FBXL Social

People attack AI and Bitcoin for wasting resources. However, consider this: it's alleged that sites like twitch or kick have viewbots spending tens of millions of hours pretending to watch videos. I don't want to think about just how much energy is wasted pretending to watch videos, particularly if the streams are hd.
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After I learned that they record all phone calls I wrote an app that calls predetermined numbers and plays audio files indefinitely. I used the audio Bible because it was public domain, and put it thru a randomized ffmpeg filter first to ensure they were never binary same. When the call ends a new call is made and it repeats. I couldn't get anyone else to participate in the process though. I figured it would be one of the best ways to impede the deep state.

@sj_zero

Streaming bits at (compressed) video rates is inherently expensive, but for bot consumption cheating maybe not so much compared to those other examples?

You're probably not going to even uncompress them, and if so there's GPU hardware to help with that, right?

Bitcoin is designed to be inherently computationally expensive, and steadily more so until all possible coins are mined (or is that more asymptotic than I very vaguely know?). But I've never even vaguely studied it down to the metal. Current Machine Learning "AI" is so inherently expensive in every way companies are bragging about enabling the use of four bit floating point numbers

Seriously, and they're standardized, the normal FP4 version is one sign bit, two exponent, and one mantissa. The other NF4 is "optimized for saving normally distributed variables" (see link). Surprisingly using the former to represent a sine wave is not super awful....

All this is to emphasize how computationally expensive these models can be, that it can be worth squeezing their size so very much. Or eight stacks of HBM3e (DRAM dies of High Bandwidth Memory) on top of a GPU, 8-12 in each stack on Blackwell per Nvidia propaganda.

Another example is the previously mentioned Nvidia ultimate water cooled rack which dissipates 100-120 kW

I get the impression "AI" is much. much more expensive, but I have no sense of the costs of transmitting the bits through fiber repeaters, routers etc. And there's considerable capital costs, and maintenance every time an excavator or anchor severs a cable.

But the computation is kinda cheap, ASICs at the head end, you just have to do it once, at the tail end ... depends again on special hardware or not, and phones I assume always have it. And for systems that don't, what's the incremental cost over an idling CPU of whatever power?

Still useful as a propaganda point. The ultimate costs of scamming the world using the Internet is very very very high. Or we could just propose to cut India off from it A numbe of sock puppets supporting H-1B etc. etc. etc. scamming were reported to go silent after that Red Sea cable cut....

https://towardsdatascience.com/16-8-and-4-bit-floating-point-formats-how-does-it-work-d157a31ef2ef/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory