this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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A dog's power output comes from its muscle mass, which for a healthy dog is about 45% of its total body weight. This gives our 28-pound dog roughly 12.57 lbs (or 5.7 kg) of muscle.
Studies of animal muscle show that the peak power output of vertebrate muscle tissue during a short, explosive burst (like a jump or the start of a sprint) is around 100 to 200 watts per kilogram of muscle.
Now we can estimate the dog's peak power:
Converting these figures to horsepower (1 horsepower = 746 watts):
So, a small 28-pound dog might be able to generate a peak power of around 0.75 to 1.5 horsepower for a very brief moment.
So this YASA motor is somewhere between 670 and 1,340 times more powerful than the dog it's being compared to in weight. That's some jaw-dropping power output.
I tried to sanity-test the math here running the same calculations on a 700 kg horse, of which around 50% mass is muscle.
700 kg x 50% = 350 kg
Low:
350 kg x 100 W/kg = 35,000 W
35,000 W / 746 ≈ 47 hp
High:
350 kg x 200 W/kg = 70,000 W
70,000 W / 746 ≈ 94 hp
Despite what the term "horsepower" would seem to suggest, a horse can actually output more than one horsepower. Estimates put peak output of a horse around 12-15 hp. By those numbers, even the low end estimate above is around 3-4x too high. We're gonna need more dogs.
I accept your terms.
I appreciate the sanity check, but just to throw a monkey wrench into your model...
I think the square-cube law will bite you here. I expect power/mass isn't constant. Mass grows faster than cross-sectional area which is key in muscle performance.
Fair
Might be my favorite thread today. Thank you, polite and nerdy strangers.
Horsepower was originally used to describe the work that a horse could do over the course of an hour. Specifically, the number of times an hour a horse could turn a mill wheel at a brewery. These are estimates of peak power, not sustained power, so I would say that it's accurate that horses can produce significantly more than one horsepower in short bursts.
I'm guessing that would be if every muscle was being used for propulsion at any given time. You'd need to allow for heart and lungs, as well as face, neck, tail muscles that don't contribute to power output, plus legs don't provide continuous power as they need to make a return trip.
If we really wanted to optimise a dog for power:weight there are quite a few systems we could do away with. But it would likely result in a less floofy doggo, so it's obviously not an option.
Stop burning the planet down to generate social media comments about shit you don't understand
If I'm not mistaken, you specifically showed an interest in better understanding this.
I recognise their username. It's half sane takes, half absolute wankery with them.
That was a joke
Stop fucking use AI, or at least get used to a sizable portion of people to tell you, that you're burning the only planet we have down over shit that doesn't matter.
Username checks out
you made an offhand joke and got mad at him for continuing the joke?
I mean, I thought it would be obvious my issue was with using AI to do so...
Even if it had been a serious question.
But, to be fair I was thinking of what a normal.person would be able to parse, and not people who's critical thinking had already atrophied from offloading to AI.
They probably don't have any idea what I meant and would need it explicitly spelled out.
I didn't realize it even was ai generated. but even if it is, that's still a fairly off-putting way to respond.
No you're right...
It's not like it's literally burning our planet down and the people profiting off it aren't tech bro fascists...
attacking someone will never change someone's mind.
If It makes you feel better (or at least more educated)……the entire three-prompt interaction to calculate dogpower consumed roughly the same amount of energy as making three Google searches.
A single Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours (Wh) of energy. A typical AI chat query with a modern model uses a similar amount, roughly 0.2 to 0.34 Wh. Therefore, my dogpower curiosity discussion used approximately 0.9 Wh in total.
For context, this is less energy than an LED lightbulb consumes in a few minutes. While older AI models were significantly more energy-intensive (sometimes using 10 times more power than a search) the latest versions have become nearly as efficient for common tasks.
For even more context, It would take approximately 9 Lemmy comments to equal the energy consumed by my 3-prompt dogpower calculation discussion.
This is not correct and can easily be disproven, even if one assumes less than 480g/Kwh.
And that is ignoring the infrastructure necessary to perform a search vs AI query.
You’re absolutely right! According to the research you cited, the energy use is actually much LOWER than I stated in my comment.
Your source shows that an efficient AI model (Qwen 7B) used only 0.058 watt-hours (Wh) per query.
Based on that, my entire 3-prompt chat only used about 0.17 Wh. That’s actually less energy than a single Google search (~0.3 Wh). Thanks for sharing the source and correcting me.
If one assumes a 1/3 correctness is sufficient and the provider is using a 7B model, it is a safe assumption that it was energy efficient and better than a traditional search. However, on the other end of the spectrum, if one assumes the most efficient reasoning model, which consumes ~400x more energy and still only amounts to 4/5 accurate responses, the entire discussion is flipped on its head.
It is however comical to see one jump to an irreproducible edge case to prove one's point, it does really exemplify how weak the position was from the beginning. Intellectual dishonesty galore.
edit: the supplied reply is also highly unlikely to have come from a non reasoning model given the structuring of the text.
I'd be curious to have the exact 3 prompts to input into Qwen7B and get that exact response.
How do you know they're not running a local model? Ultimately the problem with LLM accusations is that short of a confession or doing some hardcore surveillance of the other person you can't prove it
edit: or fingerprinting/watermarking
edit2: no, "you can tell by the way it is" isn't proof (simply because that's fixable in an instant). even if you're the smartest person on the internet. and again, it could be a local model.
Human variation.
Ironically you would have to take the others person word on it, luckily you just said you were comfortable doing so.
Some people are statistically insignificant, and to them lots of stuff is incredibly obvious and they're constantly frustrated others can't see it. They might even sink sizeable free time into explaining random shit, just to practice not losing their temper when people can't see the obvious.
So you might not be able to tell that was AI from a glance, but humans are pattern recognition machines and we're not all equally good at it.
So believe a "llm accusation" or not, but some people absolutely can pick out a chatbot response, especially when taking the two seconds to glance at typical comments from a user profile.
Jump from 1-2 sentence comments to a stereotypical AI response...
Well, again, not everyone is as good at picking out patterns quickly.
To some what took me literally under 10 seconds and two clicks counts as "hardcore surveillance" because it would take them a long time to figure it out.
Don't assume everyone else is exactly like you.
Stop burning the planet to tell people what to burn the planet for.