If you’ll pardon the pun,

This feels like a god-tier shitpost

You’re welcome!

Wow, who would have thought?

It seems the AI hype is shrinking (or at least slowing down), since people are more and more critical of it: intellectual property, workers rights, power consumption, climate impacts, usefulness and more.

If you want more reading, I recommend these:

I can’t recommend Ed Zitron’s blog enough: Where’s your Ed at

He did an interview with Adam Conover a month ago, which was also really interesting.

The other blog I highly recommend is The Luddite, e.g. Why is there an AI hype?

Username checks out 🏴‍☠️

I will also never buy a spaceship /j

They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

I do have several questions:

Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?

Exactly

To quote the post more specifically:

Even as our species destroys its only home, we assume that the solutions to climate change must lie in technology, without stopping to examine the role that this very attitude has played in the crisis.

This is so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that, when there is a new impressive technology, we assume that it must be here to solve one of our big problems. As the AI hype quickens the pace of our ecological devastation, we’re so dazzled by the technology that there is actual debate in supposedly serious publications as to whether AI is going to save us from climate change, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

One only blinks the truth and the other only blinks falsehoods. Which direction do you turn?

Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:

Bitcoin

Users

There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.

Total energy consumption

Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]

Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually

Energy consumption per user

150 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users

Banking system

Users

There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.

Total energy consumption

The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]

If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.

Energy consumption per user

348 TWh / year 
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users

With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.

There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.

1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.