Microsoft already does that, and its Antimalware agent is the bane of my existence. It will see idle machines spin up their fans to full and drain batteries within a short few hours. No thank you!

That sounds like something that's easily fixable with battery saving options. Basically, when in battery, don't do that. That would be a good default.

Because that costs energy, the fact that your CPU is idle most of the time is why you can get hours of battery life.

When plugged into the grid, it makes sense to spend a few cents of energy a day to filter out unwanted solicitations, harassment that you may not want to see, scam emails or texts, etc.

If I didn't have to worry about my grandparents getting scammed because they were having 99.99% of it effectively filtered or warned about at one layer or another before it actually became a problem...can you imagine how much you could lower that type of fraud/abuse?

> When plugged into the grid

Exactly! Apple for instance already does this with some ML tasks that only run when your device is plugged in, I think it's a great compromise.

The grid, of course, is less sure about this compromise.

When I cook a roast in the oven it uses a couple of KWh. That should cover charging a Macbook for like, a month or two. I think we will be ok.

The grid can be negotiated with if we put in the infrastructure.

That would cost money and lower the profits of the people that own/control the grid. I sometimes wonder how much money these robber barons spend on lobbying and other PR campaigns to convince that climate change isn't a problem and that the grid is just fine. It's one of those unanswerable questions I'm sure, but how much progress could be made by redirecting that amount of money to actually improving the grid itself?

That was actually part of how I intended my "negotiated" to be taken. Part of it is a monetary negotiation where we invest more in base load and peak load, but some of it needs to be in the ability for the grid to request to shed load and the devices react accordingly.

the power cord has to have a data link (USB? or just networking over power line itself) through which the power outlet can tell the computer how much does the energy cost at any given time. this is a very welcome but very expensive addition to the infrastructure.

Why would you put it in the cord? The phone/computer can handle this fine, and already has all the bits.

my wall outlet supplies power from 3 different sources: grid, solar on the roof and/or powerwall, depending on the weather, grid status (which sucks where I live) and time of day. computer only knows time of day off the bat, everything else it has to learn in a complex way. if I have a "cost" or, better, "status" information integrated into the power itself, smart appliances (like computer) can make decisions what they can or can not run. right now I can start training my models on my 4090 at night, we have an outage, and 4090 will happily drain the powerwall, so I'll not have an A/C in the morning. models can wait, they're stupid anyway, or at least I like the A/C better.

Settings > Battery > Health and Charging already has a “selectively charge when green energy is available” setting.

Some thermostats prioritize low-usage times, too.

My guess is you wouldn't lower it by much because there's more incentives for attackers than for defenders to invest in these approaches, so it's likely that by the time grandmas are running LLM-based anti-fraud tooling the attackers will already be running LLM-based attacks as well.