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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2024

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  • I didn’t factor in mobile power usage as much in the equation before because it’s fairly negligible. However, I downloaded an app to track my phone’s energy use just for fun.

    A mobile user browsing the fediverse would be using electricity around a rate of ~1 Watt (depends on the phone of course and if you’re using WiFi or LTE, etc.).

    For a mobile user on WiFi:
    In the 16 seconds that a desktop user has to burn through the energy to match those 2 prompts to chatGPT, that same mobile user would only use up ~0.00444 Wh.

    Looking at it another way, a mobile user could browse the fediverse for 18min before they match the 0.3 Wh that a single prompt to ChatGPT would use.

    For a mobile user on LTE:
    With Voyager I was getting a rate of ~2 Watts.
    With a browser I was getting a rate of ~4 Watts.

    So to match the power for a single prompt to chatGPT you could browse the fediverse on Voyager for ~9 minutes, or using a browser for ~4.5 minutes.

    I’m not sure how accurate this app is, and I didn’t test extensively to really nail down exact values, but those numbers sound about right.








  • Edit: This is probably the wrong community for asking this question since this community is meant for tech related news. c/asklemmy might be better or !technology@piefed.social allows for discussions on anything tech related.

    Smart meters work mostly the same way meters have always worked with one minor difference, they occassionally transmit the current value via a radio frequency. Same as always, you install them at some point where they can measure just how much water/electricity/gas is flowing into the home. The transmitting frequency will be different depending on the device and what country you live in.

    If you want to see the details on how water meters measure water flow, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_metering

    If you want the details on how gas meters work with all of the different sensors for that, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_meter

    If you want the details on how electricity meters work, go here and read the “Electromechanical” and “Electronic” sections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_meter#Electromechanical

    Some newer meters are setup to attempt to guesstimate additional information such as what is being used in your home. For instances with water meters, a small flow of water for a short time can mean the faucet was turned on, or a toilet was flushed. A larger flow for a longer time can mean that the bathtub is being used, or a shower, or an appliance (dishwasher/laundry), etc.


  • “environmentally damaging”
    I see a lot of users on here saying this when talking about any use case for AI without actually doing any sort of comparison.

    In some cases, AI absolutely uses more energy than an alternative, but you really need to break it down and it’s not a simple thing to apply to every case.

    For instance: using an AI visual detection model hooked up to a camera to detect when rain droplets are hitting the windshield of a car. A completely wasteful example. In comparison you could just use a small laser that pulses every now and then and measures the diffraction to tell when water is on the windshield. The laser uses far less electricity and has been working just fine as they are currently used today.

    Compare that to enabling DLSS in a video game where NVIDIA uses multiple AI models to improve performance. As long as you cap the framerates, the additional frame generation, upscaling, etc. will actually conserve electricity as your hardware is no longer working as hard to process and render the graphics (especially if you’re playing on a 4k monitor).

    Looking at Wikipedia’s use case, how long would it take for users to go through and create a summary or a “simple.wikipedia” page for every article? How much electricity would that use? Compare that to running everything through an LLM once and quickly generating a summary (which is a use case where LLMs actually excel at). It’s honestly not that simple either because we would also have to consider how often these summaries are being regenerated. Is it every time someone makes a minor edit to a page? Is it every few days/weeks after multiple edits have been made? Etc.

    Then you also have to consider, even if a particular use case uses more electricity, does it actually save time? And is the time saved worth the extra cost in electricity? And how was that electricity generated anyway? Was it generated using solar, coal, gas, wind, nuclear, hydro, or geothermal means?

    Edit: typo







  • That’s not AI, that’s just a bad Photoshop/InDesign job where they layered the text underneath the image of the coupon with Protein bottles. The image has a white background, if it had a clear background there would have been no issue.

    Edit: Looking a little closer, it looks more like some barely off-white arrow was at the top of the coupon image.

    Edit2: if you’re talking about the text that looks like a prompt, it could be a prompt, or it could be a description of what they wanted someone to put on the poster. The image itself doesn’t look like AI considering those products actually exist and AI usually doesn’t do so well on small text when you zoom in on a picture.

    Edit 4: Tap here for images of the items used for the coupon:





  • Looks like they’re finally cleaning up a bunch of junk.

    In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings.

    Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn’t install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated “limited functionality and content.” That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts.