And you aren't even being snarky. This is a legit concern whenever I see some new Google initiative that feels like a wart. A nice friendly useful loving wart but its days can be numbered
Google already dumped their original agent framework on the Linux foundation after they realized noone really liked it and the overzealous managers who immediately bought into the hype would go apeshit if they dropped support so fast. Agentic tools have a lifetime measured in months.
I find it really good and up-to-date, like within an hour of current events or website updates that it can reference. Astra is a step up for complex stuff, but I'm not going to use up all my tokens to ask it the specs of a 2023 MacBook pro then wait 3 minutes only to get a tome with a complete breakdown of the Mac OS platform and including such things as the supply side dynamics driving the ram size choices and pricing at that time.
As sister comments have pointed out, I find that it's very much dependent on the phone you're using. If it can't even show me a waveform then I don't think it's going to be able to tease out any sort of speech
Sorry I wasn't clear. It's about the hardware microphone. They're usually optimized to filter out far field sounds and only focus on near field sounds. So if you're trying to understand a conversation from even 10 ft away, it can be a problem. Not saying that's the situation that you encountered, but it does make sense that a $50 phone versus a $500 phone might have different capabilities when it comes to the microphone
Groan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.
the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people
actually benefit from all that water.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up
with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
Yes. And right after we kill golf lets pave over Central Park. And we can tear down sports arenas and concert venues after that. It's a huge waste when you think about how few people actually go there and what benefit they actually have. Sports overall are a waste of time. Everyone should just walk in the woods instead. Except soccer. You're right that we need thousands more soccer fields. Its way more efficient than any other kind of exercise. And there is so much demand for soccer in the US, you can't even find an empty field. In contrast to golf courses which are mostly empty like you noticed.
you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people.
heck keep it golf but switch to driving ranges and its still like 10x more capacity for users than golf courses.
counter arguments that point out other things that are still 10x better uses of space than golf are not very compelling. a sports arena that serves 2.5m people/year is a terrible argument against a golf course that maxes out at 117k. (using sofi in LA numbers as its a similiar footprint as well 150acres)
im also not saying abolish golf, just only play it in places where the space/water use dont matter. like rural scotland. don't put golf courses in/near cities where we should use our space better.
> you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people
My counter point was that everything we do doesn't have to be motivated by efficiency gains. Sports, golf especially, isn't trying to cram the most people possible into a small space.
By your own logic, we should replace soccer fields with kicking a ball into a net.
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
Golf courses are not green spaces, come on now. They are most often limited in their access and devoid of greenery native to the area or that supports pollinators. Grass does not equal green space, and certainly not the flavor of green that is present in golf courses. The alternative to a golf course is not hot concrete either, that's a false dichotomy.
I'm not hating on golf. My grandfather would be appalled! In crowded urban areas they don't work so well anymore. And I'm also not against using our resources for human pleasure!
its because "green spaces" and "spaces with greens" are not the same. just imagine a 150 acre generic park or forest instead of an over fertilized over watered field for a single game played by only .002 percent of people.
golf is generally a huge waste of space for the amount of value we get from it per person and should have no place anywhere near a population center where we actually need more green space.
I’m not commenting on whether generative AI is especially resource-wasteful or not, but a lot of people online seem to have newly discovered the existence of data centers.
I was curious and tried to come up with a crude estimate - all of the golf courses in the US use approximately the same amount of energy (mowing, fertilizer, etc) as one 1GW DC does.
K, but they're paying for that energy though. And the land and the building costs, etc. I really don't want to live in a country where the government just arbitrarily says "Oh, sorry we have 'enough' datacenters / Subway sandwich shops / golf courses / storage facilities so you aren't allowed to build one" -- even if it becomes a populist belief that they should.
The fact is, at this point there is so much demand for DC capacity that the prices are super high, and thus it's worth building them. Many people believe that it's a bubble or whatever. If they're right, well then a lot of people building DCs right now will lose their shirts. If they're wrong and the demand is sustained, DCs are exactly what we need to be building.
>where the government just arbitrarily says "Oh, sorry we have 'enough' datacenters / Subway sandwich shops / golf courses / storage facilities so you aren't allowed to build one" -- even if it becomes a populist belief that they should.
It's not really arbitrary though, is it? It's decided by duly-elected representatives who answer to the citizens of the municipality. A government "of the people", etc.
I feel like what you're arguing against is precisely why we have local governments in the first place.
Well, you could definitely do policies like that in a plain democracy or republic without any guaranteed rights of the citizens. In our particular constitutional systems, and many others, the founding documents say that the government can't do certain things, even if they pass a law saying they can. (Of course, the Constitution can be amended to remove rights, but there is an intentionally high bar to meet in order to do that.)
Congress could pass a law tomorrow, or California could pass a ballot measure with a 100% Yes vote, saying (for instance) that some random company now belongs to the government, or to Gavin Newsom personally, or to me, but the courts would still be obligated to strike it down since that grossly violates the Seventh Amendment. Ideas like this are commonly referred to as being checks against "mob rule" - the system recognizes that 'what the people want' isn't necessarily supreme when it runs up against other people's recognized rights.
Is there such a thing as a 1GW data center? Like a beefy gaming PC easily uses 1 KW According to Google, an individual GPU tower consumes anywhere between 10-100kW. An 1GW data center is can fit in a size of a mid size apartment.
That's fair and I left it as is knowing that. But it was still factually correct.
The main point is people worrying about resources and how to allocate them. We are creatures who want joy and I will not apologize for that. Certainly in face of abstract things such as "the environment". Which environment? I am a humanist. That definition varies. Golf is not the problem sorry to pick on it!
Lol. Let's not pick on golf? All sports are pointless depending on how you look at them. But here we are thousands and thousands of years later and humans want what humans want.
I have to disagree. You are already many levels away from the actual pixels. This is what software is for. Drawing a line for you personally is dismissive of the rest of the user base. Just because there is a so called agent added to the mix doesn't remove the human. It includes far more humans and enables them to use the tool. This is design if done right. Also you seem to be critiqueing the concept not the implementation.
Hard dissagree, it's just the pot boiling to harvest data and render future users helpless without the chatbot. Your stance is anti-human, and the robots and ceos will not appreciate your efforts in giving capital more power over creativity.
I don't sense that you have thought this out in depth. You are cycling talking points even if you don't mean too - that's what I hear.
I have a hard time seeing your way. I build software. Tools for humans to do stuff. Whatever they want. Then it gets complex. There are methods to make it more accessible to more people including so called agents. I want to go to there I want to enable the humans.
I feel you bro that you see human getting squeezed out. I do not see it that way. The human is still the nexus.
CEOs and tech bros and hype are all a distraction and a fog that will dissipate with time. We need to focus on the functionality and utility. We are engineers
You are a valuable person in the conversation and we all need you to participate with eyes wide open. I assume you are young. That's not discounting it is welcoming.
[edit: cleaned stuff up to hopefully make it more direct and non-confrontational]
Me too. I was hoping for a better write up than a pay walled verge article. Yes I'm being lazy but this is hn and I like technical break downs and not just moral panic. I own an older lg tv and I'm not dismissing the societal issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg
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