Only partially true. The solar panels almost all inject power back into the grid. Power companies started complaining about their profits when they had to actually pay the users for their power that they generated so now home power generating houses get paid pennies on the dollar for delivering power and reducing the power capacity needed by the power companies and of course the power companies didn’t lower prices at all, so they are just sucking up the difference in pure profit.
Actually, the AI assistant fad isn’t all bad.
HomeAssistant has an open souce assistant pipeline that integrates into the most flexible smart home software around. It is completely local and doesn’t rely on the cloud at all. Essentially it could make Alexa’s and google homes (that literally spy on you and send key phrases back to your built data collection profile) obsolete. That is a way not to have to rely on corporate bullshit privacy invasion to have a good smart home.
Indeed transcribing and translating (and preserving dying languages and being able to re-teach them) are 2 of the best consumer uses for AI. Then there is accelerating disease and climate research.
If these were the use cases that were pushed instead of fucking conversational assistants, replacements for customer support that only direct to existing incomplete docs, taking away artists’ jobs, and creating 1984 “you can’t trust your own eyes and ears” in real time, then AI would actually be very worthwhile.
What?
He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.
Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.
And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.
There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.
Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.
Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.
Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)
Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.
You said it right there in your comment.
Sleep mode, (and other effectively off modes) where it is functionally useless, it can do.
MSP430 can do 140uA/MHz. That is ~7 times the power that this application supplies, and that is not counting any single other chip quiescent current or chip that actively provides useful data. You would have to have a battery anyway or a big cap to provide the needed current for on-states. Or you could run it extremely low frequencies like you said, but those tend to not scale linearly at all with per MHz power ratings. Quiescent currents tend to catch up fast at that scale. I would be extremely doubtful that 150kHz would scale perfectly and wouldn’t have already exponentially decayed to around its lowest possible on-state consumption for the chip. I would definitely have to see tests on that.
The smallest of batteries like the VARTA tiny cells in TWS’s are infinitely more useful and practical and it would take this application months to fill a single cell, discounting all losses.
I don’t think people realize how extremely little 50uW is.
For a standard 3.3V microcontroller assuming a 95% efficient voltage regulator will be a current of 14.4uA. Just having the HSI master clock enabled on one of the low power STML0 chips is 15uA. This will literally only the clock. That is 0 sensors, 0 communication, 0 IO, nothing useful at all. For reference, reading SPO2 with a very efficient maxm86161 takes 10uA by itself in ultra low power mode with low accuracy and not counting the max leakage current of 1uA. For full operation, you need about 1000x-10000x that amount for short bursts.
“Oh but it can cHaRgE tHe BaTtErY”
Let’s say the device has a standard 100mAh battery (apple watch had a 228mAh or more). At 100% efficiency with absolutely not one millijoule being used by any other electronics (which would never ever happen, it would at the very least need a boost converter), it would take around 277 days to charge up that tiny tiny battery.
Let’s take another example of an even smaller battery. To charge one side of the airpods 3rd gen (0.133Wh battery), it would take 110 days per ear
This is one of those free “energy harvesting” fad BS based in nothing but wishing and marketing. It is an interesting learning project for wireless antenna beginners, but that is the extent.
This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.
That being said, I am happy about it. I got my company to use it and finally got my girlfriend to use it and just recommended it to her brother. Would hate to have to try to find something else
Really? My girlfriend’s A52 doesn’t have this feature. That is part of why I bought my Xperia 5ii. Is it a new feature?
(After 3 years the battery is at 70% on mine because apparently Sony uses shitty as hell batteries and software drain glitches, while my girlfriend’s A52 always charging to 100% lasts a day and a half with 3x the use, would not recommend)
Lol look at statistics of smokers. Waaay more than 0.01% of people in any given country and 90% of smokers throw cigarette butts on the ground. That is just that one example.
If you have ever traveled to the southern US, oof.
People can’t learn not to throw trash in the street, climate change that is backed by decades of science is a problem, or hell, they can’t even learn to effectively not click on super suspicious phishing links.
How on earth are they going to learn about implementing encrypted DNS when most barely know the difference between a browser and a computer.
This is why there are separate rules and standard for implantable, wearable, and supporting medical devices.
50% is quite decent and is 20% higher than most other “decent” services including physical stores. Building and keeping an app up to date with ever changing content requires at least a part time developer which is expensive.
Did he disclose an amount?
5% to artists is very different than 40% to artists.
Or is he adopting the Spotify bottom line?
Only pay artists after X downloads and only pay a few cents after thousands of downloads and use the rest for profits
Capitalists making use of and profiting from socialist programs and structure is a tale as old as capitalism.
Pharma as an example. Crowdsourced research, government funding with money from the people only to be bought by a capitalist corpo where they do the last 10% of the work by industrialization, jack up the price by 1000x, and take 100% of the profits and don’t even pay back their fair share in taxes, and then get a state-sponsered monopoly for an outrageous period.
Coming soon, they will unveil the Huawei xxMatexx XTX Pro X design.
Soo… Sony, oppo, realme & HMD (Nokia brand)? That is about it right for new phones I think?
Opensuse Kalpa KDE Wayland the internet access blocked and it is a terrorist org if you want a hug 😅 sorry it has been very busy
Dutch doesn’t autocomplete sentences, just spellcheck
And in all tiers: make an additional profit by selling your information without your consent (it has been decided in many courts that burying subtext deeply in forced terms of service isn’t consent)
We are already paying them by letting them harvest our data, ads or not.
Then they double or triple dip with the scenarios you describe. I am still paying them by being on their site with an ad blocker as they harvest my data and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention quadruple dipping with using our info and content without consent to train AI to sell.
They use the argument “your data/art/photos/videos are freely posted on the internet, so we can use them how we please”. If they publish content openly on the internet, then we are free to do with it as we please.
They can’t use the argument but say “no no no, it doesn’t apply to things WE put out”
They are either pirating our content and data constantly or ad-blocking is not pirating.
L O L “doing something different”
Epic tried to pull an Amazon.
Get VC money and chinese money and subsidize and undercut competition using anticompetitive practices to gain market share before the rug pull where they jack up their margins to the industry standard. (Everyone uses 30%, even brick and mortars except humble which is 25)
The difference is Amazon actually made a good software experience in the beginning few years and Epic spent literal years with very few feature updates and whining and burning money suing about “unfair market practices” when they were the only ones actually engaging in anti-consumer practices like paying off developers to be Epic-exclusive and buying developers and removing their games from steam. The other “different” thing that they did I guess is their CEO is an outspoken objective asshole.
They never got to the rug pull part because their actual software sucked balls and they refused to improve it so much so that someone else actually made a better launcher than them for their own products…
Just send the energy directly back to the power executives houses with a high power laser. They want the energy for free so badly to pad their profits and buy a 5th yacht, give it to them 😉