More from David Schmalz, re: his #MontereyCountyWeekly cover story on the Moss Landing battery fires:
"I’d like to talk more about our society’s insatiable demand for #energy, and how easy it is to become detached from its costs—not on the pocketbook, but the planet. You don’t think much, if at all, about energy when you drive your car up a hill, but you’d think about it plenty on a #bike or on foot.
…
“Energy demand keeps ticking up, especially now with the advent of #AI.
"Throw a question into a Google search, for example, and the answer—now that it’s AI-assisted—consumes 10 times more energy than it did before AI.”
https://www.montereycountynow.com/blogs/opinion_blog/there-may-be-lessons-to-be-learned-by-looking-back-on-the-history-of-vistra/article_3662d3d6-c5c4-40db-ab81-f7afc8619675.html#tncms-source=mosaic
NOTE: That’s one reason we choose to check “never" AI in our searches. https://duckduckgo.com/settings#aifeatures And we very, very rarely turn to Google. Duck Duck Go has been our default search engine since 2015. We first used the Duck in 2011 and have experienced its improvements every year. Our family is used to us saying "Ask the Duck" not "Google it.”
