Womble

Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.

You’re right that there’s orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that’s far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.

No I’m a meat eater who is anti-car! I’m more getting at how people have latched on to the energy use of AI models without realising the huge energy usage that goes into their daily lives.

Yeah, I too hate those hypcrites who complain about the massive environmental impact of AI, then drive a 10 mile round trip to buy a burger made from a cow raised on soy.

Yep, and when you click a button that liteally says “make this discoverable on search engines” which is off by defualt, its the later.

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It would be nice to see a price/GWh of this (along with running costs, it ways they save 1 Million per GWh, how much wre the running costs before!?), but any improvement in battery tech is definitely a good thing.

How long they can do it for is a significant open question, the Russian economy is already showing serious warning signs and most of the forcasts that I’ve seen show 2026 as the year where things start to become very bad for them. It’s not an all or nothing thing either, its not that it is about to implode and all of a sudden Russia cant do anything, but that the economy degrades to the point where it becomes difficult for them to maintain funnelling sufficient resources into their invasion.

Russia has an “official” central bank interest rate of 20% with parts of the real economy seizing up due to the country’s resources being funneled into creating vehicles that last for a few months before being blown up in their invasion.

Large countries have a lot of levers they can pull to keep their economies going when they really need to, but they are damaging in the long run and get more damaging the longer they rely on them. Russia doesnt have some magical property of being extra resilient based on slavic tolerance of suffering.