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lemmy.today
An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube frontend which is efficient by design.

The Hated One has been pretty solid in the past regarding privacy/security, imho. I found this video of his rather enlightening and concerning.

  • LLMs and their training consume a LOT of power, which consumes a lot of water.
  • Power generation and data centers also consume a lot of water.
  • We don’t have a lot of fresh water on this planet.
  • Big Tech and other megacorps are already trying to push for privatizing water as it becomes more scarce for humans and agriculture.

—personal opinion—

This is why I personally think federated computing like Lemmy or PeerTube to be the only logical way forward. Spreading out the internet across infrastructure nodes that can be cooled by fans in smaller data centers or even home server labs is much more efficient than monstrous, monolithic datacenters that are stealing all our H2O.

Of course, then the 'Net would be back to serving humanity instead of stock-serving megacultists. . .

  • chevy9294@monero.townEnglish
    29·
    9 months ago

    Spreading out the internet across infrastructure nodes that can be cooled by fans in smaller data centers or even home server labs is much more efficient than monstrous, monolithic datacenters that are stealing all our H2O.

    That’s definitely not true, data centers are way more efficient than home servers. But yes, they use water to be more efficient.

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    9 months ago

    We have an absolute shitton of fresh water on the planet. It’s just being horribly mismanaged most of the time.

    Once the AI gets rid of the pesky humans using it frivolously to do stupid things like “drink” or “bathe”, there will be plenty to go around.

    • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      thats if ai ever gets “sentient” in our lifetimes like the suits keep insisting it will

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        I don’t forsee it becoming “sentient” so much as “Being given a stupid amount of access and resources to figure out a problem by itself, and stupidly pursuing the maximization of that goal with zero context.”

        There’s that darkly humorous hypothetical that an Ai tasked with maximizing making paperclips would continue to do so, using every resource it could get a hold of, and destroying any threat to further paperclip production!

        So that, with data center expansion and water. Lol

        See “paperclip maximizer” under “hypothetical examples” Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

        • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          oh this is happening today. the ultra-addictive social media thing is mostly through machine learning algos being tuned to do this regardless of anything else.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            EXACTLY. High-five!

            That’s what I worry about. Right now we can ignore social media somewhat, but if Ai gets wedged into contracts with government/infrastructure and other unavoidable daily life, I imagine that’s where a plausible threat could come from.

            I’ve no doubt such things are already in the works. Ai controlled traffic lights or something, for instance. Obviously the military and law enforcement are already giddy about it, of course.

            Giving a stupid machine a seemingly simple goal to pursue and the wrong set of keys could lead to disasterous consequences, I think. We also have the whole “Do Ai cars protect the driver or all human life even if it risks the driver?” Debate.

            “But it’s trendy, it’s the future! And there’s so much venture capital involved, how lucrative!” Seems to be how major decisions are made these days.

            I don’t see it some day “waking up” and thinking “I feel like humans are unnecessary.” It’s scarier than that…it will see us as just another variable to control and “maximize” us out of the picture.

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
    132·
    9 months ago

    Also, I can’t even imagine how many resources image-generating AIs take up, especially when it’s all based around “refining prompts” over and over and over…

    • RatBin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      I’ve been limiting my AI use ever more because of that, and I found out that AI isn’t as necessary as they want us to believe. In fact, the downsides may be more than that small productivity boost we’re gaining, in terms of rights to clear and verifiable informations and in terms of manipulative tactics and uses made possible by that.

  • realharo@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    With enough technological advances, they might be able to just switch to salt water.

    It’s silly to imagine all these “way out there” scenarios without also imagining progress in other areas.

  • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    Spreading out the internet across infrastructure nodes that can be cooled by fans in smaller data centers or even home server labs is much more efficient than monstrous, monolithic datacenters that are stealing all our H2O

    1. I mean this just isn’t true though, the big servers are more efficient. Scale means efficiency.

    2. The fediverse is also just more inefficient than a centralized service. Part of this is due to the design of activitypub, but part of it is the inherent inefficiency of any decentralized service compared to a centralized one

    3. Also this doesn’t happen in practice, most fediverse accounts are on servers running on rented cloud services, not people’s homelabs