I hardly play games that use the unreal engine, but I'd expect that to be similar, especially as unreal engine is usually used for more graphics intensive 3D games.

The thing that annoys me about unity, is that it performs like ass even for games that should easily run on an iGPU, like RimWorld levels of graphic. I'm not saying their graphics are bad, it has its own style and I like it, but 2D games should definitely be able to run on an integrated graphics card, and there are a lot of games using unity that don't. Either the engine is shitty, or it's making it too easy to create unoptimized games

That would explain why it's one of the few unity games that does not try to burn a hole into my laptop! Was always wondering how they achieved that. Usually when I see that a game uses unity, I can already guess that it won't run well on my machine

If you differentiate engineered desires and "real" ones then "need" might be a better word.

And there are different aspects of being limited by resources, not just financial cost. One of the reasons we have all the ecological problems right now is because we ignore the environmental impacts of our resource usage. Your fuel example is on point - oil and gas are still way too cheap compared to the damage they do to the environment. So when we follow your proposal of trying to form a society that aims to be constrained by resources, then I'd say we are already there. We couldn't have done much better. It's just not being constrained by availability, but by the consequences of our usage.

However, there are even a few examples where we are starting to be constrained by actual resource availability, from the top of my head sand for concrete and copper come up.

I hope the idea of solarpunk is trying to keep the planet in a livable state.

Consumption and desire-driven, constrained more by ressources usage than by labor costs.

Have you looked around? Capitalism is creating desire and fueling consumption wherever it can. We are limited by resource usage and seeing the consequences of it. Going all in on an consumption- and especially desire-driven economy sounds horrible. That's definitely not the solarpunk way. Or if it is, I'm in the wrong place.

That's one of the things I'd add to the "the rules aren't really consistent"-list :D Or at that point rather, they haven't figured the rules out yet.

In 38 minutes they explicitly say, that the front half simply "disappears". McKay even jokes about preferring that over dying in the vacuum of space.

Based indeed

one part would still make it to Atlantis

Not quite, things only go through in one piece, so the front half of the jumper would just disappear. Otherwise everyone could have just stepped through, and they could have waited for the gate to shut down, "only" losing the jumper in the process.

I'm sure that has been mentioned before that episode at some point, the rules aren't really consistent though. In S3E17 (A Hundred Days) Teal'c shoots a harpoon with a rope attached to him through the gate, which should not have hit anything on the other side until Teal'c makes it through the gate. I'm somewhat certain, that's not the only example of contradicting rules for the stargate 😁

It still was and is much appreciated. I'm currently also rewatching Stargate and this was really fitting :) I'm also really impressed by how much work you put in those memes!

I think this is amazing, though I don't really benefit from it, as my "home server"(aka old laptop)-GPU is too old. I wish it had a GCN+ GPU, I think (not verified, and I don't want to put in the time to check it) starting from GCN onward the architecture should be good enough to support any modern framework. Obviously not necessarily fast, but at least they could support it, as their ability to run compute kernels should enable them to at least emulate everything.

I wonder if there’s a lot of igpus still in use from this era. Feels like they’re probably over the line already.

I'll use the HD6310 in my laptop/server until it completely gives in! And I don't see that happening any time soon. It's not like chips just break.

That may be, but that's not what this says. It says that if you have to ask yourself, you're on the wrong side. It doesn't say that if you don't ask yourself you're on the right side.

When it comes to efficiency in the IT sector I'm not that optimistic. Or at least not any more. The following is gonna be a weird statement: Hardware becoming more efficient got us in this mess in the first place. It's Jevons paradox/the rebound effect in practice.

Of course I agree with you that running all that on renewable energy would definitely be better than whatever we are doing right now, but even better would be if we didn't use that energy at all. (In the case of oil and gas exploration I'd even say it's kind of hypocritical when running them with renewables in order to green-wash the whole thing)

First I want to say thanks for answering to a few-days old comment, I was wondering whether anyone uses the fediverse more like a forum. That's kind of nice, knowing that the comments are not just shouted into the void and forgotten :) Second I want to say sorry for my answer - you stirred up a hornets' nest :D

Even when ignoring ANN, I could list way too many arguments why data centers suck, and already sucked before "AI". But before I get into that, let's start from the top - buckle up.

Water use is not really a problem of data centers - they can't require more cooling than thermal power plants generating their electricity, and I have yet to hear someone complain about the water consumption of thermal power plants. (That's the TL;DR of a way too long comment I put way too much time into, if you want more info and sources)

And as for your proposal of requiring data centers to produce 110% of their own energy with renewables, I restate my earlier sentiment:

Even if the data centers would cover their own energy usage with green energy, that’s energy that could go towards decarbonizing all the other stuff we “need” to do.

As long as our energy requirements are not completely met by renewable energies it won't help if you require data centers to produce 200% of their energy. It's not like we have spare solar panels or wind turbines lying around that would not be put to use if there were no data centers. You basically already have that idea with

Or they could just turn off the computers and sell the electricity.

so yeah... building solar parks or wind turbines just without the data centers.

when the bubble collapses, we get a bunch of cheap, green compute that hobbyists like Myself can use for our little websites.

That would be nice indeed, but AI data center hardware is not really suited for hosting websites. Unless you can host websites on GPUs or TPUs you will have a lot of "green compute" e-waste. Even the bare-bone servers without the GPUs/TPUs are way too overpowered to host "little websites". As far as I'm aware, serving websites does not need too much compute power. It's more about storage and bandwidth, depending on the kind of website you host. For ideas on how to actually sustainably host websites, see e.g. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website - this is all just to say that "green compute" is a more complex topic. It's not just about getting your energy from renewables. The 512KB Club also comes to mind. (This is a first step to respond to your "Most of the internet runs on [data centers]." - I don't even want to know how much bandwidth and energy is wasted on ads and surveillance. That's also part of the data centers that run the internet.)

So using those AI servers to host websites would just be wasting energy and resources. Granted, those resources are already wasted, which would be my other criticism here - even if you repurpose the hardware used in the data centers, I would not dare call that "green". Producing those chips requires a huge amount of energy, so they already have a lot of embodied CO2. Always getting the newest hardware just for the sake of it is not "green". Keep your computers alive for as long as is reasonable!

Now to finally get to

Data centers are actually pretty cool when they’re not being used for ANN tech. Most of the internet runs on them.

As I hinted at earlier, I'd say it strongly depends on what the data centers are used for. "Internet" is a broad term, and there are many data centers that aren't used to host websites. The Oil and Gas industry used to (and actually still does) operate some of the biggest supercomputers just to find new oil fields. I wouldn't call that useful. For some examples on how the tech industry sucks up to oil and gas companies, see one of my other comments. It mostly also works the other way around - search for the name of your favourite "multinational energy company" and a combination of "data center" or "supercomputer" and you'll most likely find something.

And it doesn't stop there, that's just the first example on my mind. There is a good reason some CPUs or GPUs have been classified as dual-use by the USA. Data centers are used for all kinds of atrocities. Even the ones that are used to run the internet, I'm wondering which of those are a benefit to society.

Sorry this got so long, I can't even blame you if you didn't read it all. I think I just had to get all of this out somewhere.