> Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly
That's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.
Even these data are noticeably low for my area where we had a _massive_ rate hike in January that results in total prices for electricity (generation + delivery) without an alternative supplier being up around $0.48/kWh.
Big cities in the US tend to have very expensive power ($0.50/kWh or higher), while rural areas can have nearly free power, particularly if you are near a dam or a nuclear power plant. The price you're quoting is definitely not a big city price.
Watts per unit of fuel are cheap but only to the power companies who mark it up. We’re in the middle of Record gouging in energy and food and you think a power company won’t gouge you?
They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.
> Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty
That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.
Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).
That's nice, but it's no justification for that earlier poster lying about the number of people killed by Chernobyl. There's very good reason to think the number is much larger than 100.
Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.
shit like slack and other electron abominations are not just 10-20% improvement going native. We are talking a simple chat application, irc glorified to load images and preview, and this somehow takes more memory and cpu than the total resources I had in 1995 times 100.
these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just ridiculous
Hit the nail on the head. Inefficiency, which has reached gargantuan proportions, and then blown past that, doesn't just mean page loads so slow that loading a news article takes upwards of 20s on a pocket supercomputer (whereas it took barely a second or two on a Pentium II on a 56kbps connection), all the while text and buttons jump around as assets are loaded. It also means very real waste of energy and battery degradation.
Personally I no longer use laptops, and instead do 99% of my computing on a fast desktop with a great keyboard, great monitors, etc. If something breaks or needs to be upgraded, I can pop it open and get it done, usually on the same day. On the rare occasion I need to travel I'll take my smart phone and a note pad if there is some need to take notes.
I don’t see prejudice against potential aliens there, just healthy skepticism that the reports actually represent some extra-terrestrial activity instead of some natural or manmade phenomena.
Low-DPI screens, bad webcams, keyboards with the wrong arrows/numpad layout, off-center trackpads etc. it's different for each person what they consider "shitty", but laptops are always a total package deal (except for Framework) and it can just so happen that nobody makes powerful laptops that also have the exact right permutation of peripherals.
You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using.
Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors.
OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck.
You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place.
The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
I haven't really been in the market for a non-Apple laptop for a while (previously had to buy MacBook bc of specific software), so this gives me a great idea of what to watch out for when I get my next laptop. Thanks a lot!
For what it's worth, the ROG Flow X16 (2022)[0] has some good specs (8-core CPU with 3070 Ti), a great keyboard layout (with correct arrow keys!), and other niceties like a mux switch and upgradeable RAM. It is so close to perfection—but doesn't have a 4K screen, ruining the whole package.
Big reason why I dislike the market so much: the existence of that machine with only a single flaw that nonetheless ruins the value of the entire product. There's nothing else like it. It seems to be the absolute best machine the market has to offer... and it just barely misses. :(
However, the screen resolution seems to be the only problem with it, so anyone who doesn't require specifically 4K (most people) would probably find it worth considering.
On the other hand, there's a lot of great tech (including, I think, the iPad pro and Apple silicon) that just wouldn't exist if the bean counters hadn't said yes, it's a good idea to invest a few billions of dollars into this...
I am very happy that ETH switched to PoS. Now it just runs in the other data centers that are already in the same location and uses a fraction of the power.
The GPUs were already made and older models. The PS5 chips were seconds that never made it into PS5's. They would have gone to waste regardless.
If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy. I find gaming a total waste of time/energy, but I don't tell people to stop playing games or that they should feel guilty about it.
Just because they had already been made doesn't mean that you using them has no impact on the world. If you hadn't used them then other people would have, there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in future.
You're clearly smart enough to understand that; you just don't want to because it makes you feel guilty. Honestly I think you should just own it. I assume you made a suitably large amount of money? I can't say I wouldn't have done the same but I hope I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.
> If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy.
It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!
> If you hadn't used them then other people would have, there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in future.
No. They were based on stock that didn't sell. It is a common misconception with GPU mining that you had to use the latest and greatest. The 4-5 year older tech was more ROI efficient and we got access to it, so we used it. Nobody wanted it cause it was old. We put it to use for a few years and now it'll either find a new home or get recycled for parts.
> I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.
See... that's a personal attack. I don't see things the way you do. In my eyes, attempting to build a better financial system isn't 'taking money from idiots'. Given all that's going on in the banking world today, I find it hard to believe anyone would want to continue with the status quo.
You literally have Yellen sitting in a room with her friends deciding which bank should live or die. I'd like to see that and a whole lot more in traditional finance get cleaned up. Helping get ETH off the ground was a good thing... now that it is on PoS, this whole debate about energy use, is a moot point.
> It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!
Sure, but don't be hypocritical about it. I'm sure that there are 1000's of ways that you personally don't do your part either. Ever fly in a plane to take a vacation? No one on this planet is doing a perfect job at minimizing their footprint and I certainly don't feel like I'm above anyone else to criticize others on their energy ab(use).
My Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, which isn't a top-of-the-line system at this point, but is still a 16 core beast-ish machine, sucks down (much) less than 400W
Are these power figures measured at the wall? If so, both are astonishing. My file server with an old Xeon, 16GB RAM and 5x 7200RPM HDDs uses about 95W when idle and about 150W when I throw something at it that works the drives. My desktop with an I7-4770K, 32GB RAM, some SSDs and a single spinner ids about the same. IIRC if I push something compute intensive at it, it can break 200W.
OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs uses about 25W and another with an SSD uses about 7W.
I don't have a kill-a-watt meter handy anymore, but I do have a smart meter. Guesstimating using that, I hit ~ 850w with my threadripper when compiling and my work project and running a game at the same time, and about 650w when _just_ compiling (so presumably the difference there is GPU being under full load).
They're obviously extreme examples, but on the flip side, I've got an M1 Macbook Pro which lasts an entire day on a single charge of battery including running docker, slack, and some "mild" compiling (not large C++ projects). I'm not sure how to measure the energy consumption of it on battery, but suffice to say it's "very low".
This is good. The idea that an astrophysicist would ever think seriously one could find ET by just scanning the sky and finding ET signals is baffling. If anyone learned how to do a Fermi problem, they could quickly do a back of the envelope estimation and realize there's zero chance to detect such a signal. The space is simply too large, stupendously large, and signals decay with the square of the distance (at least). This SETI at home experiment was a waste of compute from the beginning. It was a good distributed compute framework, too bad to use it on such a pointless task.
I'm trying to find a way to say this that isn't too negative, but do you really think you're that much smarter than everyone that's been involved in SETI over the decades? That everyone that's worked on it was incapable of doing the "simple envelope estimation" that you've done? You have such a level of hubris that you can just write off the whole idea, assuming that everyone involved with it have no idea what they're doing?
I explicitly said I don't think any astrophysicist believed that. Every single one is able to do that back of the envelope calculation, and I suspect that those involved in the SETI project actually did it. They just didn't care. As long as the population was ok with a search for ETs, the money kept coming.
While true, it isn't an easy task. You have to build and maintain infrastructure to transmit it and that is super expensive, with a lot of loss.
This is a remote location, that is sparsely populated, with a big river and many dams. There is a lot more power generated in the area, than there are users for it.
You are correct. There is one in upstate new york as well. An old Alcoa smelter factory powered off the Moses-Saunders dam. It is so remote and sparsely populated that transmitting the power elsewhere is just too expensive. I've even seen their energy bills and the transmission costs alone are insane.
The open source aspect is a good point. I'm guessing the team thought making the source open would increase the risk of cheating; misguided I know, but cheaters were a pain in the neck at first.
Many of the folks there were into music (in bands, wrote music related software, etc), so I'm guessing the signals were boring to listen to.
In comparison to everything else, it is tiny. All of banking could be significantly automated to the point that we don't need to build physical buildings all over the planet and stuff them full of humans who drive their cars to work every day to take your money and write it down on a ledger. Talk about absurd.
Remember also, this equipment is being turned off because ethereum has grown to be more efficient. It is now proof of stake instead of proof of work and it has been a relatively huge success. Over night, this single change wiped out every single GPU mined network out there by removing all the profitability. That was the plan from day one and I'm glad it worked!
The financial system has put a lot of effort into automation obliviously because it means they make more money. So to the extent that they could be automated, they are automated and will continue to increase the level of automation.
It’s also not a reasonable comparison because banks do something useful (even if I think they could be much better regulated and are too profitable and shouldn’t be running the payment system).
Crypto does nothing useful, it’s like an online casino, or an online game.
Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as much hardware and electricity?
> So to the extent that they could be automated, they are automated
It still isn't enough and is a huge waste of energy and resources.
> Crypto does nothing useful, it’s like an online casino, or an online game.
For me, it is extremely useful on a daily basis.
> Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as much hardware and electricity?
All of them. ETH has switched to PoS and no longer consumes so much energy. It also had the side effect of destroying profitability for the majority of the other GPU mined coins, and thus the hashrate on those networks have dropped off considerably (or been replaced with ASICs).
What was the RSA crack effort you mention? It doesn't seem feasible, considering finding a SHA-256 collision would take so much compute power we don't have words to describe it, and even coming up with thoughts to frame the problem is hard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY). I can't imagine cracking even an RSA2048 key with everyone working on it.
Ever travel to SE Asia? There are millions of kids that go to gaming centers. They are rooms in shacks, full of computers and they sit there 24/7 playing games online. They are burning electricity non-stop and this is majority coal based energy.
Its a distributed version of SETI at home whereas you own and control your own receiver. Its run by folks in the amateur radio community. It was launched in the late 90's before the advancements of SDRs and has alot of potential today. Its truly an open source initiative which is what SETI should be.
You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to Arecibo or the Allen Array". In terms of antenna gain you are right, but right now, the Allen Array can only look in a few directions simultaneously and Arecibo is a pile of rubble. Many smaller telescopes is better than nothing.
107 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThat's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.
Here’s the prices for the United States - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Even these data are noticeably low for my area where we had a _massive_ rate hike in January that results in total prices for electricity (generation + delivery) without an alternative supplier being up around $0.48/kWh.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-bills-supp...
They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.
That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.
Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).
Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.
these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just ridiculous
You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great webcams too—if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for the peripherals they end up using.
Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have all of "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement, high performance". And this is true for basically all laptop vendors.
OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and light" which results in bad performance, either through bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck.
You may notice that this only matters because I even care. You may also notice that this is exactly what building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first place.
The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good laptops out there, but rather that if you want high performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can only get it as a package deal with the rest of the laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
Big reason why I dislike the market so much: the existence of that machine with only a single flaw that nonetheless ruins the value of the entire product. There's nothing else like it. It seems to be the absolute best machine the market has to offer... and it just barely misses. :(
However, the screen resolution seems to be the only problem with it, so anyone who doesn't require specifically 4K (most people) would probably find it worth considering.
[0]: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x16-2022-seri...
It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
I didn't claim that it was sufficient, but it is necessary.
> It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
Of course. With other people's money (typically).
The GPUs were already made and older models. The PS5 chips were seconds that never made it into PS5's. They would have gone to waste regardless.
If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy. I find gaming a total waste of time/energy, but I don't tell people to stop playing games or that they should feel guilty about it.
Just because they had already been made doesn't mean that you using them has no impact on the world. If you hadn't used them then other people would have, there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in future.
You're clearly smart enough to understand that; you just don't want to because it makes you feel guilty. Honestly I think you should just own it. I assume you made a suitably large amount of money? I can't say I wouldn't have done the same but I hope I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.
> If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy.
It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!
No. They were based on stock that didn't sell. It is a common misconception with GPU mining that you had to use the latest and greatest. The 4-5 year older tech was more ROI efficient and we got access to it, so we used it. Nobody wanted it cause it was old. We put it to use for a few years and now it'll either find a new home or get recycled for parts.
> I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.
See... that's a personal attack. I don't see things the way you do. In my eyes, attempting to build a better financial system isn't 'taking money from idiots'. Given all that's going on in the banking world today, I find it hard to believe anyone would want to continue with the status quo.
You literally have Yellen sitting in a room with her friends deciding which bank should live or die. I'd like to see that and a whole lot more in traditional finance get cleaned up. Helping get ETH off the ground was a good thing... now that it is on PoS, this whole debate about energy use, is a moot point.
> It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!
Sure, but don't be hypocritical about it. I'm sure that there are 1000's of ways that you personally don't do your part either. Ever fly in a plane to take a vacation? No one on this planet is doing a perfect job at minimizing their footprint and I certainly don't feel like I'm above anyone else to criticize others on their energy ab(use).
My Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, which isn't a top-of-the-line system at this point, but is still a 16 core beast-ish machine, sucks down (much) less than 400W
That's before you add on a GPU. My 3080 uses 350w under load.
OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs uses about 25W and another with an SSD uses about 7W.
They're obviously extreme examples, but on the flip side, I've got an M1 Macbook Pro which lasts an entire day on a single charge of battery including running docker, slack, and some "mild" compiling (not large C++ projects). I'm not sure how to measure the energy consumption of it on battery, but suffice to say it's "very low".
This is a remote location, that is sparsely populated, with a big river and many dams. There is a lot more power generated in the area, than there are users for it.
It would be going to waste otherwise.
Many of the folks there were into music (in bands, wrote music related software, etc), so I'm guessing the signals were boring to listen to.
Remember also, this equipment is being turned off because ethereum has grown to be more efficient. It is now proof of stake instead of proof of work and it has been a relatively huge success. Over night, this single change wiped out every single GPU mined network out there by removing all the profitability. That was the plan from day one and I'm glad it worked!
It’s also not a reasonable comparison because banks do something useful (even if I think they could be much better regulated and are too profitable and shouldn’t be running the payment system).
Crypto does nothing useful, it’s like an online casino, or an online game.
Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as much hardware and electricity?
It still isn't enough and is a huge waste of energy and resources.
> Crypto does nothing useful, it’s like an online casino, or an online game.
For me, it is extremely useful on a daily basis.
> Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as much hardware and electricity?
All of them. ETH has switched to PoS and no longer consumes so much energy. It also had the side effect of destroying profitability for the majority of the other GPU mined coins, and thus the hashrate on those networks have dropped off considerably (or been replaced with ASICs).
SETI @ home is run by the SETI Institute. As a participant in SETI @ home, your only contribution is your computing power.
The SETI League has a much more interesting program called "project Argus": http://www.setileague.org/argus/
Its a distributed version of SETI at home whereas you own and control your own receiver. Its run by folks in the amateur radio community. It was launched in the late 90's before the advancements of SDRs and has alot of potential today. Its truly an open source initiative which is what SETI should be.
You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to Arecibo or the Allen Array". In terms of antenna gain you are right, but right now, the Allen Array can only look in a few directions simultaneously and Arecibo is a pile of rubble. Many smaller telescopes is better than nothing.
Any radio telescope that exists can compare favorably to Arecibo, actually.
http://www.setileague.org/argus/