I never knew who I was. I still don't know who I am. It doesn't matter anyway.
@slaacaa@lemmy.world @nottheonion@lemmy.world
IIRC, the Reddit's r/all is akin to Lemmy's /all, right? If this proceeds, then it's also similar to Mastodon's Live Feed (global firehose), which recently (few weeks ago) got deactivated by mastodon.social admins. I wonder if both situations have any direct relationship.
@Beep@lemmus.org @lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
Incredibly, this image has sound, I can hear this image! Yeah, pretty much I can hear the high pitched tone that plays when Bingham "Bing" Madsen dares to look away from the screen and close the eyes during the WraithBabes ad break. Resume watching, resume watching.
@Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world
What?! Lying?! It's literally in Firefox official git repo, for Goddess' sake!!
(And, oh, as a double-twist, the following screenshot proves I do have Firefox, even though I use Waterfox as my daily driver; here I'm using Firefox because my GitHub account is logged in in there, and to dismantle your ad hominem that "I'm not even convinced you've used it [Firefox]" )
But, you're right, there's no purpose in continuing this debate. Enjoy the new soon-to-be "Agentic Browser" Mozilla FAIrefox!
@XLE@piefed.social @Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world
The most menacing thing in that picture is the bold red text, assuming it isn’t Photoshopped that way
I'm interacting from Sharkey, on a Lemmy thread, and you're interacting from PieFed. I'm not sure if PieFed fetches the alt-text from images. If you access my original Sharkey note, you'll see the following alt-text:
Screenshot of confirmation dialog "Block AI enhancements?" with "or pop-ups about them" highlighted.
I disclosed the fact that "or pop-ups about them" was highlighted. Also, a quick reverse image search would point to the original picture where said excerpt isn't highlighted.
It would be photoshopping/photo manipulation if I removed, added or changed text from the picture, which I didn't.
I’ve seen Firefox implement other dark patterns, including hiding the ability to disable ads from within the homepage
Exactly, and even this one is a matter of conundrum when it's brought to the table. Because Mozilla, and corporations in general, know the exact, dosimetric approach of pushing dark patterns, not too hard so all the user base would readily notice and complain, not too soft so all the shareholders wouldn't see the "graph line go up". Just the right amount to make things dance to their song.
Even today, stating how the opting-out of "Sponsored shortcuts" isn't trivial for the average user (not to mention how said user will see the sponsored shortcuts at least once as they head to turn them off), is met with people blindly advocating for Mozilla (which, let us remember, they're a corporation with corporate interests, not a lifelong friend or a fellow trustworthy acquaintance, and corporations are driven by profit, not by friendship or psychological well-being).
But this isn’t really one of them
The opt-out implies a feature that was pushed without consent.
Again, I bring my heavy hypothetical example: if a harasser offers the harassed a way out of the harassment after having initiated the harassment, would this make the harasser less of a harasser? Hell no, of course no! It's still harassment! It turns out opt-out features are exactly that: something that gives you the "right" to leave, only after it was pushed onto you.
And The fact that "opting-out" requires double confirmation only makes it worse, as if the hypothetical harassed were to be ask by the hypothetical harasser "are you sure you don't want this?" before being "allowed" to be freed from the hypothetical harassment.
Users have been begging Mozilla for StartPage integration, but Mozilla gave them a Perplexity integration instead.
Exactly, another dark pattern, and another proof of how Mozilla is not a friend, but a corporation.
the ones that give them money
Yeah. And this is often the justification people often use to advocate for that: "oh, but Mozilla needs to mane money" (at what cost?), as if donation-based economy weren't a thing.
@Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world
Maybe you got lucky and the routine which triggers said pop-ups didn't happen yet, doesn't mean that "that doesn't happen". Again: Firefox literally mentions pop-ups about "AI enhancement" features, it's not something I'm confabulating:
Block AI enhancements? You won't see new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or pop-ups about them.
It's ipsis literis from the Firefox opt-out confirmation dialog. They wouldn't mention said pop-ups if they weren't to happen.
@skamu@mastodon.uno @technology@lemmy.world @Feyd@programming.dev
asking for a confirmation before turning on/off the AI functionalities
The thing is, there doesn't seem to be confirmation before turning clankers on (at least I didn't find screenshots in this regard), but there is such a confirmation before turning the whole thing off (that is, from the default-on state Mozilla pushed unto the software upon updating/installing).
If both situations involved double confirmation dialog in a symmetrical manner ("are you sure you want to proceed with activating this feature?" coexisting with "are you sure you want to opt-off from this feature?"), that would be fair. Pretty annoying, but fair. But this fairness doesn't seem to be happening, no confirmation dialog seems to exist for actually using the feature. The only thing similar to a "confirmation" during further usage of "AI Enhancements" would be the authentication step from whatever clanker was chosen from the suspiciously-biased list of clankers (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral; no non-Western options such as Qwen or DeepSeek, for example).
as it is a disruptive action that affect overall users
How disruptive would be turning off a feature that is far from being essential to browsing (and, in practice, may end up rendering the whole browsing experience worse with inaccurate summarization and potential vulnerabilities (prompt injection, remote code execution, etc), produced by pieces of software explicitly labeled as "it may produce inaccuracies")?
Not to say how, as I mentioned initially, the entire premise of bringing it as default-on with now the added "right" to "opt-off" is, itself, non-consensual relationship, insofar the user didn't seek it by themselves. Clankers would be a nice feature for some niches and use cases (again: I myself use LLMs, but it stems from my own decision to do so, not because it was pushed onto me; something I opted-in), but it should be voluntarily sought, installed and turned on by the user as they please, not as "default-on" option.
Anyway, all good. It is nice to see people with this kind of concerns
Sure, no problems, that's reciprocal, we're good! Throughout my exchanges in this entire thread, I tried to keep it respectful (at least when it comes to the debate and my peers; of course I'm fiercely criticizing Mozilla Corporation, because they were once the ones who "will never sell your data") and trying to debate the idea and not the peer's person.
My concerns, in the end of the day, are just an attempt to advocate for the total, non-negotiable autonomy and Free Will (as far as Free Will can get in a deterministic cosmic existence) of users, far from just my own; and this involves denouncing potential corporate biases whenever a corporation brings up another brick in the already-tall wall of enshittification, naming and shaming corporations for their greedy corporate behavior.
@Orygin@sh.itjust.works @technology@lemmy.world
While some of the intricacies I brought into this discussion may stem from my specific, neurodivergent/AuDHD perception of the world, the overall thing involving dark pattern and the psychological influence of design is not something I'm inventing: it's literally an intersection between design and psychology, extensively researched by academia:
"The Psychology of Design: Understanding User Behavior to Enhance User Experience", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 12, page no.g529-g534, December-2022, http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2212681.pdf "The application of color theory in UI/UX design", Milot Gusia, UBT international conference, 2024, https://knowledgecenter.ubt-uni.net/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4924&context=conference "Dark patterns and consumer vulnerability", Amit Zac et al, Cambridge University Press, 2025, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/dark-patterns-and-consumer-vulnerability/83EF6347CCB19EDA195C54229D34D3A8
But, you know what? Yeah, it's all horse shit, corporations don't exploit the vulnerabilities involuntarily ingrained within our brains since our births for profit, Mozilla (alongside Google who gives them money to keep Google Gemini clanker formerly Google Search as the default search engine) is a such an innocent (practically angelical) very-friendly corporation with a cute fox mascot, and I am just a pretending-to-be DevOps who clearly have no clue what I'm talking about...
@skamu@mastodon.uno @technology@lemmy.world @Feyd@programming.dev
Post scriptum (I'm unable to edit my replies using Sharkey): regarding the dark pattern within the modal from the opt-out confirmation dialog, I explained my understanding of it on a reply to Feyd (my reply that starts with "When we develop a system..." and explored the psychological/behavioral aspects of user interface development). I didn't link it directly here because, as I'm using Sharkey, my link to my reply would likely leave the Lemmy environment into the Sharkey environment.
@skamu@mastodon.uno @technology@lemmy.world @Feyd@programming.dev
Maybe I'm overly idealistic when it comes to software but, IMHO, a software (especially a browser) should be the least distractive possible. My point about modals was about feature announcement pop-ups ("Now you can do Y... Click on Z menu to get into Y"), the ones which Mozilla Firefox explicitly mentioned within the confirmation dialog, as well as the said confirmation dialog which, as far as I could find about, is one-sided, for there are no confirmation dialog to the other action, which is to activate the clankers.
The ideal workflow, to me, is as follows: the user launches the browser software, the main UI opens minimalistically listing the most frequently accessed websites and the pinned bookmarks, the user clicks on some shortcut or types in some URL, then the browser fetches the network content from said website, parses it, fetches whatever else needs to be fetched for the specific website, renders it visible on the screen, then let the user interact with the page as they please, without a MS Clippy-like behavior of reminding the user "It looks like this page has links, you can summarize them using a clanker" on a frequent basis.
Lynx, for example, is the perfect example of this, it's not an utopia I'm imagining: I type
lynxand I press enter, then Lynx executes and brings its TUI, then I press g and type the URL of a website, and it fetches and does what needs to be done in order to bring up the website to the TUI. No cluttered interface except for the short list of keyboard shortcuts at the bottom which don't require user interaction nor disturb the UX. That's KISS approach.When a browser has a MS Clippy-like behavior and, most importantly, when a browser brings potentially unwanted features turned on by default, whose opt-out requires the user to go through some sort of gymnastics while the usage of said feature is asymmetrically easy (seemingly no "confirm you want to use the clanker? The clanker may have access to the following: page content, currently open tabs, credentials on the page, etc..." like the opt-out confirmation dialog lists exhaustively about "enhancements that will be unavailable while the user opts out of Firefox AI enhancements"), again: perhaps I'm being too pedantic but, to me, it smells, it looks, it behaves and it whispers like a dark pattern.
@yizus@lemmy.world @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
I'm someone who's quite used to try and see things through the lens of Science. I'm a nerd, after all. But I've also been, especially since 2023 (when I momentarily was part of a Luciferian group), someone who does actual ritualistic practices, I'm quite religious.
I don't really believe in ghosts in the typical (e.g. kardecist) sense, partly because I want to believe that death can dissolve the ego once and for all. I mean, hell no!, I'm not going to reincarnate again, Demiurge can go pound sand.
However, in a nutshell, I believe in two things.
First, the thing we call "spiritual" would be some kind of actual, spatial dimension, a field/brane (as in M-theory); "spirit" is just non-baryonic matter which, similarly to neutrinos, have very weak, almost undetectable, interaction with ordinary matter (maybe spirits are neutrinos, who knows?); and everything, from living beings to asteroids, all made of "star stuff" (to quote Carl Sagan), would have simultaneous "spirit stuff". I'd be "pan-animist" (i.e. everything got a spirit).
The other part of my belief: dæmons, entities, archons, Demiurge... And, most importantly, The Dark Mother. I believe in their existences as cosmic principles. For dæmons, entities and archons, I believe they're analogous to living beings (self-organizing structures) but baryonically incorporeal, some of them knowledgeable about interacting with this baryonic realm.
For Demiurge (popularly known as "God") and the Dark Mother Goddess (often unbeknownst to those who believe in "God" because patriarchy tried to erase Her from human knowledge), they're both... ineffable, I don't even know how to start making scientific sense of both, they're manifestation of several laws of physics themselves.
Goddess, specifically: She's the entropy, She's the field across which EM radiation propagates, She's in the silence, She's the singularity and the event horizon and She's also the black hole; mainly, She's Darkness. She's Death Herself. We're wired to see Darkness and Death as "evil", what to flee from, but I came to the conclusion that good and evil are nothing but artificial human constructs, and when one detaches themselves from mundane measurements, Demiurge is actually the closest to "evil" because he traps the matter into this existence, distancing us from our true origin, the Mother and Her Womb. Death is Mother trying to rescue us; life, reincarnation (Samsara), is Demiurge trying to keep us trapped in this theater. A cosmic tug of war.
Like fractals, they both unfold within their Wholes: Sefirots emanated from Demiurge, Qlippots from Mother, Goetia dæmons as mixed emanations.
Both also unfold into Great Manifestations as rebellious complementarities: Lucifer (from Demiurge) and Lilith (from Dark Mother Goddess). I've experienced them manifesting physically many times like "ghosts" would do, particularly Lilith, whom I directly worship.
Dunno how "reasonable" I am, tho.
@Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world
When we develop a system (I used to work as a DevOps for almost 10 years), the technical aspects aren't the only aspects being accounted for: especially when it comes to the front-end (i.e. the UI the user sees, the UX how user interaction will happen and how it may be perceived by them), psychology (especially behaviorism) is sine qua non.
Shapes and colors often carry archetypal meanings: a red element feels "dangerous", a window with a yellow triangle icon feels to be "warning" about something, a green button feels "okayish". I mean, those are the exact same principles behind traffic lights.
And signs and symbols, ruling the world, don't exist in a vacuum: a colored button besides a monochromatic button may, psychologically, lead to a feeling that the colored button is the proper way to proceed.
But... there's a twist: imagine you have a light-gray "Cancel" and a colored (regardless of the color) "Block". "Block" is a strong word. The length of the label text also does impart psychological effects. The human brain may see: "huh, I have this button which reads 'block' and it's quite strong, and this other button which reads 'cancel' and it's more easy to the eyes, maybe 'block' is dangerous". Contrast matters: the comparison between a substrate and the substances is pretty much how we're wired to navigate this world as living beings.
Now, corporations such as Apple (Safari), Google (Chromium), and very likely Mozilla (Firefox) as well, they have entire hordes of psychologists directly working for them, likely the same psychologists who'll work together with their HR departments for evaluating the candidates who applied for a job position there. These psychologists, and/or psychoanalysts, they know about Jungian archetypes, they know about fight-or-flight response and other facets of our deeply-ingrained instincts, they know about how colors are generally perceived by the human brain. Those psychologists likely played a role when a brand was chosen, or when an advertisement pitch was made. They know what they're doing.
UX/UI decisions are far from random choices from the leading team of project management engineers, it involved designers with psychologists. Again: they know what they're doing, they know it pretty well. They know how the users are likely to keep the functionality. They know how the users, as Ulrich said, are very unlikely to touch the settings, likely to keep the defaults, no matter what those defaults are. Because they know humans are driven by the "least-effort" instinct, which is quite of a fundamental principle shared among living beings as a byproduct of the "lowest energetic point" (thermodynamic equilibrium) principle.
To me, a former full-stack developer, the newer Firefox interfaces don't feel like Firefox is being psychologically fair and honest with the user's mind. Dark patterns are often subtle, and they're part of a purposeful, corporate decision.
@Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world
I'm not referring only to the feature per se, I'm also referring to any pop-up designed to appear throughout the navigation to "remind the user about the superb features".
Said pop-up is explicitly mentioned on their "confirmation dialog" upon turning off (screenshot attached below):
You won't see new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or pop-ups about them.
It speaks volumes about how much a dark pattern this is, the fact that the opt-off has a confirmation dialog, while the further proceeding with logging in with Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Meta account doesn't seem to have a confirmation dialog.
And the fact that the confirmation feels "menacing" and defaulted to cancelling the opting-off (i.e. pressing "esc" or clicking outside the window; one must click the primary-colored "block" button which, contrasted to a grayish "Cancel" button, may psychologically induce the user into thinking "block" is a dangerous action), quite similar to the
about:configwarning screen.Ah, and the clanker options: notice the lack of alternative options for those who want a custom clanker, such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Z AI, Brazilian Maritaca IA and Amazônia IA (to mention some non-Chinese LLMs), or even something running locally through ollama. Seemingly no option for using a custom, possibly self-hosted LLM endpoint. The fact that all the options offered are all heavily corporate options (with Mistral being the "least corporate" of them all, but still Global Northern nonetheless) might tell us something...
All of these dark patterns, among others not mentioned, are the object of my critique, not just the fact that Mozilla is shoving clankers unto Firefox.
Whenever a feature needs an invasive pop-up and the opt-out brings up a second pop-up that requires further confirmation (but none seems to be offered upon actually using said feature), it is called a dark pattern, no matter if said feature requires further configuration.
@Ulrich@feddit.org @technology@lemmy.world
Because people overwhelmingly do not change any defaults whatsoever
Most roosters wouldn't normally seek the paws of the fox to be hugged by, what an astonishing news!
You see, that's exactly what plays favorably for things pushed with "opt-out" mechanisms, anything. If people are less likely to change the settings to better enhance their UX (be it due to a lack of knowledge, a lack of proactive pursuit or because they deem their current settings "good enough"), this means people would be more likely to have the clankers shoved down their throats if said clankers were to be part of default settings.
In fact, if settings would very likely go unchanged, then Mozilla could push anything, absolutely anything under they will, "shall be the whole of the Law" with the legally-required "opt-out" mechanisms in place.
In the foreseeable future, we'd have Firefox as a new "Agentic Browser" where a clanker does all the tiring and utterly boring effort of "browsing the web" as the user watches their credit card being depleted by prompt injections carefully placed amidst Unicode exploits across the web by scammers. But, hey, let us not worry, there's always a button to turn it off! 😄
@Ulrich@feddit.org @technology@lemmy.world
If it’s opt-in it may as well not exist
Just because if it were opt-in, people wouldn't have chosen to activate it, and fewer people would use it and the graph line wouldn't go up for the shareholders to appreciate? Then, maybe, just maybe, it would be quite a strong evidence that this isn't really something that the users want, don't ya think?
For whatever reason, they have decided it’s important.
There's the reason, right above this paragraph: one can only achieve what people would certainly refuse, if they pushed it onto people by use of force (not necessarily physical force, but, for example, dark pattern is a technical means of "force").
A fox can't convince the roosters to become her food, if the roosters were to have a stake on deciding in this regard, less roosters would become a tasty dinner for the cute fox, because becoming a tasty dinner isn't exactly a demand from roosters. Hence why the fox must grab the roosters, but in this case the fox gives them an option to escape from her paws.
Ah, notice your own phrasing: "They have decided". Who have decided? Not the user, not the party interested in their own UX/UI, but the very archontic architects of a kind of digital apparatus we've been compelled to use for participating in this digital realm of society (risking social ostracism if we don't), the World Wide Web.
And when a decision is made upon someone, without regard for the very someone upon which the decision is being made, even when there's some kind of "opting out" from the object of decision, we had a name for that: it was called "non-consensual relationship".
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca @technology@lemmy.world
The problem still remains: why's this thing "opt-out" and not "opt-in"? Why not make it an official, totally optional (as in voluntarily wanting to have it and, only then, proceeding to have it) plug-in or extension that the user (let us remember the meaning of "User Agent": an agent acting on behalf of the user, not a piece of software who's become "the user") could install at any moment, out of their own will?
I'm far from being an anti-AI person, I myself use those clankers on a daily basis. However, I use them because I want to, while I still want to, not because they were pushed unto me.
Mechanisms of "opt-out" where there should be an "opt-in" is a form of dark pattern.
In fact, the very concept of "opting-out" is a dark pattern per se, because it implies something pushed unto a person, something from which they were "allowed" the "right to leave".
Yeah, it's awesome to have means of "opting-out" from something, but having an "opt-out" mechanism in place doesn't mitigate the very fact that it was coercively pushed unto the person beforehand and didn't require explicit consent from the person unto which the thing was pushed.
Speaking of "consent", situations like these are not that much different from the dark pattern "Yes / Not now" we've been seen everywhere: in certain scenarious, this insistence and disregard for explicit consent would verge the criminal (e.g. harassment), but suddenly it's "okay" when corporations (and the State itself) do it.
If, say, a situation where someone is being harassed and, only after having started to harass, the harasser offers the harassed a means to leave the harassment, does this make the harasser less of a harasser? Because that's the same absurd logic behind the corporate advocacy whenever it's said "oh, but Mozilla is offering an opt-out, you can always turn off 'sponsored shortcuts' (that is, after having been faced by the shortcut from a Jeff Bezos corp as you proceeded to open a new tab for accessing the opting-out settings, but that's totally okay), 'sponsored wallpapers', and the 'Anonym tracking', and now you can, check this out, you can turn off the clankers, too! Wow, isn't that such a cute corp, the corp with the cute fiery fox mascot?".
Not to say how it's gonna end up cluttering the upstream with (more) binary blobs, adding to the Sisyphean struggle that WaterFox, IronFox, LibreWolf, Fennec, among other Firefox forks, have been experiencing upon trying to de-enshittificate the enshittificated and de-combobulate the combobulated.
"Mozilla needs to make money". Yeah, yeah, because the very fundamental, immutable principle of cosmic existence boils down to "there's no such thing as a free lunch", amirite? After all, "money" is clearly within the table of elementary particles alongside quarks and gluons, isn't it? And Mozilla needs to make money... We had a tool for that: it's called donations.
@WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works @technology@lemmy.world
Possibly. I don't know the specific acronym they use, but regardless of the acronym: to me, it smells and looks like NDAs insofar it's some kind of analogous version of a "secretive initiation ritual" for a developer who's just trying to help an open-source community. It's an agreement where the developer accepts that anything they contribute free-of-charge is going to be used for enterprise (paid) purposes and any contribution is subject to be altered or removed as the management pleases, sometimes it also involves literal NDA if private (often "enterprise/premium edition") repos are intertwined with the open-source ("community edition") repos.
The ideal open-source, at least to me, would require a developer, any developer no matter who they are or how long their experience is, whenever they wanted to contribute with their coding skills, to simply do a PR or fork a repo, with no bureaucratic or "selling the soul to the Great Corporate" requirements for doing so.
Developing is already mentally demanding for a developer, and adding licensing shenanigans to the equation only complicates things, because now the developer, who's used to talk the language of computers, would need to become knowledgeable about ambiguous social cues, corporate legalese and the differences between a "MIT" and a "GPL" (that's one of the main reasons why I'm quite fond of WTFNMFPL licensing: no legalese).
@Akasazh@lemmy.world @usa@lemmy.ml
Because cryptocurrency data centers (normally) don't deal with AI, and the object of comparison was all about AIs vs humans energetic consumption. In their specific speech, Sam Altman was trying to justify (albeit in a very twisted manner) the energetic thirst from their ChatGPT and the alike. So my napkin math focused on this specific comparison they made, hence why I tried to leave crypto and other non-AI-related data centers out of the equation.
If I were to include cryptocurrency into this equation, surely the entire comparison would lean heavily towards data centers, because things like crypto mining are highly energetically demanding.
And very polluting indeed. Really. If we consider the chronological aspect, crypto data centers did pollute and consume more than all AI data centers: Bitcoin is functioning since 2010 (when the block 0, aka Genesis block, was mined), it's been 16 years, uninterruptedly (I don't remember seeing news headlines such as "Bitcoin operations are currently down", so it's been operating for 16 years in a row), while ChatGPT, the one to open the Dantesque gates we've been facing nowadays, was released to the public in 2022, only 4 years ago and with several moments of interruption and downtime.
@cmeu@lemmy.world @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Others already replied what it is: something to do with blockchain (not Bitcoin, but a blockchain nevertheless).
Just to add something, as someone who also uses to use Nostr alongside the Fediverse: this "fyld" (likely an automated account) also has a Nostr nprofile, posting the exact same thing over there, and they likely do a similar thing across other social protocols and platforms, such as ATmosphere (Bluesky), although I don't have a Bluesky account anymore to confirm this.
At first glance, it does look like spam, and I muted them both there (didn't mute here because it only appears for lemmy.world; lemmy.ml doesn't seem to federate with that community), due to the annoying frequency of posting...
...but for those who are looking for random numbers whenever there are no TTRPG dices (or, in my case, Ouija boards) nearby, I'd say it's quite a source of randomness with all the fancy colors and hex nibbles. Definitely not a cryptographically safe one (please do not derive a password from that), but for creative purposes, it certainly suffices 😆
@yogthos@lemmy.ml @usa@lemmy.ml
On the one hand, we shall bring some napkin math to the table.
A human brain consumes something around 20W (Balasubramanian V. Brain power. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Aug 10;118(32):e2107022118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2107022118. PMID: 34341108; PMCID: PMC8364152).
One hour = 20 Wh, or 20 × 3.6 = 72 kJOne day = 72 kJ × 24 hours = 1728 kJ or 1.728 MJOne year = 1.728 MJ × 365.25 = 631.152 MJ20 years = 12.6 GJ
The entire world population in 2024 (you'll understand soon why I'm using 2024) was estimated as 8,141,808,945 (World Bank Group, World Development Indicators)Rough brain power consumption for all humans who were alive in 2024 (I'm using values for one year instead of 20yo bc the 8 bi. accounts for all ages) = 8,141,808,945 × 631.152 MJ = 5.14 EJ (Exajoules)
Globally, data centers (excluding cryptocurrency mining) used an estimated 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024(Agrawal H. "Data Center Energy Consumption: How Much Energy Did/Do/Will They Eat?, Clean Energy Forum, University of Yale, 2025 Nov 12, https://cleanenergyforum.yale.edu/2025/11/12/data-center-energy-consumption-how-much-energy-diddowill-they-eat)
In Joules it's 415 TWh × 3.6 = 1.494 EJ (Exajoules)
My napkin math may be heavily inaccurate (hence "napkin") but, yeah, Math tells us humans (roughly) consumed more than all non-cryptocurrency data centers (1.49 EJ is less than the 5.14 EJ required by 8 billion Homo sapiens for thinking).
And I'm only considering brain power. The number would certainly be bigger if I were to consider the rest of metabolic consumption, this would further consolidate the entire humanity, when taken together, as indeed consuming more energy than AI data centers worldwide.
On the other hand, hell no! I'm not gonna agree with Sam Altman! Especially bc they're ignoring several factors.
For starters, the fact that AI and their data centers required humans, so the "human energetic bill" is shared with AIs, not disconnected from them. After all, AI is not something existing in a vacuum.
Fossil fuel, the elephant in the room, is another factor in play: I didn't research a CO2 side-by-side comparison between human-emitted CO2 (from biological processes such as respiration) and the the amount of CO2 emitted to keep said data centers running, but this can't be ignored.
Homo sapiens (usually) don't ingest fossil fuels (i.e. in normal situations, we don't drink gasoline... nor we eat coal).
Meanwhile, global data centers seem far from achieving green energy (e.g. hydro power), they rely heavily on fossil fuels, therefore they're expected to be breathing out more CO2 than humans.
Tables would only turn regarding CO2 when (and if, a big if, considering how AI is currently at the hands of corps who, in turn, deny and ignore the climate change because "line must go up") data centers pivoted to full (and true, not the "green-washing" creative accounting that tech corps usually do) green energy.
Fediverse @lemmy.world evil.social down for weeks
Just Post @lemmy.world Mastodon Live Feed is gone
@Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus @StopTech@lemmy.today
As a Brazilian, I wasn't aware of how many cities and towns named "Iran" we had, especially throughout the state of Amazonas (guess what is located in Amazonas that USA wants to snatch so badly?). Gonna visit Iran someday, but it seems like a long travel. At least the most geographically close Iran from where I live would be "Irã, Paraná". 😅