I'm starting to believe this is [a] way forward. Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between <everything I have is on a phone behind a fingerprint and a four digit pin> and <I don't own a smartphone>.
Unfortunately, it's pretty common to only have a smartphone as your sole compute device, and increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
>Or maybe an approach which is on a spectrum between
>increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
Yes, and I think this unfortunately demands a grey area. I'm starting to treat my smartphone more like a work device, and there are a few things I do on it:
- My work's authenticator app is there.
- Unfortunately Signal is tied to smartphone usage.
- Practically speaking, people will expect to be able to send you text messages.
- It's still useful for taking pictures.
- My banking app is on there.
Outside of rare occasions, that's really all I use my phone for. I don't carry it around the house. If I go somewhere with my wife, I don't even bring my phone most of the time. I'm "required" to have it, but in principle it's not even mine. It shouldn't be trusted or enjoyed.
(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)
> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]
I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?
Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop, if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))
I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where your compute heat could offset your heating requirements. But that gets harder to quantify.)
Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the case.
But commodity hardware that's right-sized for your own private needs is many orders of magnitude cheaper than datacenter hardware that's intended to serve millions of users simultaneously while consuming gigawatts in power. You're mostly paying for that hardware when you buy LLM tokens, not just for power efficiency. And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to address these needs separately in some way.
>And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to address these needs separately in some way.
^ Fair. Yep, I agree the calculus changes if you don't have _any_ local hardware and you're needing to factor in the cost of acquiring such hardware.
When I did this napkin math, I was mostly interested in the energy aspect, using cost as a proxy. I was calculating the $/token (taking into consideration the cost of a KWh from my utility, the measured power draw of my M1 work machine, and the measured tokens per second processed by a ~20BP open-weight model). I then compared this to the published $/token rate of a frontier provider, and it was something like two orders of magnitude in favor of the frontier model. I get it, they're subsidizing, but I've got to imagine there's some truth in the numbers.
I wonder, does (or will) the $/token ratio fall asymptotically toward the cost of electricity? In my mind I'm drawing a parallel to how the value of mined cryptocurrency approximately tracks the cost of electricity... but I might be misremembering that detail.
I doubt it because you aren't going to get the utilisation that a commercial setup would. No point wasting tons of money on hardware that is sat idle most of the time.
If you're running agentic workloads in the background (either some coding agent or personal claw-agent type) that's enough utilization that the hardware won't be sitting idle.
I ran into a guy at a hardware store who ran just such a power supply attached our city's water (or was it natural gas?) infrastructure. I was incredulous, but the idea that it helped prevent corrosion did make sense.
(edit: I see you answered a sibling comment with the same question. TL;DR: Potential output is the output pretending that curtailment did not apply. Thanks!)
A UI or terminology question: when 'Potential output' says it is 'Including curtailment', does this mean that it pretends that curtailment doesn't apply, or that it subtracts the curtailed power from the total available so that the total power shown is only the power actually transmitted (exported) to the grid? It's very likely that I'm just not familiar enough with the terms, but this wasn't immediately clear. My guess is the former meaning, although I can imagine it meaning either.
Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?
> Regardless, this is incredibly neat, and I'd love to see this kind of data for the grid that serves me (Eastern Interconnect in the US) -- are you aware of any sites similar?
(for most US grids, ElectricityMaps consumes somewhat delayed EIA Balancing Agency generation mix data from https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... ; their data is mostly live for system operators that provide live data on their own website, CAISO in California and ERCOT in Texas, for example)
Now I'm wondering how residential rooftop solar is accounted for... presumably there are houses in these grids which export solar electricity or offset grid power with solar production. The utility supplies data to this site, and the utility would only know about the energy produced by residential solar if each KWh of exported or offset energy were reported somehow. I'd imagine that's a pretty tough problem, particularly in the offset scenario.
In Australia [1], a data provider (APVI [2]) collaborates to provide this data in the aggregate, and so it can be surfaced distinctly as rooftop solar. In the US, it manifests as reduced demand (“behind the meter generation”) during daylight hours.
Sounds like a neat space to be in. Wishing you calm skies next month. I guess you'll have all the goodies (RFI detectors, thermal imaging sensors, etc.) to collect data? I wonder to what extent detection from a distance (discovery?) and investigation of faults can be automated. Hopefully using drones for good will be sufficient for a viable business model. We've enough surveillance as it is.
We're collecting 61MP RGB, LiDAR (DSM DTM) and radiometric thermal for sensors
We're thinking of flying at ~150' AGL or ~100' ATO at over 20 mph to collect data when automated. There's trade offs between effective speed, localized navigation, and mission planning. It's just challenging to build fully automated systems, but generally speaking flying higher and faster is more efficient and safer (also helps with command-and-control links)
> "The draft from the GSA also mandates that contractors "must not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into the AI systems data outputs," the FT reported."
EDIT: probably not relevant, after re-re-reading the comment in question.
Presumably littlestymaar is talking about all the LLM-generated output that's publicly available on the Internet (in various qualities but significant quantity) and there for the scraping.
Unfortunately, it's pretty common to only have a smartphone as your sole compute device, and increasingly onerous not to own one at all.
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