Edit: This is probably the wrong community for asking this question since this community is meant for tech related news. c/asklemmy might be better or !technology@piefed.social allows for discussions on anything tech related.

Smart meters work mostly the same way meters have always worked with one minor difference, they occassionally transmit the current value via a radio frequency. Same as always, you install them at some point where they can measure just how much water/electricity/gas is flowing into the home. The transmitting frequency will be different depending on the device and what country you live in.

If you want to see the details on how water meters measure water flow, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_metering

If you want the details on how gas meters work with all of the different sensors for that, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_meter

If you want the details on how electricity meters work, go here and read the “Electromechanical” and “Electronic” sections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_meter#Electromechanical

Some newer meters are setup to attempt to guesstimate additional information such as what is being used in your home. For instances with water meters, a small flow of water for a short time can mean the faucet was turned on, or a toilet was flushed. A larger flow for a longer time can mean that the bathtub is being used, or a shower, or an appliance (dishwasher/laundry), etc.

“environmentally damaging”
I see a lot of users on here saying this when talking about any use case for AI without actually doing any sort of comparison.

In some cases, AI absolutely uses more energy than an alternative, but you really need to break it down and it’s not a simple thing to apply to every case.

For instance: using an AI visual detection model hooked up to a camera to detect when rain droplets are hitting the windshield of a car. A completely wasteful example. In comparison you could just use a small laser that pulses every now and then and measures the diffraction to tell when water is on the windshield. The laser uses far less electricity and has been working just fine as they are currently used today.

Compare that to enabling DLSS in a video game where NVIDIA uses multiple AI models to improve performance. As long as you cap the framerates, the additional frame generation, upscaling, etc. will actually conserve electricity as your hardware is no longer working as hard to process and render the graphics (especially if you’re playing on a 4k monitor).

Looking at Wikipedia’s use case, how long would it take for users to go through and create a summary or a “simple.wikipedia” page for every article? How much electricity would that use? Compare that to running everything through an LLM once and quickly generating a summary (which is a use case where LLMs actually excel at). It’s honestly not that simple either because we would also have to consider how often these summaries are being regenerated. Is it every time someone makes a minor edit to a page? Is it every few days/weeks after multiple edits have been made? Etc.

Then you also have to consider, even if a particular use case uses more electricity, does it actually save time? And is the time saved worth the extra cost in electricity? And how was that electricity generated anyway? Was it generated using solar, coal, gas, wind, nuclear, hydro, or geothermal means?

Edit: typo

I really like the “Feeds” feature of PieFed, it allows anyone to combine all of the different communities into a single feed. It really makes browsing something like “Technology” a lot better.

Based on the uptick in “I was banned from Reddit” posts, I’m thinking that we’re getting a lot more users that were banned for good reason from Reddit. Looks like Reddit has also stepped up their game in their ability to keep those users off their platform.

It’s not sending the audio to an unknown server. It’s all local. From the article:

The system then translates the speech and maintains the expressive qualities and volume of each speaker’s voice while running on a device, such mobile devices with an Apple M2 chip like laptops and Apple Vision Pro. (The team avoided using cloud computing because of the privacy concerns with voice cloning.)

Highlighting the main issue here (from the article):

“This means that it is possible for the WhatsApp server to add new members to a group,” Martin R. Albrecht, a researcher at King’s College in London, wrote in an email. “A correct client—like the official clients—will display this change but will not prevent it. Thus, any group chat that does not verify who has been added to the chat can potentially have their messages read.”

Looks like the research was only looking at Denmark:

economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

Its probably better this way.

Otherwise you end up with people accusing movies of using AI when they didn’t.

And then there’s the question of how you decide where to draw the line for what’s considered AI as well as how much of it was used to help with the end result.

Did you use AI for storyboarding, but no diffusion tools were used in the end product?

Did one of the writers use ChatGPT for brainstorming some ideas but nothing was copy/pasted from directly?

Did they use a speech to text model to help create the subtitles in different languages, but then double checked all the work with translators?

Etc.

Too far would be anything outside of fair use. If a user generates an image of a specific copyrighted character, then attempts to make money off of that image, they could be sued.

You can’t copyright a style, but there’s still a lot of legal grey area here.

It’s also worth noting that OpenAI has an indemnification clause in their Terms of Use. This means that if someone else goes after OpenAI for something that went viral and was created by a specific user, OpenAI can then turn around and bill that user for all legal fees incurred by them (whether they win or lose the case).

If anyone is into using AI for anything, I would strongly suggest that they avoid using (or at least publishing/posting about) any of OpenAI’s tools especially while all of these legal issues are still being sorted out.