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Comment by oulipo2

12 hours ago

Indeed, looking at a "single median query" totally disregard the fact that:

- first, those queries are mostly useless and we could totally do without them, so it's still a net pollution

- they are being integrated everywhere, so soon enough, just browsing the web for a few hours is going to general 100k+ such equivalent "small queries" (in the background, by the processes analyzing what the user is doing, or summarizing the page, etc). At that time, the added pollution is no longer negligible. And most of this will be done just to sell more ads

1. Your prediction is that soon browing the web for a few hours is going use >30,000+ Wh (based on the "equivalent" you mentioned)? (For comparison to that 30,000+ figure, the energy use from using a laptop for a few hours is 75 Wh, all per OP source.)

2. > most of this will be done just to sell more ads

Are you predicting that the value of ads is going to increase by a number of magnitudes? Because 30,000+ Wh of electricity has a quite significant cost, and even a video ad currently only earns pennies, so I'm trying to imagine how the math would work in this scenario?