Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities

The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?

The energy problems aren’t coming from inefficient technology, they’re coming from inefficient economics. For the most part, the energy issues are caused by the AI “arms race” and how irresponsibly corporations are pushing their AI products on the market. Even with operational efficiency ruled out as a cause, AI is causing two killer energy problems: waste and externalities.

Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency, “the metaverse”, artificial intelligence… — all seem to be comically expensive boondoggles that only really benefit the salesmen.

Monorail!

The most recent tech-fad-and-why-it’s-bad pairing seems to be AI and its energy use. This product-problem combo has hit the mainstream as an evocative illustration of waste, with headlines like Google AI Uses Enough Electricity In 1 Second To Charge 7 Electric Cars and ChatGPT requires 15 times more energy than a traditional web search.

It’s a narrative that’s very much in line with what a disillusioned tech consumer expects. There is a justified resentment boiling for big tech companies right now, and AI seems to slot in as another step in the wrong direction. The latest tech push isn’t just capital trying to control the world with a product people don’t want, it’s burning through the planet to do it.

But, when it comes to AI, is that actually the case?

What are the actual ramifications of the explosive growth of AI when it comes to power consumption? How much more expensive is it to run an AI model than to use the next-best method? Do we have the resources to switch to using AI on things we weren’t before, and is it responsible to use them for that? Is it worth it?

These are really worthwhile questions, and I don’t think the answers are as easy as “it’s enough like the last thing that we might as well hate it too.” There are proportional costs we have to weigh in order to make a well-grounded judgement, and after looking at them, I think the energy numbers are surprisingly good, compared to the discourse.

Apple puts its logo on the devices it sells. Not just on the outer casing, but also each internal component. The vast majority of these logos are totally enclosed and invisible to the naked eye. This seems like an incredibly strange practice — especially since Apple doesn’t sell these parts separately — except it turns out to be part of a truly convoluted rules-lawyering exploit only a company like Apple could pull off and get away with.

Remember, trademarks are a consumer protection measure to defend against counterfeits. Apple’s registered logo trademark protects consumers from being tricked into buying fake products, and deputizes Apple to defend its mark against counterfeits.

But Apple has perfected the art of twisting this system to use it as a weapon against their opponents, and it is a nightmare. (And I don’t just mean Apple asserting a monopoly over the concept of fruit, although it does do that also, all the time.)

The Loaded Gun

While some counterfeiting happens domestically the major concern is usually counterfeits imported from foreign trade. This brings us to Customs and Border Patrol, which you might know as the other side of the ICE/CBP border control system. You might be surprised to see them involved with this, since Border Patrol agents are fully-militarized police outfitted to combat armed drug cartels.

But among its other duties, Border Patrol takes a proactive role in enforcing intellectual property protection at ports of trade — backed by the full force of the Department of Homeland Security — by seizing goods it identifies as counterfeit and either destroying them outright or else selling them themselves at auction.¹ To get your property back, you have to sue Border Patrol — an infamously untouchable police force — and win.

The “blue check” — a silly colloquialism for an icon that’s not actually blue for the at least 50% of users using dark mode — has become a core aspect of the Twitter experience. It’s caught on other places too; YouTube and Twitch have both borrowed elements from it. It seems like it should be simple. It’s a binary badge; some users have it and others don’t. And the users who have it are designated as… something.

In reality the whole system is massively confused. The first problem is that “something”: it’s fundamentally unclear what the significance of verification is. What does it mean? What are the criteria for getting it? It’s totally opaque who actually makes the decision and what that process looks like. And what does “the algorithm” think about it; what effects does it actually have on your account’s discoverability?

This mess is due to a number of fundamental issues, but the biggest one is Twitter’s overloading the symbol with many conflicting meanings, resulting in a complete failure to convey anything useful.

History of twitter verification

Twitter first introduced verification in 2009, when baseball man Tony La Russa sued Twitter for letting someone set up a parody account using his name. It was a frivolous lawsuit by a frivolous man who has since decided he’s happy using Twitter to market himself, but Twitter used the attention to announce their own approach to combating impersonation on Twitter: verified accounts.

The other day I had a quick medical question (“if I don’t rinse my mouth out enough at night will I die”), so I googled the topic as I was going to bed. Google showed a couple search results, but it also showed Answers in a little dedicated capsule. This was right on the heels of the Yahoo Answers shutdown, so I poked around to see what Google’s answers were like. And those… went in an unexpected direction.

gio :⁾@giovan_h

Replying to giovan_h:

me: so should I induce vomiting or

google: here’s how and why to drink human blood

Fri Feb 26 07:40:22 +0000 2021

So, Google went down a little rabbit trail. Obviously these answers were scraped from the web, and included sources like exemplore.com/paranormal/ which is, apparently, a Wiccan resource for information that is “astrological, metaphysical, or paranormal in nature.” So possibly not the best place to go for medical advice. (If you missed it, the context clue for that one was the guide on vampire killing.)

There are lots of funny little stories like this where some AI misunderstood a question. Like this case where a porn parody got mixed in the bio for a fictional character, or that time novelist John Boyne used Google and accidently wrote a video recipe into his book. (And yes, it was a Google snippet.) These are always good for a laugh.

eli! 🐪@frozenpandaman

thanks google

Sat Apr 27 10:36:51 +0000 2019

Talitha Kearey@TalithaKearey

honestly this is still my favourite AI misunderstanding

Tue Jan 17 18:04:08 +0000 2017

The Google search summary vs the actual page

— insomnia club (@soft) October 16, 2021

Wait, what’s that? That last one wasn’t funny, you say? Did we just run face-first toward the cold brick wall of reality, where bad information means people die?

Well, sorry. Because it’s not the first time Google gave out fatal advice, nor the last. Nor is there any end in sight. Whoops!

On August 5, 2021, Apple presented their grand new Child Safety plan. They promised “expanded protections for children” by way of a new system of global phone surveillance, where every iPhone would constantly scan all your photos and sometimes forward them to local law enforcement if it identifies one as containing contraband. Yes, really.

August 5 was a Thursday. This wasn’t dumped on a Friday night in order to avoid scrutiny, this was published with fanfare. Apple really thought they had a great idea here and expected to be applauded for it. They really, really didn’t. There are almost too many reasons this is a terrible idea to count. But people still try things like this, so as much as I wish it were, my work is not done. God has cursed me for my hubris, et cetera. Let’s go all the way through this, yet again.

gio :⁾@giovan_h

I am so deeply frustrated at how much we have to repeat these extremely basic principles because people just refuse to listen. Like, yes, we know. Everyone should know this by now. It’s mind boggling. twitter.com/sarahjamielewi…

Thu Aug 05 22:16:28 +0000 2021

The architectural problem this is trying to solve

Believe it or not, Apple actually does address a real architectural issue here. Half-heartedly addressing one architectural problem of many doesn’t mean your product is good, or even remotely okay, but they do at least do it. Apple published a 14 page summary of the problem model (starting on page 5). It’s a good read if you’re interested in that kind of thing, but I’ll summarize it here.

There’s this popular description of someone “having brain worms”. It invokes the idea of having your mind so thoroughly infested with an idea to the point of disease. As with the host of an infestation, such a mind is poor-to-worthless at any activity other than sustaining and spreading the parasite.

A “persistent delusion or obsession”. You know, like when you think in terms of legality so much you can’t even make ethical evaluations anymore, or when you like cops so much you stop being able to think about statistics, or the silicon valley startup people who try to solve social problems with bad technology, or the bitcoin people who responded to the crisis in Afghanistan by saying they should just adopt bitcoin. “Bad, dumb things”. You get the idea.

And, well.

Okay, so let’s back way up here, because this is just the tip of the iceberg of a story that needs years of context. I’ll start with the most recent event here, the Mastodon tweet.

The Mastodon Context

The “he” Mastodon is referring to is ex-president-turned-insurrectionist Donald Trump, who, because his fellow-insurrectionist friends and fans are subject to basic moderation policies on most of the internet, decided to start his own social network, “Truth Social”. In contrast to platforms moderated by the “tyranny of big tech”, Truth Social would have principles of Free Speech, like “don’t read the site”, “don’t link to the site”, “don’t criticise the site”, “don’t use all-caps”, and “don’t disparage the site or us”. There are a lot of problems here already, but because everything Trump does is terrible and nobody who likes him can create anything worthwhile, instead of actually making a social networking platform, they just stole Mastodon wholesale.

Mastodon is an open-source alternative social networking platform. It’s licensed under an open license (the AGPLv3), so you are allowed to clone it and even rebrand it for your own purposes as was done here. What you absolutely are not allowed to do is claim the codebase is your own proprietary work, deliberately obscure the changes you made to the codebase, or make any part of the AGPL-licensed codebase (including your modifications) unavailable to the public. All of which Truth Social does.

So that’s the scandal. And so here’s Mastodon poking some fun at that.

During the years when Homestuck updated regularly, I usually had some sort of update notifier that pinged me when a new page was posted. But since Homestuck usually updated daily, I ended up just keeping a tab open and refreshing it. And that’s pretty much how I kept up with other serial media on the internet, for years. A writing blog that posts regular updates? Keep a dedicated tab open and refresh it occasionally. Comic? Tab. To this day, I have a “serial” browser window that’s just tabs of sites I check regularly. (Or imagine I might want to check regularly, at least.)

please don’t tell anyone how I live

Of course, this is terrible. The biggest problem is browser tabs are expensive. If you have a tab open, that takes up a dedicated chunk of memory, even when you’re not reading anything. CPU too, probably, if the site has JavaScript running on it (which is to say, is either decades out of date, or this one). Not to mention the clutter.

Unfortunately, dedicated browser tabs fit specific use case of keeping up with serial media well. Social media feeds — all of them, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube — are explicitly “media aggregators”, services that combine multiple media sources into one feed. This is no good for serial media. If you’re following multiple sources, they likely update on different schedules, and updates from the more active ones will bury updates from those slower. Even email updates have this problem. No, you need a dedicated space for each source (but not each update), which a dedicated browser tab will get you.

There is a good system for this, though: RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a fantastic technology that has fallen out of favour in the mainstream lately. It works like this: the media source puts up a small file somewhere that notes the dates, titles, and (optionally) content of posts. And that’s it. There’s no API, it’s just a file people can read if they want. It’s like traditional syndication, but instead of selling articles to multiple distributors (as with syndicated cartoons), you’re distributing articles to many consumers directly.

This morning YouTube sent out an announcement that, in one month, they’re going to break all the links to all unlisted videos posted prior to 2017. This is a bad thing. There’s a whole lot bad here, actually.

Edit: Looks like Google is applying similar changes to Google Drive, too, meaning this doesn’t just apply to videos, but to any publicly shared file link using Google Drive. As of next month, every public Google Drive link will stop working unless the files are individually exempted from the new security updates, meaning any unmaintained public files will become permanently inaccessible. Everything in this article still applies, the situation is just much worse than I thought.

The Basics

YouTube has three kinds of videos: Public, Unlisted, and Private. Public videos are the standard videos that show up in searches. Private videos are protected, and can only be seen by specific YouTube accounts you explicitly invite. Unlisted videos are simply unlisted: anyone with the link can view, but the video doesn’t turn up automatically in search results.

Unlisted videos are obviously great, for a lot of reasons. You can just upload videos to YouTube and share them with relevant communities — embed them on your pages, maybe — without worrying about all the baggage of YouTube as a Platform.

What Google is trying to do here is roll out improvements they made to the unlisted URL generation system to make it harder for bots and scrapers to index videos people meant to be semi-private. This is a good thing. The way they’re doing it breaks every link to the vast majority of unlisted videos, including shared links and webpage embeds. This is a tremendously bad thing. I am not the first to notice this.

Oh good, you broke links again

See, I just kind of sighed when I saw this, because this isn’t the first time I’ve lived through it. On March 15, 2017, Dropbox killed their public folder. Prior to that, Dropbox had a service where you could upload files to a special “Public” folder. This let you easily share links to those files with anyone — or groups of people — without having to explicitly invite them by email, and make them register a Dropbox account. Sound familiar?

Twitter Blue! $5/mo for Premium Twitter. It’s the latest thing that simply everyone.

I have an issue with it, but over a very fundamental point, and one Twitter shares with a lot of other platforms. So here’s why it’s bad that Twitter decided to put accessibility features behind a paywall, and it isn’t the obvious.

Client/Server architecture in 5 seconds

All web services, Twitter included, aren’t just one big magic thing. You can model how web apps work as two broad categories: the client and the server. The client handles all your input and output: posts you make, posts you see, things you can do. The server handles most of the real logic: what information gets sent to the client, how posts are stored, who is allowed to log in as what accounts, etc.

Nintendo is trending on twitter today for yet another abuse of the legal system. Today, though, it’s not about a fan game, or intellectual property, or anything else Nintendo has something approaching a reasonable claim too — it’s all a sham.

I have a memory from when I was very young of my dad doing the finances. He would sit in his office with a computer on one side and an old-fashioned adding machine on the desk. While he worked on the spreadsheet on the computer, he would use the adding machine for quick calculations.

A year or two ago I had a very similar experience. I walked upstairs to the office and there he was, at the same desk, spreadsheet on one side and calculator on the other. Except it was 2020, and he had long ago replaced the adding machine with an iPad. There was really one noticeable difference between the iPad and the old adding machine: the iPad was awful at the job. My dad was using some random calculator app that was an awkwardly scaled iPhone app with an ugly flashing banner add at the bottom.