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Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter u

Totally agree that it's just a proxy for people's feelings on AI, but my Lobster Jesus is much more important to me than a Netflix show! All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. Time has already shown that the datacenter for training is also just creating something people want.

K0balt 2mo ago
Lobster Jesus FTW.
ipdashc 2mo ago
> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK. Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going. I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn.... This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.
  - ipdashc 2mo ago
    > the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before? I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever. On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.
    - whimsicalism 2mo ago
      I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize. We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
      - ipdashc 2mo ago
        > If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful. We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone. I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
        whimsicalism 2mo ago

K0balt 2mo ago

Lobster Jesus FTW.

ipdashc 2mo ago

> All of the datacenter usage (for inference) is just serving something people want. I agree with this in principle, but I wonder how asymmetric the usage is. When I hear about developers dropping $200/mo (subsidized!) on AI coding, and having multiple agents on supergigaultramax effort churning on stuff for hours... Versus your average person maybe asking a few chatgpt questions every day or week... IDK. Like others have said, yes, OpenAI probably isn't literally going to sell you more than $200 of electricity for $200/mo. But data centers get industrial rates, and $200 of power is still a decent bit of power just to be churning out slop! (It's about a monthly home bill and EV charging cost combined) And some companies spend way more than that on API pricing for tokens... It's just hard to get a handle on where the usage is actually going. I just wish we could pass a common sense law to require them all to build renewables. It's literally electricity, it's the easiest energy to decarbonize.

whimsicalism 2mo ago
i think this sentiment comes from a deep misunderstanding of how our modern society is the product of transitive satisfaction of wants. the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. who are in turn fulfilling the transitive preferences of a school teacher for cheap groceries, who are in turn.... This is how economies work and the alternative strategy of enumerating morally correct wants/needs and assigning the correct price from on-high has been a demonstrable failure. It is a cognitive failure of humanity that this strategy is so intuitively appealing to us.
- ipdashc 2mo ago
  > the developers churning out agent work on supergigaultramax effort are fulfilling the transitive preferences of people like supply chain managers, etc. Sure, but that's the crux of it all, isn't it. Are they? And are they doing it that much better than before? I'm far from an AI coding skeptic at this point, the stuff works, and I use it, but I think it's fair to ask whether it's worth burning a middle class home's amount of electricity to spit out CRUD apps and web frontends a bit faster. As many have pointed out, we've still yet to see some kind of huge productivity increase in society at large, or even some particularly revolutionary new app or whatever. On some level it's people's money and they can spend it how they want, but people get criticized for unnecessary waste of resources all the time.
  - whimsicalism 2mo ago
    I think people should be allowed to do things, generally. If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business (and quickly, at these prices). I think it is likely more worth it than you realize. We're not talking about criticizing, we're talking about bans.
    - ipdashc 2mo ago
      > If it's not worth it, the people doing it will go out of business In general I agree (and many environmentalists and such undervalue the fact that environmental waste often correlates with wasted money), but I don't think this is a reliable principle. You can always brute force your way though problems, sometimes it's cheaper that way, doesn't mean it's not wasteful. We are also assuming that economic value means something is good for society. A lot of money is made off of social media, ads, gambling apps, clearly there's demand for it. I don't think that means we can say all those things are good, just off demand alone. I'm not really talking about banning anything, I just think it should be asked whether this stuff is worth it. We're just two guys on the Internet, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
      - whimsicalism 2mo ago