Comment by lxgr

12 hours ago

Definitely worth considering in a world in which there are any H200s idling in data centers.

Now that's one fine No True Scotsman.

    A: GPUs use a lot of power!
    B: Not all of them are running 100% continuously, eh?,
    A: They waste too much power when they're idle, too!
    C: None of the H200s are sitting idle, you knob!

I mean, they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work. I don't know what to say anymore.

We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • B is supposed to be me? I said the H200 doesn't need to be running continuously to generate a dozen images. If a million people generate a dozen images, it no longer makes sense to compare to the costs of a single artist for 6 hours. I really don't understand why this is hard and that makes this feel very uncharitable.

  • I'm not saying that this isn't "true idling", I'm saying that idling H200s simply don't exist, i.e., I disagree with B. Do you, A, even disagree?

    > they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work

    Now here's a true (inverse) scotsman, or more accurately, a moved goalpost: Work on things you don't deem valuable is basically the same thing as idling?

    > We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    I'm very concerned about that too, but I don't think we'll avoid the sauna with fatalism or logically unsound appeals to morality about resource consumption.