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Capricorn2481 commented on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses   technologyreview.com/2025... · Posted by u/jeffbee
sceptic123 · 4 days ago
Median is _an_ average, are you wanting a mean consumption perhaps when you say average?
Capricorn2481 · 2 days ago
Well first of all, you're implying this measures our consumption at all. But it's left completely vague what this is a median of. They said "A point-in-time analysis quantified the energy consumed per median Gemini App text-generation prompt, considering data from May 2025".

Considering what data? All queries sent to Gemini? Real users? A select few? Test queries from Google?

Does it include AI summaries of google searches? Because if the data includes stuff as simple as "How tall is Lee Pace," that is obviously going to bring the median query down, even if the top distribution is using many times more energy.

But still, the median is not useful by itself. It tells us 50% of the queries measured were under 0.24Wh. It obviously obscures policy-relevant information to not include the mean, but it also obscures what I can do individually without more details on the data. Where am I on this median?

It makes the most sense to provide the entire distribution and examples of data points.

Capricorn2481 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
naikrovek · 3 days ago
Show me a programming language that does not have annoying flaws and I'll show you a programming language that does not yet exist, and probably won't ever exist.

I really like Go. It scratches every itch that I have. Is it the language for your problems? I don't know, but very possibly that answer is "no".

Go is easy to learn, very simple (this is a strong feature, for me) and if you want something more, you can code that up pretty quickly.

The blog article author lost me completely when they said this:

> Why do I care about memory use? RAM is cheap.

That is something that only the inexperienced say. At scale, nothing is cheap; there is no cheap resource if you are writing software for scale or for customers. Often, single bytes count. RAM usage counts. CPU cycles count. Allocations count. People want to pretend that they don't matter because it makes their job easier, but if you want to write performant software, you better have that those cpu cache lines in mind, and if you have those in mind, you have memory usage of your types in mind.

Capricorn2481 · 2 days ago
> At scale, nothing is cheap; there is no cheap resource if you are writing software for scale or for customers. Often, single bytes count. RAM usage counts. CPU cycles count. Allocations count

Well if maximalist performance tuning is your stated goal, to the point that single bytes count, I would imagine Go is a pretty terrible choice? There are definitely languages with a more tunable GC and more cache line friendly tools than Go.

But honestly, your comment reads more like gatekeeping, saying someone is inexperienced because they aren't working with software at the same scale as you. You sound equally inexperienced (and uninterested) with their problem domain.

Capricorn2481 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
aatd86 · 3 days ago
???!

refinement: the process of removing impurities or unwanted elements from a substance.

refinement: the improvement or clarification of something by the making of small changes.

public static void in a class with factory of AbstractFactoryBuilderInstances...? right..? Yes, say that again?

We are talking about removing unnecessary syntactic constructs, not adding as some would do with annotations in order to have what? Refinement types perhaps? :)

Capricorn2481 · 2 days ago
> public static void in a class with factory of AbstractFactoryBuilderInstances

That's not syntax. Factory builders have nothing to do with syntax and everything to do with code style.

The oxymoron is implying syntax refinements would be inspired by Go of all things, a language with famously basic syntax. I'm not saying it's bad to have basic syntax. But obviously modern Java has a much more refined syntax and it's not because it looks closer to Go.

Capricorn2481 commented on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses   technologyreview.com/2025... · Posted by u/jeffbee
threeducks · 4 days ago

    the median prompt [...] consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity
In layman's terms, that is (approximately)

- one second of running a toaster, or

- 1/80th of a phone charge,

- lifting 100 pounds to a height of 6 feet,

- muzzle energy of a 9mm bullet,

- driving 6 feet with a Tesla.

Capricorn2481 · 2 days ago
How in the world do they claim to have 0.24Wh per query? MIT estimates the LLama 3.1 405B model uses 1.86Wh.

GPT-4 is over a trillion parameters. Is there any reason to think they have 2.5x more parameters but somehow use 6x less energy?

Capricorn2481 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
xlii · 3 days ago
I don't share experience about not being suitable about bare metal. But I do have experience with high level languages doing similar things through "innovative" thinking. I've seen int overflows in Rust. I've seen libraries that waited for UDP packet to be rebroadcasted before sending another implemented in Elixir.

No Turing complete language will ever prevent people from being idiots.

It's not only programming language API and syntax. It's a conceptual complexity, which Go has very low. It's a remodeling difficulty which Rust has very high. It's implicit behavior that you get from high stack of JS/TS libraries stitched together. It's accessibility of tooling, size of the ecosystem and availability of APIs. And Golang crosses many of those checkboxes.

All the examples you've shown in your article were "huh? isn't this obvious?" to me. With your experience in C I have no idea you why you don't want to reuse same allocation multiple times and instead keeping all of them separately while reserving allocation space for possibly less than you need.

Even if you'd assume all of this should be on stack you still would crash or bleed memory through implicit allocations that exit the stack.

Add 200 of goroutines and how does that (pun intended) stack?

Is fixing those perceived footguns really a missed opportunity? Go is getting stronger every year and while it's hated by some (and I get it, some people like Rust approach better it's _fine_) it's used more and more as a mature and stable language.

Many applications don't even worry about GC. And if you're developing some critical application, pair it with Zig and enjoy cross-compilation sweetness with as bare metal as possible with all the pipes that are needed.

Capricorn2481 · 3 days ago
> With your experience in C I have no idea you why you don't want to reuse same allocation multiple times and instead keeping all of them separately while reserving allocation space for possibly less than you need.

Which part are you referring to, here?

> Even if you'd assume all of this should be on stack you still would crash or bleed memory through implicit allocations that exit the stack.

What do you mean by this? I don't mean to be rude, but this sounds confusing if you understand how memory works. What do you mean an allocation that exits the stack would bleed memory?

Capricorn2481 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
aatd86 · 3 days ago
Perhaps that it is coming sooner than you think... It all started with adding Value types, now syntactic refinements à la Go... Who knows? :-) You'll be very happy.

edit: hold on wait, java doesn't have Value types yet... /jk

Capricorn2481 · 3 days ago
> syntactic refinements à la Go

An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.

Capricorn2481 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
gf000 · 3 days ago
Java's GCs are a generation ahead, though, in both throughput-oriented and latency-sensitive workloads [1]. Though Go's GC did/does get a few improvements and it is much better than it was a few years ago.

[1] ZGC has basically decoupled the heap size from the pause time, at that point you get longer pauses from the OS scheduler than from GC.

Capricorn2481 · 3 days ago
Do you have a source for this? My understanding is Go's GC is much better optimized for low latency.
Capricorn2481 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
tuetuopay · 3 days ago
Depending on your iterator implementation (or, lackthere of), the functional boils down to your first example.

For example, Rust iterators are lazily evaluated with early-exits (when filtering data), thus it's your first form but as optimized as possible. OTOH python's map/filter/etc may very well return a full list each time, like with your intermediate. [EDIT] python returns generators, so it's sane.

I would say that any sane language allowing functional-style data manipulation will have them as fast as manual for-loops. (that's why Rust bugs you with .iter()/.collect())

Capricorn2481 · 3 days ago
Clojure transducers as well.
Capricorn2481 commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears   telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera
byyoung3 · 4 days ago
"there's nothing in here that indicates they have frozen hiring or that Zuckerberg is cautious of a bubble"

That's what makes it clickbait my friend

Capricorn2481 · 4 days ago
That is what I said, yes.
Capricorn2481 commented on 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend   thedailyadda.com/95-of-co... · Posted by u/speckx
jawns · 4 days ago
Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value.

Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually.

We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls.

We recently switched to using AI to transcribe and write these summaries. Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents, they also free up the human agents to do higher-value work.

It's not sexy. It's not going to replace anyone's job. But it's a huge, measurable efficiency gain.

Capricorn2481 · 4 days ago
> Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents

We have someone using Firefly for note taking, and it's pretty bad. Frequently gets details wrong or extrapolates way too much from a one-off sentence someone said.

How do you verify these are actually better?

u/Capricorn2481

KarmaCake day1406June 26, 2022View Original