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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Humanius@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldNot everyone needs to have an opinion on AI
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    2 months ago

    People who have a more in-the-middle opinion generally don’t talk about AI a lot. People with the most extreme opinions on something tend to be the most vocal about them.

    Personally I think it’s a neat technology, and there probably exist use-cases where it will work decently well. I don’t think it’ll be able to do everything and anything that the AI companies are promising right now, but there are certainly some tasks where an AI tool could help increase efficiency.
    There are also issues with the way the companies behind the Large Language Models are sourcing their training data, but that is not an inherent issue of the technology. It’s more an issue with incorrectly licensing the material.

    I’m just curious to see where it all goes.




  • Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

    As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

    • During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
    • During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

    Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.


  • Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
    Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

    Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

    • The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
    • The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.


  • That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

    While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

    I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.


  • Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

    Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
    If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

    While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.