I thought a few years back already that owning a bigger house will be cheaper than ever due to the progress of cheap renewable energy, cheaper and cheaper heat pump technology and batteries.
Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make. Alone how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant.
The same with a ton of ohter daily things i do.
Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment.
And the companies running those GPUs actually have an incentive to be co2 neutral while bitcoin miners don't: They 1. already said they are doing / going co2 neutral due to 2. marketing and they will achieve it becauseh 3. they have the money to do so.
When someone like Bill Gates or Suckerberg say 'lets build a nuclear power plant for AGI' than they will actually just do that.
>Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment
What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema?
You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game.
>Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make
I think you mean CO2.
And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters are convenient so we use them more as alternatives with less convenience.
Like the movie example, we watch more and even bad movies if it's just a click on Netflix than we do if we have to drive somewhere to watch.
MS recently announced they fail der CO2 target but instead produce 40% more because of cloud services like AI
It is 100% realistic to read books and play board games. Both markets are massive, and board games in particular are having what I would consider a renaissance. Maybe it depends on your crowd, but everybody I know plays tabletop games and reads books.
You're missing the point. What's not realistic is to tell everyone that they should abstain from any type of entertainment that requires power (TV shows, movies, video games, etc) and should only read books and play board games instead. I don't care what kind of renaissance board games are undergoing, most people still only play the mass market classics, and then only rarely.
I don't know how much energy Netflix uses serving a movie, but playing a video game on my PC for two hours where I'm located might generate a kg of CO2. That's about as much as I'll breathe in a day. Relative to other sources of atmospheric CO2 I'm not that concerned.
My issue was with "we know what modern entertainment looks like" as if humans are now incapable of enjoying themselves without a screen. And you should care about a massive market increase when it's directly relevant to the point at hand. If the initial point was "we know what modern entertainment looks like, nobody plays board games or reads books", pointing out that the board game market has more than doubled in the past decade is far from irrelevant. It actually directly counters the point.
I agree with your second paragraph, and selling the "make better choices to save the world" argument is an industry playbook favorite. Environmental damage needs to be put on the shoulders of those who cause it, which is overwhelmingly industrial actors. AI is not useful enough to continue the slide into burning more fossil fuels than ever. If it spurs more green energy, good. If it's the old "well this is the way things are now", that's really not good enough.
AI and ML will help a lot of people and already does. Alpha Fold / protein folding will help us with cancer.
We will have better batterires thanks to ml material research.
We will be able to calculate and optimize everything related to flow like wind.
The last thing we need to optimize is compute and compute is what has the most money anyway. One of the first industries going green is datacenters. Google for example is going green 24/7 (so not just buying solar power but pulling green energy from the grid 24/7 through geo thermy and others).
AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve. For example, i have one of these and we need data to make a therapy for this and i'm not alone.
How many battery breaktroughs did we have before AI? They rarely lead to new batteries.
>AI/ML big datacenters are crucial for all the illneses we have which no one cares enough to solve.
Too bad that companies like OpenAI and MS buy most of the hardware for their data centers to write summaries of articles and emails and to create pictures.
And even if they find a cure, doesn't mean it will be available for people in need, not without a hefty fee.
Insulin is a bad example and a good one. A bad one because what happens in the USA is some super weird shit (and it only happened in the USA, thats why USA people drive to canada or mexico). Without insulin though, they wouldn't be alive.
ML on x-ray pictures is super easy technology which partially already is better than x-ray experts. Its not far away to have build in diagonstics or cheap online services. And yes they will reach poorer people than before. It will also allow a lot more people to get better diagnosis.
My sister has a type of blood cancer, she would have been dead by now if research wouldn't have found a solution 13 years ago.
And no MS and OpenAI and google are not just using their DCs to write summeries. They use it to do research. A LOT actually.
And take a look at google ios and the research papers, plenty of medical papers coming from those big companies.
Driving too the cinema to watch a movie produces more CO2 than watch one movie online but online makes it more convenient so you watch more. That sums up to more CO2 emission.
The point is that higher efficency is wortless in terms of CO2 emissions if it leads to higher usage that compensates for the savings.
If a programmer can program faster with AI it's good if he only needs 1 hour instead of 8 but if he still programs 8 hours a day AI's energy consumption comes just on top of his previos consumption.
Climate change doesn't care how efficient you produce more CO2, more is simply more.
I. believe that watching mulitply movies is still a lot more co2 efficient than driving a car to a big independent room, which gets heated and than also shows a movie through a big projector than having a tv running and streaming it from the internet.
But it's realistic that we watch movies online than in cinemas.
And don't forget the datacenters of the movies need to run even if no one watches.
My car doesn't produce CO2 whe I don't drive.
Datacenters always run because there is always something to do.
For everything else, there are already plenty of energy saving mechanism build into the CPUs, Mainboards, Disks etc. A Datacenter doesn't run on 100% Energy just because the load is reduced.
This is a very limited perspective. There are many parts of the world not beholden to automobiles for transportation. Where I live, I can walk to the bank, and walk or ride a bike to entertainment. The alternative to data centers does not have to be driving an automobile somewhere.
I think it's more nuanced than that. I used to walk to my bank, I can't do that any more because many branches closed. The bank now directs all interactions to happen via their app. In terms of emissions (and social interaction, particularly for vulnerable and isolated members of society) I think this is bad news.
But this is a complex calculus and - frankly - feels like a distraction from the issue. I don't want to get into the weeds of calculating micro-emissions of daily activities, I want climate responsibility and reduction in energy consumption across the board.
I did made the point that AI/ml is helping us and the type of energy location and load is much easier to get green than lets say concrete.
We need AI/ML for getting there faster and helping more people around us. Alone for weather simulations but also for medicine, material research for batteries etc.
But we do know that the Proof of Stake system we currently have, is a lot cheaper and more advanced than what Bitcoin does.
Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem yet which is fundamental to our society and a fiat system like the trust issue:
If i exchange 1 bitcoin with you for any service or thing outside of the blockchain, i need the whole proof of stack system protection of our normal existing money infrastructure like lawyers, contracts etc.
And no smart contracts do not solve this issue.
What is left? Small amount of transactions per day with high fees 'but' decentralized infrastructure run by someone we all don't know aggregated probably in data centers owned by big companies.
Proof of Work is far superior to Proof of Stake in a network with absolute fairness (security) being fundamental. Satoshi himself said he could find no other way.
Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.
Yes, start comparing energy spend on bitcoin mining and the missing features. You will see that bitcoin already consumes a lot more energy than our proof of stake system.
What do you do when you want to exchange 1 bitcoin for 1 car and the person with the car doesn't give you the car after the 'absolut fairness/ security' of transfering bitcoin to their wallet? You go back to our Proof of Stake system. You talk to a lawyer. You expect the police to help you.
The smallest issue in our society is just transfering money from left to right. This is not a hard problem. And pls don't tell me how much easier it is to send a few bitcoins to africa. Most people don't do this and yes western union exists.
Or try to recover your bitcoins. A friend has 100k in bitcoins just doesn't know the password anymore.
What do you do when someone breaks into your home and forces you to give them your bitcoin key? Yes exactly anonyms moving of money from you to them. Untraceable, wow what a great thing to have!
And no Satoshi 'himself' is not an expert in global economy. He just invented bitcoin and you can cleary see how flawed it is.
> Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.
you're ending up with the entire rest of civilisation on the other side of that
* Bitcoin, 0.5% of all energy use: 7 transactions per second total worldwide
* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO, 199x the energy use, really quite a lot more than 1,393 transactions per second worldwide, and all the other stuff civilisation does too
You are not comparing apples to apples.
BTC is comparable to gold or US treasuries. How often do you transact in physical gold? What is time taken from a piece of gold in your pocket to cash to coffee? However, you can transact in paper gold eg the ETF GLD in microseconds with comparatively much lower transaction costs (settlement is still not immediate).
How often do you transact in treasury bonds? Try paying for a coffee with your treasury bond. Let’s see how many days that takes.
Comparison with USD (ultimately representing US treasuries) on number of transactions basis is not useful.
And even if it were just LLMs, I use LLMs in my workflow every single day, and I've never used a/the blockchain except for some mild speculation around 2017.
AI solves gigantic issues and helps us with cancer, protein folding, potentially math and other studies, material science etc.
Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a country and has basically done nothing besides moving money from one group of people to a random other group of people.
And bitcoin is also motivated to find the cheapest energy independent of any ethical reasoning (taking energy from cheap chinese hydro and disrupting local energy networks) while AI will have energy from the richest companies in the world (ms, google, etc.) which already working on co2 neutral 24/7.
None of your problems in the first sentence are solved by LLMs. I do not dispute AI research and applications and their benefits, but the current LLM and GenerativeAI hype is of no value to hard scientific problems. Otherwise I agree with you.
I think the coolest counterpoint to this I have seen so far is people using generative AI to design materials with desired properties. For example, discovering new super conductors[0].
The benefit is all for naught if it undermines the fabric of society at the same time. All these benefits will only go to the few who land on top of this mess.
The wealth gap is widening while in parallel poorer people have better lives than ever.
We house, heat and give access to knowledge to a lot more people than ever before.
Cheap medical procedures through AI will help us all. The AI which will be able to analyse the x-ray picture from some 3th world country? It only needs a basic x-ray machine and some internet. The AI will be able to tell you what you have.
I'm also convinced that if AGI is happening in the next 10 years, it will affect that many people that our society has to discuss capitalisms future.
I failed in university at math. Why? Because the tutors had not the time to help me. My level of math was not the same as the other students as i was not in the math part of a gymnasium.
I struggled and wasted a lot of time and energy to even find good explanations.
And when i had a math group, one girl was super nice but knew so muchmore than i did because of her math in gym. Professors asumed so much knowledge and no one cared to try to help people.
Best help were people from india on youtube with bad english.
And the most ridiculous part: Every year around the globe people teach this level of university math to probably millions of students. We should have the perfect free educational platform which teaches everyone perfectly already because so many tutors and professors lecture on the same topics over and over and over again. Our educational system is a joke.
THEN SAID A teacher, Speak to us of Teaching.
And he said:
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.
And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.
For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.
And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.
I think it more about about the difference between knowledge and understanding. You accumulate knowledge by yourself or with the help of a teacher. But the leap from knowledge to understanding is always done by your own mind. The teacher’s help is only a better presentation of the information. Understanding is a step by step process, you’re just not constrained to a single path. And most of the times they converge and overlap.
The nice thing about learning, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.
It's high school, and parent is likely from Denmark, where high school was split into language or math, although it is odd that someone from language would be admitted to a bachelor in math without taking extra classes for about a year between the two.
I took a course in numerical analysis and the prof was hopeless as a teacher - not only a bad teacher but proud to be a bad teacher.
The syllabus had all the methods we had to know, and I learned them all through youtube on a channel called NumericalMethodsGuy. I stopped attending class and just went to labs (which were really just matlab assignments in numerical methods) and turned in assignments, and wrote exams. I got an A.
I just finished a mathematics degree (BMath). Not a single one of my professors was a teacher in the sense of a primary/secondary school teacher. They lectured for an hour, three times per week, and assigned weekly or biweekly coursework. They set midterms and final exams and they assigned all the grading to TAs.
Key takeaways:
* Mathematics is hard. Much harder than most other subjects (except physics which is mostly hard because of all the math involved).
* University is not like primary/secondary school. It is a place where you need to learn how to take responsibility for your own learning. Ideally, you learn how to become an adult.
Every one of my classmates began their degrees from a different place. They excelled in some areas and struggled in others. Many dropped out. This led me to believe that most secondary schools do not fully prepare their students to study mathematics. Having said that, those of us who did make it weren't exactly geniuses. Just people who got used to it.
"Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." -- John von Neumann
I've been tutoring high school students in math (and other subjects) for 8 years now. One thing I'd like to add is that I can tell who will succeed at mathematics and who will struggle just by watching them work from across the room.
The students who succeed are the ones who can sit there and focus for hours at a time. The ones who struggle do so because they can't focus for more than five minutes and then start socializing. I think one of the biggest issues for people studying math is that they either can't focus (due to ADHD) or they have math anxiety which fills them with dread any time they try to study. This dread can be so overwhelming that they will do anything they can to avoid it, so they stop studying and do something else.
When I was studying math I was spending upwards of 40 hours per week working on homework. Although this is normal for anyone with a full-time job, it's an unfathomable amount of time to be studying math for those who struggle. This is really what it takes though. An unrelenting drive to figure things out.
For myself, with ADHD, the key was not doing it alone. Working through coursework and homework on a literal blackboard with colleagues from the same class. Just thought I'd add in case anyone felt dissuaded or needed something to try.
It really was the savior of me. I can focus for hours when I get into something, but its the friction of starting up that I found other people really helped with. There are formal names for it, like "body doubling", but I didnt know of that, I just knew it was critical to work together with others to get stuff done, which as the above correctly writes, absolutely must be done.
If you have ADHD, you need to understand things in mathematics, because merely memorizing them becomes too difficult.
Understanding things in math is definitely possible, and whoever says otherwise probably sucks as a teacher. Yes, it is possible to just say a lot of random stuff, and the best students succeed to figure it out anyway. But if you take care to actually explain how it works, the proportion of successful students increases dramatically.
I am not aware of any proof that "Consiousness is a emerging feature of our brains complexity". For all that I know throwing around such statements of truth is mere stupidity and anti scientific
“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.”
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
This quote doesn't really describe ether at all. I'm not even particularly inclined to stand up while I'm doing ether, much less engage in depravity. I recommend for a more accurate account that you read what Oliver Wendell Holmes said about it.
This has very little to do with helm. For me helm is primarily not a package manager, its a templating language and a way of configuring and installing it to a k8s cluster happens through kubeapps, helm cli or argocd.
This approach also kills for me the really awesome IaC paradigma: I bootstrap ArgoCD and after that, reference only git repos.
Your demo doesn't talk about HOW someone would use your templating features (like your 'form' support) but shows everything besides that.
I honestly like this as i'm still having the feeling that something is wrong with helm, but the way you are approaching it, i think it will fail. It will not gain enough traktion as bigger companies do not need your tooling. Kubeapps works really well and helm too (you want to replace helm, you probably will keep the helm support in there for a long time).
The problems helm have is: its getting convoluted when helm charts become big. The templating folder is a shit place for basically having everything in there, yaml is not that good for templating and values.yamls become way to big.
I don’t mean for this to sound condescending or dismissive, BUT if you don’t think Helm is primarily a package manager you haven’t worked with infrastructure deployed in k8s much.
I’ve been doing this for about 8 years and have seen a few hundred clusters at dozens of orgs, been using GitOps for the last 4ish years.
Invariably they all involved using helm as a package manager to deploy off the shelf infrastructure with minor adjustments. I still don’t see your point, we can just agree to disagree.
I'm happy to discuss this topic and to clarify it.
For me the 'package manager' aspects are more than the templating and having a zip file. For me it is more what apt etc. do
So using helm and its remote repositories, using the helm cli etc.
But we use kubeapps or ArgoCD to install the helm packages and download all helm charts before we deploy them (due to security requirements).
We leverage 100% IaC. Therefore we bootstrap ArgoCD and than install everything through ArgoCD. Only helm charts for our customers/collegues are installed through kubeapps.
I don’t doubt your experience and what you do at your org, yeah that falls into a bit of a different category since you use kubeapps.
I guess what I’m saying is: in my experience across many organizations, helm is indeed treated more like a package manager (like I described above). Your workplace seems to be in the minority.
Nice to see blog