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Here's a handy calculator you can use to estimate how much CO2 and water I wasted with my coding agent session: https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/
Not sure what point you wanted to make, but this calculator is quite shocking.
GPT 5.5 pro, with "a long document" and 10 requests a day gives 25% of daily CO2 emissions!
Ten coding sessions a day with Opus is still 4.7%!
This feels enormous. I will definitely stop rolling my eyes when people complain about AI CO/water usage...
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This very obtusely ommits the demand for new data centers and related infrastructure that using AI creates, the going "vegan for a year" option assumes less cows being born but somehow the "don't use AI" doesn't assume that the data center wasn't build in the first place.
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The real point is not "one session", it's the fact that people now do that routinely, that CICD are using those to check every commit, and each search engine query now does that too, so it multiplies
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As someone who actually gives a shit about the environment and global warming and has been putting this into practice for more than a decade through daily personal sacrifices: no, I downvote it because if you properly look into it, AI is just completely insignificant compared to cars, air travel, clothing, food, needless junk and so on that it's a joke. It's always brought up by people who never cared, but now pretend to do so because they hate LLMs for other reasons. The irony is that some of those are actually _good_ reasons but they're too cowardly to admit them. There's nothing unmanly about admitting you're afraid of AI taking your job, becoming more intelligent, and ending up in a dystopia.
Go run the numbers and compare them vs. what it takes to produce a single hamburger or hoodie. Anyone who actually cares has already done this and drawn this conclusion.
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While one can raise environmental concerns about the AI datacenter buildout, I don't think it is fair to say that it "ruins the planet".
I don't think it is a good contribution to the discussion around Simon's LLM use to fix a CSS bug.
That's an interesting choice as a source. It doesn't mention climate change or human impacts at all and describes El NiƱo as a naturally occurring event.
> The El Nino is a phenomenon that occurs naturally
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It was posted at 5am in New York... not sure that that was a US view, so the fact that the platform is US-owned doesn't seem so relevant, if there's a global audience.
That being said, I do agree it is a legit thought (and moreso, completely on point in the subthread discussing downsides), and that it shouldn't be downvoted.
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