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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You can do this with not that much setup:

    • Obsidian app on the phone
    • Make a shortcut on your desktop so that it’s easily accessible and there’s minimal friction to make a rough note (you can write on your daily note)
    • Have obsidian synced to your computer, either through their paid service or something like Google drive / etc.

    And now what makes it magic for me:

    • Have a bash script that runs on your computer every once in a while and combines your notes into a single file
    • Append that file into your LLM of choice (either online or a local one if you have that setup) and make a prompt that goes something like “you’re a NotebookLM style assistant with access to my notes, answer from knowledge of my notes unless explicitly asked otherwise…”

    Depending on how sophisticated your setup is, you might get the LLM to automatically pick up changes in your notes. I do this at work and it feels like magic.







  • These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

    8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

    • Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
    • Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
    • A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
    • The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

    850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

    • The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
    • Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
    • The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
    • The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

    So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

    The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

    But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.








  • A very minor one, but only in a roundablut way. Valve weren’t targeting a performance boost, but a battery increase. They went for a newer generation of their processor with roughly the same processing power and slightly more efficiency. The thing is, because of the added efficiency it can sustain high loads without throttling for longer. Between that and the minute differences in processing power, it happens to have a tiny bit of a performance boost, but it’s very very minor.