LLMs are a tiny energy use, 100 queries to chatGPT type models use about as much energy as a hair dryer for a few minutes. At current UK electricity retail prices (after tax, so significantly more than datacentres pay) 1 query costs somewhere between £0.00015 - £0.001 in power usage.
I cant see that being a significant factor in the price power companies charge over things like moving away from cheap but dirty sources of power or fluctuations of the natural gas price.
UK, France and western Europe more generally getting a bit colder isnt too big an issue with temperatures rising anyway, the more concerning part of it is that it will make the climate much drier and affect what crops can be grown.
They are not going to be applying any changes to anyone currently on pip, I fail to see how that isn’t backing down.
Even if they hadn’t backed down, which they did, you would still be wrong to call it extermination.
The same research that you are quoting also said there were 200,000 who were willing and able to work but prevented from doing so as they would lose their benefits as a result. Not that it matters as the government backed down under pressure from its back benchers.
Trying to frame that as tantamount to exterminating is catastrophising.
The title kinda buries the lede there. I thought it was ridiculous to fine a platform just because a streamer happened to die on camera, but no, they were streaming months long abuse and torture of this guy at the hands of his co-streamers.
They made a slight change so that people with low levels of disability wouldnt get as much support and paired it with making getting a job not cut off all disability benifits immediately. When that change got huge amounts of pushback from labour MPs they watered it down. Then a private members bill (So coming from an individual MP) with no support from the government got passed allowing people who have less than six months to live get assistance in ending their own life if they get approval from a panel of a judge and care experts, that change has overwhelming support in the country.
The grandparent post is catastrophising.
You can tell when posts are from mastodon as they are full of twitterisms like hashtags and @User to reply to comments
And latitudes above 40degrees.
If you really dont care about speed (as in ask a question and come back half an hour later dont care) you could try a 3 bit quantization of qwen3 thinking thats at around 100GB so you could fit it in memory and still have enough leftover for the OS. But I’m not kidding about coming back an hour later for your response (or even longer), thats a very big model for a decade old computer.
Yes, if you want a social security net and dont live in the world’s economic hegemon
FWIW the article does make sense, though the conclusion I’d draw wouldnt be the same as theirs but:
Jane is earning £60k and claiming child benefit for three children. That’s worth £3,094.
She’s now in the 42% tax band.6 Jane still pays basic rate tax for her income between £12,570 and £50,270, but now pays 42% tax for everything over that. So her total tax bill is (50270 – 12570) * 28% + (60000-50270) * 42% = £14,643 and Jane takes home £45,357.
Jane is thinking of working a few more hours to earn another £1,000. She’s in the higher tax band – so in a sane world she’d expect another £420 of tax, and a marginal rate of 42%.
But that is not the result. Once Jane’s income hits £60,200, the “High Income Child Benefit Charge” (introduced by George Osborne) starts to apply to claw back her child benefit – 1% for every £200 of earnings.
The marginal rate – the tax Jane is paying on that new £1,000. This is 56.5% – and we will have the same result for all incomes between £60k and £80k.
The solution I’d draw from that would be to raise the higher rate from 42 to 45-50% and scrap the means testing of child benefits. Makes the tax take more progressive and reduces administrative burden by not having to assess people’s income for if they are eligible for child support or not.
If this university hadnt bought this meaningless advert it would have a tiny reduction in the demand for advertising potentially leading to less always lit billboards being made. So no, they dont get a pass for it.
People make a complete mess of DIY with powertools, that doesnt mean that the powertools are the problem.
The energy usage stuff is just silly, its dwarfed by streaming and video games, never mind actually energy intensive things like heating transport and meat rearing.
You think venture capital dictates to the politburo what its priorities are in China?
Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to throw coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?
I think her point was that you were doing the annoying “everyone is from USA so I’ll just talk like we all are” by bringing up Trumps tarrifs when they were not the topic of conversation and are irrelevant to everyone outside the USA.
ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes transport, heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.
Do you have a source for that? Because given a chatgpt query takes a similar amount of energy to running a hair dryer for a few seconds i find it hard to believe.
It would make a lot more sense nowadays for Europe/NA to east Asia (or would for Europe if Russia were a reasonable country that could be trusted to fly over).
Sure maybe that’s all true, but even if you make insane assumptions like every single person in the UK is making 100 queries per week, and that the true average cost is 10 times higher than the 3Wh I used for my upper price limit there (this is far more than independent research suggests), and that data centres are paying retail price + taxes: It still only comes out to around 5% of the UK domestic electricity market, so hardly going to be responsible for huge shifts in prices.