ctlr+r #04: AI’s Energy Bill , Free Localhost Tunnels

A weekly recall from the terminal of my mind: Thoughts 🧠, 🛠 Tools, and 📕 Takes.

🧠 Is AI resource usage killing the planet?

I recently stumbled upon a good essay arguing from Andy Masley that ChatGPT is not bad for the environment. Then, I read a jarring counter-perspective from Alistair Alexander claiming that a single Sora AI video burns 1 kWh. Meanwhile, we see massive investments in new infrastructure, like Anthropic’s $50 billion project.

So, are we killing the planet or not? The truth lies in the details.

First, we need to distinguish what “AI cost” actually means. While data on this has historically been imprecise, Google’s August 2025 report finally gives us solid numbers.

• Text is cheap: A query costs about 0.24 Wh : roughly equivalent to 9 seconds of watching TV.

• Video is expensive: Generating video is exponentially more energy-intensive. While tools like Kling 2.6 offer utility for artists, the energy cost of flooding the internet with “fun” Sora-style clips is massive compared to text.

Second, we must differentiate Training vs. Inference.

• Training is like building a stadium. Massive energy goes into the construction, but that cost is “fixed” regardless of whether 1 person or 10,000 people sit in it. This is the scary part: we are currently making a massive energy bet : burning resources now to build these “stadiums” and hoping that AI will improve life enough to justify the cost.

• Inference is the daily usage (the ticket to the stadium).

Finally, there is a surprising trade-off between Cloud vs. Local inference. Technically, the cloud is much better at “math-per-watt” due to specialized cooling and efficient hardware.

Your laptop is less efficient at the math, but it represents “sunk carbon”. The environmental cost to manufacture your phone or laptop has already been paid. Using the “idle compute” we already own locally might be the smarter move to avoid building endless new data centers.

The future will likely need to be a hybrid of both.

🛠 Tunnels: exposing localhost to the world

I recently needed a quick tunneling service to test a few things locally. Specifically, I had a webhook I needed to register to verify that my app could receive it and trigger the correct actions.

To do this, you typically need to register a public URL. This is where tunneling comes in: it makes your local machine (aka localhost:3000) available to the internet via a secure public link.

I used to use ngrok, but it has become increasingly restrictive for free usage (bandwidth limits, no static domains without paying).

After checking awesome-tunneling, I found Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared). It is incredibly simple to start and arguably the best free alternative right now.

In a setup with AI tools like Lovable or Replit, this is becoming less critical because they often provide their own cloud previews out of the box. However, if you want a true local development environment, a tunnel is still essential.

I suspected Cursor might eventually host apps for development purpose too.

📚 What I read / watched

• Driving Xiaomi’s Electric Car: Are we Cooked?: It’s great to see more competition in the EV space. Xiaomi (yes, the one that makes phones and tablets) seems to have really nailed it with this model.

• Anthropic acquires Bun: Anthropic acquiring an OSS JS runtime is... interesting. I’m curious to see the future of this, but to me, it proves that we still need good engineers. Generating code might be becoming a commodity, but engineering? That isn’t going anywhere. Otherwise, they would have just forked the project.

• Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare: Replicate (think Vercel, but for AI model hosting) has been acquired. Cloudflare continues to build a really neat catalog of products, but I feel the one thing they are missing is strong developer branding. I see AWS, GCP, and Vercel champions everywhere. Cloudflare? Not so much.

---

Two months ago, I challenged myself to make the best Sunday morning pancakes for my family. Given that my cooking skills hover around zero, this was ambitious, but I’m finally getting somewhere! 🧑‍🍳