ES-1 is the most important figure, though? As you say, it is a summary, and the authors consider it their best estimate, hence they put it first, and in the executive summary.

Figure 1.1 does show a single source from 2018 (Shehabi et al) that estimates almost flat growth up to 2017, that's true, but the same graph shows other sources with overlap on the same time frame as well, and their estimates differ (though they don't span enough years to really tell one way or another).

I still wouldn't say that your assertion that data center energy use was fairly flat until 2022 is true. Even in Figure 1.2, for global data center usage, tracks more in line with the estimates in the executive summary. It just seems like the run-of-the-mill exponential increase with the same rate since at least 2014, a good amount of time before genAI was used heavily.

The energy impact of crypto is rather exaggerated. Most estimates on this front are aiming to demonstrate as a high value as possible, and so should be taken as higher upper bound, and yet even that upper bound is 'only' around 200TWh a year. Annual energy consumption is in the 24,000TWh range with growth averaging around 2% or so per year.

So if you looked at a graph of energy consumption, you wouldn't even notice crypto. In fact even LLM stuff will just look like a blip unless it scales up substantially more than its currently trending. We use vastly more more energy than most appreciate. And this is only electrical energy consumption. All energy consumption is something like 185,000 TWh. [1]

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

It looks like the number of internet users ~doubled in that time as well: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2022...

Will you be responding similarly to Pike? I think the parent comment is illustrating the same sort of logic that we're all downwind of, if you think it's flawed, I think you've perhaps discovered the point they were making.

Hey, this bathwater has tracea of baby in it!

Yes I agree although I still believe that there is some tangential truth in parent comment when you think about it.

I am not accurate about google but facebook definitely has some of the most dystopian tracking I have heard. I might read the facebook files some day but the dystopian fact that facebook tracks young girls and sees if that they delete their photos, they must feel insecure and serves them beauty ads is beyond predatory.

Honestly, my opinion is that something should be done about both of these issues.

But also its not a gotcha moment for Rob pike that he himself was plotting up the ads or something.

Regarding the "iphone kids", I feel as if the best thing is probably an parental level intervention rather than waiting for an regulatory crackdown since lets be honest, some kids would just download another app which might not have that regulation.

Australia is implementing social media ban basically for kids but I don't think its gonna work out but everyone's looking at it to see what's gonna happen basically.

Personally I don't think social media ban can work if VPN's just exist but maybe they can create such an immense friction but then again I assume that this friction might just become norm. I assume many of you guys must have been using internet from the terminal days where the friction was definitely there but the allure still beat the friction.

It can't function without advertising, money, or oxygen, if we're just adding random things to obscure our complete lack of an argument for advertising. We can't go back to an anaerobic economy, silly wabbit.

My take on the above, and I might be taking it out of context is that I think what is being said here is that the exploitation and grift needs to stop. And if you are working for a company that does this, you are part of the problem. I know that pretty much every modern company does this, but it has to stop somewhere.

We need to find a way to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet soon.

I don't work for any of these companies, but I do purchase things from Amazon and I have an apple phone. I think the best we can do is minimize our contribution to it. I try to limit what services I use from this companies, and I know it doesnt make much of a differnce, but I am doing what I can.

I'm hoping more people that need to be employed by tech companies can find a way to be more selective on who they employ with.

Point is he is criticizing Google but still collecting checks from them. That's hypocritical. He would have a little sympathy if he never worked for them. He had decades to resign. He didn't. He stayed there until retirement. He's even using gmail in that post.

I think everyone, including myself, should be extremely hesitant to respond to marketing emails with profanity-laden moralism. It’s not about purity testing, it’s about having the level of introspection to understand that people do lots of things for lots of reasons. “Just fuck you. Fuck you all.” is not an appropriate response to presumptively good people trying to do cool things, even if the cool things are harmful and you desperately want to stop them.

My take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away.

Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate.

Just an armchair observation here.

That has been clear since the Google Plus debacle, at the very least.

> Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.

Did you sell all of your stock?

It was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.

No, but it counters this point "a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans."

> And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.

This, speaking about environmental impacts. I wish that more models start focusing on the parameter density / their compactness more so that they can run locally but this isn't something that big tech really wants so we are probably gonna get models like the recent minimax model or glm air models or qwen or mistral models.

These AI services only work as long as they are free and burn money. As an example, me and my brother were discussing something yesterday related to LLM and my mother tried to understand and talk about it too and wanted to get ghibli styles photo since someone had ghibli generated photo as their pfp and she wanted to try it too

She then generated the pictures and my brother did a quick calculation and it took around 4 cents for each image which with PPP in my country and my currency is 3 ruppees.

When asked by my brother if she would pay for it, she said that no she's only using it for free but she also said that if she were forced to, she might even pay 50 rupees.

I jumped in the conversation and said nobody's gonna force her to make ghibli images.

Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.