They pay a lot of attention to preventing cache misses and branch prediction failures, which is how they get away with reference counting and still being fast.
I checked. The IEA says airlines generate about a gigaton of CO2, and it's still growing since the dip of covid, which is perhaps where your infographic authors got their screwy figures, which are, like I suggested, the wrong order of magnitude.
Why does nighttime AI use burn dirtier energy?
Fossil fuel dominance: Coal and gas supply up to 90% of overnight electricity.
Solar drop-off: Solar disappears after sunset, while wind delivers only ~30% capacity at night.
Peak carbon hours: Between 2–4 AM, grid intensity rises to 450–650 gCO₂/kWh, compared to 200–300 gCO₂/kWh in the afternoon.
This is complete bullshit in the UK, where energy is greenest in the small hours of the night when demand is low and the wind turbines are still turning. Least green and most expensive is late afternoon and evening, when energy usage spikes.
Let me reiterate. AI is crap. AI is a massive waste of energy, but your website has its calculations off in terms of order of magnitude when it comes to comparing the airline industry pushing tons of metal fast and hard into and through the sky with AI pushing a bunch of electrons through a bunch of transistors. Seriously, way off.
New kid on the block, roc, has it right by splitting application code from "platform"/framework code, precompiling and optimising the platform, then using their fast surgical linker to sew the app code to the platform code.
Platforms are things like cli program, web server that kind of thing. Platforms provide an interface of domain specific IO primitives and handle all IO and memory management, and they also specify what functions app code must supply to complete the program.
It's pretty cool, and they're getting efficiency in the area of systems programming languages like C and Rust, but with none of the footguns of manual memory management, no garbage collection pauses, but yet also no evil stepparent style borrow checker to be beaten by. They pay a lot of attention to preventing cache misses and branch prediction failures, which is his they get away with reference counting and still being fast.
A note of caution: I might sound like I know about it, but I know almost nothing.
Absolutely. I watched a great video explaining how it does it and felt like I understood for five minutes, and I know it's something about putting loops through loops through loops forever, and yes it absolutely does unravel if it's not secured at both ends, but the way it threads the new loop through the old loop with a wheel that keeps turning in the same direction all the time, that is just pure magic and has no right to be possible in regular three dimensional reality.
I do enjoy singing but enough people have told me I'm tone deaf to know not to do it when anyone's around.
But when I'm alone in the car, or everyone else is out of the house, I put the radio on loud and enjoy "tunelessly warbling" (as my older daughter puts it) to my heart's content.
(They're also not at all keen on Kylie Minogue, but I don't think that's a skill issue.)
Sunk cost fallacy.