Well, that wasn't accidental. I think it's insane for a government to wield such power.

The difference, of course, is that most AI companies don't have the malicious motive that Google has by also being an ad company.

First of all, shocked people still use d3. Hasn't there been something better? It's pretty ancient by javascript standards. Do people still use jquery too? Haha... been about a decade since I touched this stuff!

Second of all, isn't it ungodly slow? I get that it can draw a few boxes nicely, and maybe shuffle them around, but I had to write my own engine using html canvas because d3 couldn't get svg to flow properly if I had thousands of pixels in my image.

Honestly, if you're going to go through the trouble of understanding d3, I would just write your own javascript canvas to animate things.

The claim that "any amount may have negative effects" (in the article) is NOT the same as the claim that "you can detect if I had a single drop 20 years ago" (the claim you were arguing against.)

I read AI coding negativity on Hacker News and Reddit with more and more astonishment every day. It's like we live in different worlds. I expect the breadth of tooling is partly responsible. What it means to you to "use the LLM code" could be very different from what it means to me. What LLM are we talking about? What context does it have? What IDE are you using?

Personally, I wrote 200K lines of my B2B SaaS before agentic coding came around. With Sonnet 4 in Agent mode, I'd say I now write maybe 20% of the ongoing code from day to day, perhaps less. Interactive Sonnet in VS Code and GitHub Copilot Agents (autonomous agents running on GitHub's servers) do the other 80%. The more I document in Markdown, the higher that percentage becomes. I then carefully review and test.

The original press release and report are at [1], couldn't find a link to them in the article.

> In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity

If they're running on, say, two RTX 6000s for a total draw of ~600 watts, that would be a response time of 1.44 seconds. So obviously the median prompt doesn't go to some high-end thinking model users have to pay for.

It's a very low number; for comparison, an electric vehicle might consume 82kWh to travel 363 miles. So that 0.24 watt-hours of energy is equivalent to driving 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) in such an EV.

When I hear reports that AI power demand is overloading electricity infrastructure, it always makes me think: Even before the AI boom, shouldn't we have a bunch of extra capacity under construction, ready for EV driving, induction stoves and heat-pump heating?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...

From at least 2018, medical research says that the first drop starts to harm. In 2023, WHO adopted that position.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/alcohol-and-your-health-...

https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...