acc_297 (u/acc_297) - Readit News

acc_297 commented on Google agrees to pause AI workloads when power demand spikes theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/twapi

jeffbee · 20 days ago

The second author of that paper is the person who got turfed out of Google for refusing to use actual energy consumption and insisting on using their flagrantly wrong estimate of inference energy costs. E.g. the rebuttal by Dean https://x.com/JeffDean/status/1843493504347189746

acc_297 · 20 days ago

The number was correct to a reasonable degree under the assumptions stated by the author in the paper that tweet references since they obtained estimates from consumer grade hardware and the carbon intensity associated with average kilowatt produced in the United States not a hyperscale datacentre run using "ML best practices" although this distinction is left out of various lay media citations. The number also did not pertain to inference it was associated with training a particular model from pre-2019.

acc_297 commented on Google agrees to pause AI workloads when power demand spikes theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/twapi

jeffbee · 20 days ago

I'm not sure if that's true of not. As the article indicates, training for AI is naturally demand responsive. Training can move on the clock, and it can move around the world to minimize carbon footprint. See the PDF I just love to share: "Revamped Happy CO2e Paper" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05149

acc_297 · 20 days ago

Agree on training. But that google paper was written when the only image model available for broad public consumption was dall-e 2 and video models were more than a year away. It gets a mention in a more recent 2024 paper [1] which goes into detail about how inference rather than training creates the difficult to manage energy load which grids struggle to meet. If consumer interests and demands drive the trend in what companies offer in terms of inference capability then it's fair to worry that the impact on sustainability goals will be an afterthought.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3630106.3658542

acc_297 commented on Google agrees to pause AI workloads when power demand spikes theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/twapi

jeffbee · 20 days ago

But electricity consumption is a minority of energy consumption. It was always true that decarbonization was going to massively increase the use of electricity.

acc_297 · 20 days ago

Yes but the task becomes that much harder - we are scaling up natural gas generation not to phase out coal but simply to meet demand that wouldn't exist without the fierce competition to build the biggest LLM. Any feasible plan made 5 years ago which may have worked to transition a large industry from fuel burning energy sources to electricity generation (renewable or otherwise) is made 10x harder by the introduction of this rapid rollout in datacentre capacity.

acc_297 commented on Google agrees to pause AI workloads when power demand spikes theregister.com/2025/08/0... · Posted by u/twapi

acc_297 · 20 days ago

This is a common agreement to have with industrial power users. I know in Quebec during the coldest days in winter industrial users are required to scale back.

I would hope there aren't too many large utility jurisdictions which would curtail citizen consumers in favour of industrial users in the event of a demand surge.

On a related note. It's worrying to me how quickly we've accepted that we're going to boost electricity consumption massively prior to achieving anything close to the carbon intensity reduction targets which would mitigate the worst of climate change effects. It's all driven by a market force which cannot be effectively regulated on a global scale for multinational tech firms who can shop around for the next data centre location with near total freedom. And with advances in over the top fibre networks etc... a tonne of AI demand can be met by a compute cluster on the other side of the world (especially during model training) so the externalities related to the computing infrastructure can theoretically be completely dumped somewhere far away from the paying customer.

acc_297 commented on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300% science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/sxv

acc_297 · a month ago

There is more than one comment here asserting that the authors should have done a parallel comparison study against humans on the same question bank as if the study authors had set out to investigate whether humans or LLMs reason better in this situation.

The authors do include the claim that humans would immediately disregard this information and maybe some would and some wouldn't that could be debated and seemingly is being debated in this thread - but I think the thrust of the conclusion is the following:

"This work underscores the need for more robust defense mechanisms against adversarial perturbations, particularly, for models deployed in critical applications such as finance, law, and healthcare."

We need to move past the humans vs ai discourse it's getting tired. This is a paper about a pitfall LLMs currently have and should be addressed with further research if they are going to be mass deployed in society.

acc_297 commented on Programming vehicles in games wassimulator.com/blog/pro... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

acc_297 · a month ago

Reading this reminded me of this good lecture on the physics of racing which was posted to youtube.

Andre Marziali - Physics of Racing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYp2vvUgEqE

acc_297 commented on Why English doesn't use accents deadlanguagesociety.com/p... · Posted by u/sandbach

owenversteeg · 2 months ago

We do, of course, use accents and other diacritics. It's not as common as in other languages, but most people will come across a few each day. The popular argument here is that many are French, with the accents optional, yet soupçon and exposé are rarely written naked. If you want non-French, pick up the New Yorker and you will find coöperative and reëlect, or a poem to find changèd and learnèd. We use them in names, from Brontë to Beyoncé.

There is an excellent Wikipedia article that goes into detail on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

acc_297 · 2 months ago

-Naïve- is the example I think I see most often but I think it’s often spelled -naive- and no one would fuss too much with either spelling

acc_297 commented on NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System iflscience.com/nasas-voya... · Posted by u/world2vec

righthand · 2 months ago

Firefox has enhanced tracking protection and I got through fine with it set to “strict”. Are you on a vpn?

acc_297 · 2 months ago

Ah yes, I turned off a bunch of Kaspersky internet security settings and I'm through. This is my work computer I forget what's running in the background sometimes.

acc_297 commented on NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System iflscience.com/nasas-voya... · Posted by u/world2vec

acc_297 · 2 months ago

In both Edge and Firefox I'm blocked for using Adblock but from what I can tell I do not have adblock on either browser.

acc_297 commented on Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872... · Posted by u/stephen_g

acc_297 · 2 months ago

This has been on my mind for awhile and is why I only briefly used copilot on a daily basis.

I'm at the beginning of my career and learning every day - I could do my job faster with an LLM assistant but I would lose out on an opportunity to acquire skills. I don't buy the argument that low-level critical thinking skills are obsolete and high level conceptual planning is all that anyone will need 10 years from now.

On a more sentimental level I personally feel that there is meaning in knowing things and knowing how to do things and I'm proud of what I know and what I know how to do.

Using LLM's doesn't look particularly hard and if I need to use one in the future I'll just pick whichever one is supposedly the newest and best but for now I'm content to toil away on my own.