> People don't want to travel to the U.S. right now
Not enough to break a conference. “International arrivals to the United States in 2025 decreased 5.5% from 2024” [1]. (HY1 2026 is basically in line with 2025 [2].)
> People who attend conferences like this are probably not a representative sample of general arrivals
Business air travel to America was flat in 2025 from 2024 [1][2]. I'm just not seeing any data which support the hypothesis that conference visitation to the U.S. has cratered in general to the point of threatening conference finances. (NTTO stopped breaking out conference visitation after 2019 [3].)
A good move is to negotiate in good faith. You show you can’t be pushed around and you are able to be civil. And most importantly, you know your worth.
My guess is that the validation just validates the numbers which are old and valid and some automated system notices the label and routes it. I bet their system is a disjointed system and not set up in a way where every step checks every thing. It's very plausible it was home grown in such a way where its like this
It's doing something that wasn't worth the squeeze for a human. Seems like a perfect use case for AI. Sure, I can do X or I can do Y but if it takes me a few weeks but AI can hash it out in hours, it now makes it worth it.
A link to a YouTube video without context e.g. summary of findings, primary author/creators, and primary citations, methodology, and so on is a next to useless for making a point. For all we know you’re linking to a crackpot or an industry sock puppet and I don’t care to “watch” any of what can potentially be a dubious video or worse a malicious video. It is your job as the linker to convince me the video is worth even one iota of my time.
On the other hand recent papers highlight the validity of concern/suspicion:
> This systematic review demonstrates that the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence is a structural and increasingly consequential challenge, shaped by interdependent decisions across algorithms, software pipelines, hardware infrastructures, and deployment contexts. The synthesized evidence shows that energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with AI systems are highly variable, context-dependent, and often underestimated — Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Review of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint Across the AI Lifecycle (published in “Sustainability” an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/3/1359
Nobody is concerned about the costs and environmental impact of data centers.
When someone in a discussion about the benefits of AI goes "did you think about the environment?!", it's always performative.
The real motivation is disliking AI itself or doubt about the government's ability to offset the labor market impact. Discussions that start with feigned concerns being raised are nearly always going to be unproductive.
I don’t dislike AI but really of mine are negatively affected by climate change and AI isn’t helping what is easily observed when Google and MS scrapped their CO2 reduction targets.
So every time I use AI I think about the necessity and usefulness of what I‘m doing with AI and if the use outweighs the costs.
Since the rise of AI the environmental impact doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
I guess because it’s the shiny new toy of the hackernews audience.
Privacy also lost importance given the fact that the same people who refused to give information like their phone number to companies like Google and Meta now upload their whole life to their AIs to asks what should the eat, hyperbolically speaking
You're not helping your case by questioning the usefulness of software produced with AI in the same comment section, or complaining about other people supposedly compromising their own privacy in overusing AI.
The reason it doesn't matter is because the environmental impact is moderate, and the benefit obviously tremendous.
The environmental impact is anything but moderate and the benefits are not obviously tremendous at all. I'm happy using Claude Code as much as the next guy, but saying that the impact has been "tremendous" is vastly overstating the actual results.
I disagree, with the projected doubling by 2030 we're looking at 3% of global electricity consumption or 3.4 EJ, less than 1% of final energy consumption.
That is moderate. Energy-intensive industry is around 130 EJ, and global final energy consumption > 450 EJ.
Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035.
Now that was about operational energy consumption. Someone might bring up manufacturing and construction.
From what I could find the climate impact of those are estimated somewhere between 10-35% of the total climate impact of data centers, so relatively small compared to the operational energy consumption.
It is very hard to justify more than moderate environmental impact here, in my opinion.
For the benefits of AI, my personal results have been great, so I am quite optimistic. And objectively, I find it hard to ignore recent results in mathematics and security research.
"Global data centers consumed around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity—about 1.5% of the world's total electricity—with AI acting as a primary accelerator for new power demand."
That is today where we already consume too much. If by 2030 AI's consumption doubles it gets worse.
While training large models draws major initial power, everyday AI usage (inference) now drives roughly 80% to 90% of cumulative AI energy
"Existing documented applications of today's AI have the potential to decrease energy consumption by >13 EJ/year by 2035."
Seems like AI helps slowing down the rise of energy consumption.
We are at a point where we want less CO2 not moderataly more.
In the end more is more.
If your doctor tells you to lose weight or you get sick it's not a success to gain weigth slower
Well, at least we could establish that the environmental impact is moderate rather than extreme.
And if the potential of >13 EJ/year is actually realized, it would seem like the net impact of the data centers is not just "moderately more CO2" but possibly "moderately less".
Most of my family are small business owners, so I've done a handful of Excel automations that they needed that generally take me a while to figure out. Landing pages and a few 3D designed prototypes that I used the Fusion 360 MCP server for
Many people were making more money on unemployment than their standard wage due to the covid increased pay. The fed paid $600 on top of state benefits for a few months and then $300 for more than a year after that meaning people were seeing 16 -> 24 dollars an hour in wages for not working in my state of Georgia for instance. It was often smarter to stay unemployed until that ran out compared to local wages.
