What was the purpose of this comment? It's obviously irrelevant, as it's only considering one type of low-carbon electricity.

I'll take it with the whole shaker, because Texas has over 30 million residents to Sweden's 10, which means at least one of the above numbers is completely wrong.

... and shows why you still need to know things in order to safely use LLMs. If I hadn't known the approximate populations of both Texas and Sweden, I would have been more likely to believe the parent comment without question.

When the state is a full 30 degrees of latitude southern than Sweden, with consistent sun throughout the year, yeah, it will generate more energy through solar.

What's the point you're making?

> China emits half the emissions per capita of the US.

China emits more CO2 than any other country by a wide margin. It's not less damaging to the environment just because they have more people. Even if we pretended that that were the case, [China emits more CO2 per capita than 32 of 38 OECD countries.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...) They are an egregious and unrepentant polluter, in every way imaginable, and in many ways you cannot even imagine.

Any discussion of reducing CO2 emissions which doesn't include a large section on China is not taking the subject seriously. But to be clear, we should also discuss emissions by the other large polluters like the U.S. and Canada.

Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.

I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.

How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?

Because they’re not both equally bad.

If you eat meat, you’re producing more CO2 and using more water than 100 vegan vibe coders sitting around creating slop 24/7. It’s not on the same level.

Eating meat is not necessary by any means to 'be alive' in fact many studies show that a plant based diet is better for longevity. So, in the same way that AI is not 'necessary' to do a job, it's not necessary to eat meat. It's a matter of taste and societal conformity/norms.

Friends have described scenarios where ai has literally saved their life. Like, they were trying to commit suicide, they had no one human to talk to, but they did have AI.

I also had this sudden realization a year ago about the cruelty of animal usage in society and went vegan and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.

But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this

That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?

I trap and kill hare, and make cheese from fresh milk from my friend's dairy farm. But no, I do not kill the cows that I eat.

What do immigrants have to do with this? I shared my opinion that living like our ancestors did is the way I'd like to continue my life. If you have a counter opinion, can you offer it?

and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away.

but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.

Not sure about your great-grandfather, but mine didn't own a car, didn't travel on vacation by airplane, and, while he may have used a stove to heat his house, he probably only used it sparingly, because coal was expensive. So I doubt his life was more energy-intensive than mine.

I am unsure what a dead grandfather then has to do with CO2 emissions.

well thank god for the US citizens then taking one for team earth <3

ill keep supporting my local politicians who take a private jet for 100 kilometer journey to advocate for co2 reductions

Whoever responds "we need to stay within our CO2 budgets, otherwise we'll be in real trouble in 20 years" with "being a hippie and organizing your life around recycling" is really building up some sort of weird straw man and not really usefully engaging in solving the problem.

What's your point? Do you mean "everyone is equally bad", so reducing your resource usage is pointless? Because that's not true, clearly.

Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?

This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.

In my opinion, it is the responsibility of each and everyone to live as frugally w.r.t. the environment as possible, while keeping in mind that each of us has a job to manage in order to feed our families.

I own a phone, but it's as old as I can have in order to still have access to banking. I own a car, but it's as old as I could find while still driving well and being reasonably fuel efficient. I drive as little as I can, while still allowing myself to travel to meet family. I eat food but I buy organic and avoid imported food as much as possible. And so on.

Another important factor is that one should strive to improve the laws. Because clearly, reducing your own impact is not enough. And the political work one does, of course needs to be calibrated to what time one has available.

I'd never judge somebody for prioritizing family over political work, or buying a second-hand iPhone in order to save time on setting up a Fairphone or similar.

I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that. I will not judge but gently inform someone of the facts, if they buy meat that I consider coming from an unethical animal industry. And I will listen to a vegetarian if they'd like to inform me about the realities of the industry that produces the meat I eat, even though I personally consider it "ethical enough", because perhaps they'll change my mind.

Figuring out how to provide more for people using less resources, isn't that a great achievement?

I think reducing this discussion into only two polar opposites is rather juvenile, the struggle we face is on how can we be more efficient, and less damaging to the our general environment while providing for people.

That's a lot more sci-fi to me than sending rockets to Mars to colonise it.

Ecosystems are incredibly important for human survival. Once they are gone, we are in a lot of trouble.

Denmark would disagree, but with the limitation that the data centre needs to be sited in an appropriate location.

https://danskfjernvarme.dk/viden-vaerktoejer/udgivelser/taen...

https://danmarksdagblad.dk/article/datacenter-paa-15-million...

https://pulse.microsoft.com/da-dk/transform-da-dk/government...

I don't think anywhere would want to be entirely reliant on a single datacentre, at least not at the scale of district heating use in Denmark.

(I gave some pages in Danish, you can search "Denmark datacentre district heat" yourself if you like.)

> it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.

By completely replacing workers with AI? Unless their new job will be from home or out in the open, they'll continue to consume the same.

If we're talking of completely eliminating people, I guess we can consider the emissions they would cause during their whole extant life. Should we kill them or just wait for them to die of starvation?

Except they wouldn't move to Texas but would also build in Texas. So you don't get a less polluting datacenter but you get one less polluting and one more polluting datacenter. A Swedish datacenter doesn't simply replace one in Texas, it's an additional one.

It’s not either Texas or Sweden, it’s either Texas or Texas and Sweden. You just get more datacenters and more CO2 output.

> "Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed"

This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?

They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

> Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed

By what?

You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.

You can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs. They can only smelt so much aluminum and they are exporting that also, so there are costs associated with that. In comparison, an AI result just needs a network connection to send.