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Water usage goes up with data centers because more cooling is needed when you run the hardware harder.

So: if you're running the models on your own machine, presumably you're not running them as often, and air cooling is sufficient. But, at the same time, this is less efficient in terms of hardware use; the data centers need water cooling specifically because they're getting more bang from their buck from their hardware, by running their hardware harder.

So that's the tradeoff: more hardware-use efficiency means more water usage.

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Almonds and avocados use two orders of magnitude more water.

You can start adjusting your consumption of those products.

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that water is recirculated. nobody sends it down the drain after one loop
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With hardware like the Spark and Strix, the water usage is known to be zero, yea?

On the energy front, I assume less efficient, but I also think there is a tradeoff in efficiency versus freedom, that's why I have my own hardware.

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The electricity used by hardware itself consumes water. When people talk about data center water usage they're often also including the water used in electricity generation.
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Ironically, 77% of my electricity comes from flowing water rather than the boiling it, ~90% renewable overall

Once we get to fully renewable (as a country), there should be no water involved in electricity generation as well.

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All consumer hardware (not counting XOC) uses either air cooling or closed-loop liquid cooling, so the water usage is zero, always. Power is a little trickier. I'd assume it's less efficient, but also the total usage is less, because the user sometimes turns the machine off, and the hardware idles to a deeper sleep state than server hardware.
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the comparison misses that local LLM usage covers tasks you'd never send to an API — private code, offline work, medical notes. the baseline is 'local vs not-doing-it', not 'local vs cloud'
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I have bad news about my private code and medical notes...
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Looking forward to some pre/non-finetuned frontier model to leak, and people to start completing medical notes.
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> Looking forward to some pre/non-finetuned frontier model to leak

I'm looking forward to this too. It'll be incredibly useful.

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