A link to a YouTube video without context e.g. summary of findings, primary author/creators, and primary citations, methodology, and so on is a next to useless for making a point. For all we know you’re linking to a crackpot or an industry sock puppet and I don’t care to “watch” any of what can potentially be a dubious video or worse a malicious video. It is your job as the linker to convince me the video is worth even one iota of my time.
On the other hand recent papers highlight the validity of concern/suspicion:
> This systematic review demonstrates that the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence is a structural and increasingly consequential challenge, shaped by interdependent decisions across algorithms, software pipelines, hardware infrastructures, and deployment contexts. The synthesized evidence shows that energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with AI systems are highly variable, context-dependent, and often underestimated — Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Review of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint Across the AI Lifecycle (published in “Sustainability” an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/3/1359
Nobody is concerned about the costs and environmental impact of data centers.
When someone in a discussion about the benefits of AI goes "did you think about the environment?!", it's always performative.
The real motivation is disliking AI itself or doubt about the government's ability to offset the labor market impact. Discussions that start with feigned concerns being raised are nearly always going to be unproductive.
I don’t dislike AI but really of mine are negatively affected by climate change and AI isn’t helping what is easily observed when Google and MS scrapped their CO2 reduction targets.
So every time I use AI I think about the necessity and usefulness of what I‘m doing with AI and if the use outweighs the costs.
Since the rise of AI the environmental impact doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
I guess because it’s the shiny new toy of the hackernews audience.
Privacy also lost importance given the fact that the same people who refused to give information like their phone number to companies like Google and Meta now upload their whole life to their AIs to asks what should the eat, hyperbolically speaking
You're not helping your case by questioning the usefulness of software produced with AI in the same comment section, or complaining about other people supposedly compromising their own privacy in overusing AI.
The reason it doesn't matter is because the environmental impact is moderate, and the benefit obviously tremendous.
The environmental impact is anything but moderate and the benefits are not obviously tremendous at all. I'm happy using Claude Code as much as the next guy, but saying that the impact has been "tremendous" is vastly overstating the actual results.
I disagree, with the projected doubling by 2030 we're looking at 3% of global electricity consumption or 3.4 EJ, less than 1% of final energy consumption.
That is moderate. Energy-intensive industry is around 130 EJ, and global final energy consumption > 450 EJ.
Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035.
Now that was about operational energy consumption. Someone might bring up manufacturing and construction.
From what I could find the climate impact of those are estimated somewhere between 10-35% of the total climate impact of data centers, so relatively small compared to the operational energy consumption.
It is very hard to justify more than moderate environmental impact here, in my opinion.
For the benefits of AI, my personal results have been great, so I am quite optimistic. And objectively, I find it hard to ignore recent results in mathematics and security research.
"Global data centers consumed around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity—about 1.5% of the world's total electricity—with AI acting as a primary accelerator for new power demand."
That is today where we already consume too much. If by 2030 AI's consumption doubles it gets worse.
While training large models draws major initial power, everyday AI usage (inference) now drives roughly 80% to 90% of cumulative AI energy
"Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035."
Seems like AI helps slowing down the rise of energy consumption.
We are at a point where we want less CO2 not moderataly more.
In the end more is more.
If your doctor tells you to lose weight or you get sick it's not a success to gain weigth slower
Well, at least we could establish that the environmental impact is moderate rather than extreme.
And if the potential of >13 EJ/year is actually realized, it would seem like the net impact of the data centers is not just "moderately more CO2" but possibly "moderately less".
Most of my family are small business owners, so I've done a handful of Excel automations that they needed that generally take me a while to figure out. Landing pages and a few 3D designed prototypes that I used the Fusion 360 MCP server for
Many people were making more money on unemployment than their standard wage due to the covid increased pay. The fed paid $600 on top of state benefits for a few months and then $300 for more than a year after that meaning people were seeing 16 -> 24 dollars an hour in wages for not working in my state of Georgia for instance. It was often smarter to stay unemployed until that ran out compared to local wages.
I don't think they're saying $150-300K will be easy, but it should be doable in raising 3 kids if you make sacrifices:
1. Seriously cut down on vacations. As an example, in the first 19 years of my life I slept in a hotel for perhaps 10 nights total (over 3 separate vacations). We did not feel at all deprived. Those who do are definitely "keeping up with the Joneses".
2. Don't buy new (or even recent) cars. Once your kids are old enough to ditch the booster seat, a Camry or Accord sized car is plenty.
3. Eliminate most subscriptions and streaming services.
4. No private schools.
5. Birthday parties for kids: Keep the budget low. It's OK not to offer a meal. Cake and snacks is fine. Limited/no decoration. Just get a good cake and stuff for them to play with.
6. Eat out only on special occasions. When I was a kid, we'd get junk food once a week, and everything else was home cooked. Actual dine-in "proper" restaurants? Perhaps oncea year. Learn recipes that can be cooked quickly.
7. Don't live in SV or Boston.
8. No, you don't need to get furniture for every room in the house (if you have a decent sized house). Have a 5 (or even 10) year plan for adding furniture and other niceties to the house.
9. If the yard is expensive to maintain, stop maintaining it if you can get away with it.
10. Don't pay more than $400 for a phone, and keep it for at least 3 years (my last one was bought for less and lasted 7 years). Only buy used phones.
The part that probably craters all of the above is medical issues (high premiums + deductibles). I offer no solution for you.
(I break a lot of these rules, but I also don't complain - I know where my problem lies).
I truly appreciate the thoughtful reply, really - we comply with most of if not all of it.
Unfortunately, the last 10-15 years has truly shifted what was once a low or middle tier CoL area into a higher tier. The Carolina Lowcountry went from hidden gem to a playground for the rich, or as a friend once put it “Antebellum Disneyland.”
I’ve used the example in other areas - my first team lead bought his house at 300k and sold it for over 1M last year. You just can’t compete anymore, I get similar stories from my Nashville and Texas colleagues.
> I’ve used the example in other areas - my first team lead bought his house at 300k and sold it for over 1M last year.
Yikes. How big is the house?
I assure you that I live in an above average COL area, and with $200K it's doable. With $300K you can get most of the luxuries I mentioned in the list (but won't retire early).
Keep in mind that there are those for whom conservatively means living with other family members or grandparents etc etc in other words there's immigrants and there's people who grew up in America with certain Suburban expectations. There are always levels. I say this to someone who myself would struggle not living that version of America we imagined when we were growing up. Um but there is a world in which you essentially live tenemens style, it's just something fairly unthinkable... one path could be to change the culture and make this less unappealing
There are people for whom conservative living is 12 people in a 1-bedroom flat. Should we aim for that? Is the economy good if most people don't have to live that way yet?
I suspect that Americans have the highest amount of square footage per resident of any major developed country. What we should strive for is debatable but it's important to keep things in perspective rather than imagine that our mcmansion standard is the middle of room
Go pick a metro, find a decent neighborhood, price out a house. Go price out insurance for a family. Go price out a minivan, go price out student loans, groceries, clothes, a cheap vacation for a week a year, car repairs, home repairs… the list goes on.
It’s not a “personal story” - the finances of living are a bitch and my math isn’t magically different, I’m not keeping up with any Jones’.
I have a lesser standard of living than my (single) mother buying a home in the 1980s here in the 2020s.
Offer a real rebuttal or kindly piss off, this isn’t Reddit.
I think that's just having a family in general if you're not into it. Many people are chosing not to because they want a different life. It's not really a money question. Humans have been having kids in much worse times. We just have the option not to. Women have more rights and we have birth control.
I think it's because most of us don't do CS once we graduate. We build APIs and websites which don't involve CS at all. It barely involves engineering. lol.
No one uses binary trees or some manual form of serialization.
They use "superlib.search(arr)" or (seriliazer.parse(thingy)" and that's about it. No one cares about what it does. They just know it does it faster than something they could write. The only places that care about it are at the utmost peak of scale.
Heck, I run an API that gets tens of millions of reqs a day and I'm an idiot that couldn't computer science their way of of a paper bag.
I'm not some Google/Microsoft/whatever engineer who's been working on highly scalable, highly available systems. I've mostly worked in consulting on small projects. I have never not had problems with the defaults on any of those sorts of libraries. I've almost always had to roll my own graph manipulation and heavily customize any serialization system I've used. And when I do so, because I've gotten good at doing it (in particular, I don't think of the graph stuff as being hard at all), it makes tons of other stuff inside around the project a lot easier.
I feel like people bend themselves out of shape trying to avoid these so-called "complex" or "esoteric" "only theoretical Computer Science" topics. You don't need a general purpose tree or graph manipulation library. Trying to make one ends up creating something far more complex than necessary and all you succeed in doing is making the calling code maybe two lines shorter but also not easily portable between projects, and also at a huge maintenance cost. It would be like trying to make your own, bespoke "Collection handling class" because you think trying to keep track of arrays and lists and dictionaries and sets and queues and stacks is too "complex, esoteric." No, you end up creating something complex and esoteric in the attempt to try to handle the erroneously identified "complexity."
In general, I don't think you can argue definitively on the uselessness of a piece of knowledge from a standpoint of ignorance of that knowledge.
> In general, I don't think you can argue definitively on the uselessness of a piece of knowledge from a standpoint of ignorance of that knowledge.
I agree, I think those things are definitely worthwhile learning. But I don't think that it follows we should test for them in interviews.
It sounds like you've done some pretty impressive work around graph algorithms, but if a job doesn't need you to do this, testing for it is a little silly. (If it's a criteria you're explicitly hiring for, I think that's clearly different)
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