Could someone please help me save some power and just post the image with the 5tits so I don't need to have it regenerated de novo?
Let's not forget billionaires in this consideration.
Meanwhile I'm down town I'm my city cleaning windows in office buildings that are 75% empty but the heat or ac is blasting on completely empty floors and most of the lights are on.
Laughs in total recall
Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/
You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.
If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is: https://<searxng_url>/search?q=%s
I have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.
Firefox has a plugin that blocks the AI results. It works pretty well most of the time, but it occasionally has hiccups when Google updates stuff or something.
Then I guess it's time to stop using Google!
Someone posted here a while ago - if you use the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 it doesn't include the AI search. I've updated my Google search links to use that instead of the base Google URL.
You can also use alternatives like startpage and ecosia which use google results, I believe.
Both of which are probably training their own AI as middle men or stealing your search terms to tell Walmart what type of peanut butter you're most likely to buy if they could lock it up on a plastic covered shelve.
Probably, but neither automatically opt into AI replies. Ecosia has an AI chat, but it doesn't run until you go to it. Startpage has no AI option that I can see.
Ecosia has the upside of planting trees depending on user search rate. Not sure how true that is, though. I prefer startpage either way. Startpage claims to be privacy first, and I've never received tailored results or ads.
That doesn't mean they don't sell info. We can't know that for sure, but it sure as hell beats using Google and it's automatic AI searching.
I am trying to understand what Google's motivation for this even is. Surely it is not profitable to be replacing their existing, highly lucrative product with an inferior alternative that eats up way more power?
They don't want to direct you to the thing you're searching for anymore because that means you're off their site quickly. Instead they want to provide themselves whatever it is you were searching for, so you will stay on their site and generate ad money. They don't care if their results are bad, because that just means you'll stick around longer, looking for an answer.
To make search more lucrative, they've enshitified it and went too far, but for a short time there were great quarterly resukts. Now they're slowly losing users. So they try AI to fix it up.
It's also a signal to the shareholders that they're implementing the latest buzzword, plus they're all worried AI will take off and they've missed that train.
Their motivation is always ads. The ai response is longer and takes time to read so more time looking at their ads. If the answer is sufficient, you might not even click away to the search result.
AI is a potential huge bonanza to search sites, letting them suck up the ad revenue that used to goto the search results
When I’m told there’s power issues and to conserve power I drop my AC to 60 and leave all my lights on. Only way for them to fix the grid is to break it.
Literally rolling coal to own the cons
wow based
I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days
The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.
The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.
I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.
The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city's solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn't tried scamming me.
FUCK private energy providers.
Smart meters with this ability are great, when done well. Without them they have the ability to turn off all of your power if they need to. If they can't keep up with demand, they have to turn things off. It's better for them to have the ability to shut off a few appliances or decrease your AC usage rather than shut people down entirely.
People always complain that they don't want to give the energy company power over their electricity, but they already do. However, without this their power is total, and only total. With it they can moderate it. It's better if everyone has a smart meter instead of only people who care about others, and greedy people only look out for themselves.
I agree though, fuck private providers.
I agree though, fuck private providers
If it was a public utility i'd feel very differently.
Also they can build nuclear power generators for the data centers but never for the residential power grid.
There's no money in selling residential energy.
Yeah, that thing that nobody wanted? Everybody has to have it. Fuck corporations and capitalism.
We're going away folks, and nothing of any true value will be lost, except all the species that did live in homeostasis with the Earth that we're taking with us in our species' avarice induced murder-suicide
Carlin had some good material, but this is an absolutely stupid mindset. We can cause an extreme level of ecological damage. Will the planet eventually recover? Quite possibly. But that's not a certainty, and in the mean time we're triggering a mass extinction precisely because irresponsible humans figure there's no way we can hurt the Earth and it's self-important hubris to think that we can.
But the time we're living through and the time we're heading into are all the proof we should need that it's actually hubris to assume our actions have no meaningful impact.
Citations: [1] Human extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction [2] What If Humans Suddenly Went Extinct? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOKTZISXhc [3] How long would it take for all traces of humans to be gone? https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/1azu120/how_long_would_it_take_for_all_traces_of_humans/ [4] What would happen to Earth if humans went extinct? https://www.livescience.com/earth-without-people.html [5] How long before all human traces are wiped out? https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/2215950-how-long-before-all-human-traces-are-wiped-out/ [6] Vanishing Act: What Earth Will Look Like 100 Years After Humans Disappear - Brilliantio https://brilliantio.com/if-people-dissapeared-what-will-happen-to-earth-in-100-years/ [7] If humans became extinct, how long would it take for all ... https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/if-humans-became-extinct-how-long-would-it-take-for-all-traces-of-us-to-vanish [8] Nature will need up to five million years to fill the gaps caused by man-made mass extinctions, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/mass-extinctions-five-million-years-nature-mammals-crisis-animal-plants-pnas-aarhus-a8585066.html [9] Humans Will Go Extinct on Earth in 250 Million Years; Mass Extinction Will Occur Sooner if Burning Fossil Fuels Continues [Study] https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/49951/20240430/humans-will-go-extinct-earth-250-million-years-mass-extinction.htm [10] How long would it take for all evidence of humanity to be ... https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/153618/how-long-would-it-take-for-all-evidence-of-humanity-to-be-erased-from-earth [11] What Would Happen If Every Human On Earth Just Disappeared? https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/life-like-humans-suddenly-disappeared.html
Stephen Baxter over here. I'm going back to bed, it won't change anything...
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