Here we go again with this.

NVidia shipped 100k AI GPUs last year, which - if run nonstop - would consume 7,4 TWh. Crypto consumes over 100 TWh per year, and the world as a whole consumes just under 25000 TWh per year.

AI consumption of power is a pittiance. To get these huge numbers, they have to assume long-term extreme exponential scaling. But you can make anything give insane numbers with an assumption like that.

I simply don't buy the assumption. Not even assuming an AI bust - even assuming that AI keeps hugely growing, and that nobody rests on their laurels but rather keeps training newer and better foundations - the simple fact is that there's far too much progress being made towards vastly more efficient architectures at every level - model structure, neuron structure, training methodologies, and hardware. . Not like "50% better", but like "orders of magnitude better". I just don't buy these notions of infinite exponential growth.

Everyone (including Slashdot) is presenting the study wrong. It's forecasting that world incomes would drop by nearly a fifth relative to what they would have otherwise been, not relative to the present.

He's lucky not to have been killed, 1.6lbs of metal travelling at high speed is basically a small cannonball.

It's not just a question of whether it's justifiable. It's just simply nonsense to think that they can enforce this. Anyone can run Stable Diffusion on their computer. There's a virtually limitless number of models finetuned to make all kinds of porn. It's IMHO extremely annoying all the porn flooding the model sites; I think like 3/4ths of the people using these tools are guys making wank material. Even models that aren't tuned specifically for porn, rarely does anyone (except the foundation model developers, like StabilityAI) specifically try to *prevent* it.

The TL/DR is: if you think stopping pirated music was hard, well, *good luck* stopping people from generating porn on their computers. You might as well pass a law declaring it illegal to draw porn.

Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.

To be fair, there have been times where Earth's temperature changed relatively rapidly.

On the other hand... those times tended not to work out very well for life :

Our current experiment with mass greenhouse gas emissions affecting the climate, Earth itself has kinda done it before, at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. The associated Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) left the world such an altered place that we refer to it as a different era (the Eocene). The oceans took the brunt of the hit. Except the differences we have vs. the PETM are *not* to our favour:

  * The arctic was ice-free going into the PETM; ours is not. The presence of ice creates an amplifying feedback process, where the more ice that melts, the more sunlight gets absorbed, creating more heat to melt more ice.

  * We're releasing our carbon an order of magnitude faster (though our methane emissions are similar)

The PETM caused a 5-8C rise over 6000 years, but we're speed-running it, so it's really our best case. The worst case is the K-Pg extinction event

Only the worst excursions in history tend to result in large parts of the earth becoming relative sterile. But they all lead to mass disruptions in ecosystems and waves of global or at least local extinction (but new speciation of the survivors who take their place). Indeed, we probably owe our existence to the PETM - primates diversified and radiated after it. But that's little solace to species that didn't make it. Like, for example, dinoflagellates flourished during the PETM. But do you really want to replace reefs with red tide?

Also, it's actually 1-3 years. The Great Barrier reef underwent mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, and now in 2024.

(To be clear on terminology: colony != reef. A coral colony is a cluster of polyps that bud or divide off from each other, all genetically identical and interconnected by the coenosarc to share resources, with each polyp living for a few years. For a plant analogy, the colony would be a a tree, and the polyps, individual leaves of that tree)

Going through mass bleaching events every 2-3 years is not the "whew, let's relax" event you seem to think it is when corals don't hit reproductive age for ~3-10 years, depending on species, with initial reproduction rates being slow and taking time to accelerate (the longest-lived animals on Earth are coral colonies, with certain individuals documented having lived for thousands of years; most live for decades, or in some species hundreds of years). Let alone the knock-on for all the species that depend on healthy coral for their their habitat, which lead to balance in the ecosystem, which is critical to e.g. preventing explosions of coral predators.

It's like taking an old growth forest in an ecosystem not adapted to regular fires, and burning it down every couple years. There will still be "something" living there, but it's just not going to be the same ecosystem it was.

Or they were just healthier to begin with, or more favourably situated. It doesn't mean that they have an inherent genetic advantage.

Corals are not fast growing. They grow about a centimeter per year, give or take half an order of magnitude. The fastest-reproducing corals still take several years to hit reproductive age, while others take as much as a decade. These aren't like bacteria that can quickly get new genes into the mix, test them, and quickly spread them through the population.

Corals need to get off Tiktok and stop with these unhealthy style trends. You're beautiful the way you are, corals!

Who wants to keep typing a password like that into a device with no keyboard?

You're assuming that the gas line is longer than the line for the EV chargers.
Often there aren't many EV chargers, and if they're full you could be waiting quite some time for someone to leave. Eventually a charging point will become a standard feature of every parking space, but until then.

If you're paying a monthly subscription then there's ongoing revenue, while the cost of hosting the servers will decrease over time. Eventually it will reach the point that the cost of hosting the server exceeds the monthly revenue from subscribers.
But if there's no money to be made hosting the servers, then they should release the servers and allow users to host them instead for the few who want to continue playing or are interested in preserving retro games etc.

People still play pong today. In fact people still play board games their grandparents purchased in their youth.
A reasonable consumer would expect a game they purchased to continue being playable indefinitely providing the game itself has not been lost or damaged.

If a game is being provided as a service then it should be made clear up front that you're subscribing to a service, as well as making it clear when the service will be discontinued.