods of time (years). Many classes of diseases completely go away just by eating plenty of meat.
  - kemotep 3y ago
    I’m interested in learning what disease beef cures that beans do not provide any nutritional benefits towards solving as well. Or that could not also be supplemented to provide a diet that is equally healthy to beef consumption. If the costs (environmental, health, or money-wise) are a major factor in your choice of diet, it seems clear that beans provide more for less.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Iron, for one. Beans contain iron but so little of it that you’d have to consume 1.2kg to get your recommended daily intake. Similarly for a lot of other essential minerals.
      - harimau777 3y ago
        This suggests that kidney beans have a higher iron to calorie ratio than beef does. https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietary-guidelines-online-materials/food-sources-select-nutrients/food-1 https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietar...
        chongli 3y ago
        Iron is not protein. You can get protein from many sources but iron is very difficult to get from a vegan diet.
        harimau777 3y ago
- belorn 3y ago
  People who care about plastic waste has better alternatives than paper. Reusable metal straws (the large ones) are superior to both paper and plastic straws, with the only draw side that you got to wash them as any other reusable eating utensils. The main reason why plastic eating utensils are common is that it reduces the labor costs of serving food, which in turn allow fast food restaurants to charge lower price. Reusable travel utensils and reusable drinking cups seems to also gained some traction for drivers, an otherwise large consumer of single-use utensils. A bit more work but far superior to paper and plastic in their feel and use. (I prefer both utensils made from metal and eating meat. Eating meat with plastic utensils is just a terrible experience. Being against plastic has nothing to do with food culture or diet).
  - timeon 3y ago
    > People who care about plastic waste has better alternatives than paper. Best alternative is no straw.
noobermin 3y ago
While the usage per capita shoots up for the very rich, a huger fraction of CO2 output is from those below them, not exactly the poorest but people in the middle. Per capita doesn't help, you could execute the very rich tomorrow and still have irreversible climate change in 10 years.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Per capita doesn't help, you could execute the very rich tomorrow and still have irreversible climate change in 10 years. The thing is, getting rid of the very rich and their indulgence in climate-devastating actions moves the goalposts/acceptable excuses for the lower classes ("but the rich are doing it too") as well.
  - mr_00ff00 3y ago
    Maybe there’s some term or phrase for this, but I feel like those being wasteful aren’t gonna change because suddenly the goal post is moved. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I feel like most human behavior we decide what we are gonna do and then find the reasons to justify it.
- CM30 3y ago
  It's less the absolute effect and more the feeling of "why should our lives be made significantly less convenient while those with seemingly unlimited wealth and power get to pollute as much as they like?" If you want regular people to care more about the environment and pollute less, than you should have the rich and powerful lead by example, not push laws that seemingly do nothing while acting as wasteful as ever.
- timeon 3y ago
  > per capita shoots up for the very rich This can be huge population. US CO2 output per capita is pretty big even if you compare it with EU.
goatlover 3y ago
Then out a carbon tax on those things. I can’t bring myself to care because I know individual choice isn’t enough. It’s a global systems problem.
analognoise 3y ago
I care less about the environment than I do authoritarians being in power.

hgh 3y ago

The mechanism that can shift supply to less polluting sources of electricity and shape demand for computation/electricity is pricing. Measurement, pricing and reducing pollution externalities is a major challenge, but I don't think that's as unknown of a problem as the article seems to suggest.

seydor 3y ago

Just tell them to cut animations and you ll have the same impact

irusensei 3y ago

> I also wonder if a games console could drop its FPS, or outsource some of its processing to the cloud, when domestic electricity becomes too expensive. No. Go to China to protest against their impact on the planet instead.

palata 3y ago
After you have realized that your game console was made in China, you mean? Because the CO2 emission does not happen in your backyard does not mean that it does not happen for your own comfort.
roywiggins 3y ago
I'm not sure we regularly let off the second-worst offenders from the consequences of their actions. "Oh, you mean he's only the second-most prolific serial killer? I don't know why you're mad at him when there's Axe Killer Joe running about as well."

_visgean 3y ago

> I also wonder if a games console could drop its FPS, or outsource some of its processing to the cloud, when domestic electricity becomes too expensive. I don't think that is neccessary, but there is a lot of applications that could reduce / slow their workflow to less demanding times. This coud be priced into cloud costs per hour. And then there are some things that should stop existing: bitcoin.

briantakita 3y ago

The largest polluter in the world is the US Military.

harimau777 3y ago
Do you have a link to information on that? It doesn't surprise me that the US Military produces a lot of pollution; however, I'm surprised that they are the largest.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  They are the largest single entity polluter in the world according to a recent-ish estimate [1]. It does make sense, as with the exception of aircraft carriers all of the US military naval assets run on fossil fuels, and so does all other hardware (trucks, tanks, planes, construction equipment, power generators, ...). And almost all of that is exempt from emissions regulations, a lot of it is so old that it predates modern regulations anyway. [1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-cli...
  - maeil 3y ago
    Their competitors - which like the US military will be state-controlled entities - for burning the most fossil fuels aren't exactly known for their transparency. They're generally going to be in China. And then to be able to burn any, you first need to take them out of the ground. If we count those indirect emissions, obviously Saudi Aramco causes orders of magnitudes more emissions than the Pentagon. Sure, this comparison may be "cheating", but put it this way; it's much worse for global emissions to have Aramco improve their barrels/day rate by 10% than the Pentagon's budget increase by 10%.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > Their competitors - which like the US military will be state-controlled entities - for burning the most fossil fuels aren't exactly known for their transparency. They're generally going to be in China. China has orders of magnitude less logistics to accomplish. They only run three small overseas military sites, in contrast to the (at least) 1.000 sites the US operates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...

SamBam 3y ago

It would be nice to get some accurate measurements for how carbon-intensive LLMs and image models are. I've started to cut way back on just randomly noodling with image prompts once I read that each image generated might produce the same amount of carbon as driving four miles. That really adds up.

asynchronous 3y ago
There is quite literally no way that math is correct. Even in the absolute worst case scenario where your server farm was powered by coal plants exclusively this would not be the case.
- evilduck 3y ago
  Using a Kill-a-watt to measure, my M2 Max will pull around 60 watts for 10-15 seconds while running stable diffusion, and the Apple chips aren’t even especially suited for the task. Hosted services in data centers with Nvidia GPUs are probably more efficient per image. There’s no chance I’m using more energy in a month of playing with stable diffusion with 10 second bursts of load than there is in an hour of playing a AAA game which will have my gaming system pulling about 260 watts sustained.
sapiogram 3y ago
> I read that each image generated might produce the same amount of carbon as driving four miles I can safely assure you that this is bullshit. Any electric car will use well over 1 Kwh to travel that distance. You can run two high-end GPUs for an hour with that amount of electricity. You're not spending two hours of GPU-time to generate your images.
goatlover 3y ago
Adds up to what? You think not driving 4 miles makes any real difference?
- nani8ot 3y ago
  Yes, because your not the only one driving four miles in a car and thinking it doesn't matter.

vdaea 3y ago

Nice climatic authoritarianism the author is advocating for here.

stuckinhell 3y ago

All while Taylor Swift is taking 30 min private jet trips.

echelon 3y ago
And the rest of us are using paper straws.
- SmokeyHamster 3y ago
  But still wrapped in plastic. You know. For your protection...
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    And Japan peels away the banana of its natural coating and puts it in a plastic bag.
    - SmokeyHamster 3y ago
      Do you mean the "Mongee" banana? It is wrapped in a plastic bag, but the peel is actually edible. https://www.newsweek.com/you-eat-these-newly-engineered-bananas-skin-and-all-791546 https://www.newsweek.com/you-eat-these-newly-engineered-bana...
      - passion__desire 3y ago
        The over-packaging problem in Japan https://univibes.org/blog/over-packaging-problem-in-japan/ https://univibes.org/blog/over-packaging-problem-in-japan/ I actually came across this tidbit while watching a vlog on youtube where the vlogger mentioned that Japan uses too much plastic for everything.
- OJFord 3y ago
  What's this about? It's at least the third time I've seen some comment about 'paper straws' in some way related to Swift / the 2024 'superbowl' match or something?

PeterisP 3y ago

There's no need to involve carbon here - there is a reason to adjust the time of power consumption due to cost, as at least in certain places the price of electricity during a single day can vary between near-zero to very expensive. And if certain mixes of generation are "too carbon intensive" then the same pricing is the proper mechanism to get electricity users to take it into account; apply a subsidy or tax depending on how polluting some generation is, and then let the market forces optimize which things can wait until a "cleaner hour" and for which it is worth to pay more to not wait.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SmokeyHamster 3y ago

The initial report he's responding to, one saying operating systems will try to schedule non critical tasks to times when electricity is cheaper, is actually a good idea. For most consumers, power is cheap enough where that level of optimization isn't really noteworthy, but for larger industrial systems where power demand is a huge expense, that could actually save you a ton of money

lukan 3y ago
And make sense energy wise. Sun is strong at day and sometimes there is strong wind ... sometimes none of both. But the main computation is done already, or soon mainly on GPUs. And there is the limiting factor currently not energy, but avaiable GPUs. So you want what you have to run 24h. I am not sure if CPU tasks can make a huge difference. At least CPU tasks that are not needed now.
teddyh 3y ago
The return of batch(1)?

oakwhiz 3y ago

Smart features like this seem to assume a connection to the grid based on location information. What if the device is connected to a microgrid? Is that configurable?