If it were quartz it would be needing to justify why it costs more than $10. The Swiss government doesn't do anything to get people to buy Swiss watches. They're good status symbols, so rich people buy them.
Kinda funny that I wrote (100% manually) a short report to a collaborator about an event I went to this weekend and made a special effort to avoid AI language patterns, like I reversed the order of a structure with negation, etc.
It is A. Not B, Not C, Not D.
as opposed to current AIs which are trained to do it the other way.
Clearly havent seen what enterprise hardware is like these days... sure, the OS takes 5 seconds.. but the hardware can take 10 minutes in some cases now glares at hpe gen11 systems. Its seriously bad now. The amount of power and time backround hardware level tasks now take has significantly increased over the last 10 years. Even the ancient dell r710 i have sititng in a closet collecting dust boots faster than todays hp gen11's.
We waste a ton of energy on ineffeciencies in hardware and software today all because we managed to "just go faster".
Not surprising. the 100R folk are very upfront about their ideology around sustainability and eco justice.
mjk didn't have anything to add to the social economic conversation around llm usage, to the point of even being a bit tone deaf (especially if the 100R were part of his intended audience).
A bit more open constructive conversation to mjk's post on Mastodon would've been helpful for more people to understand the 100R philosophy more intimately; but...it seems the battle lines are drawn. Who wins/loses?
> mjk didn't have anything to add to the social economic conversation around llm usage
There's some semi-apologetic interest in ML, esp. smaller local models, in the "permacomputing" (don't like the term but whatev) sphere. But I don't know if there's much of a conversation around LLMs. With all the hype and how resource intensive and externalities-heavy they are, I can see wanting to draw a line, but it's sad to see it become a purity test.
Lately the discussion around this has had me thinking of the William Köttke quote "not only is it ethical to use the resources of the current system construct the next one, ideally, all the resources of the current system would be used to that end".
I think that if the situation was as dire as it's made out to be (I think it is) and projects like uxn were a serious attempt at a mitigating response (less convinced, as cool as they are), there's room for a conversation about beneficial-detrimental (rather than good-evil). Then we could discuss whether it's a good idea to use LLM-based tools when they are available to help build out infrastructure that runs without them, whether there's a nuance as to at what level of automation we draw the line (Ivan Illich, tools vs machines etc), human augmentation vs replacement, the cognitive load stuff Keeter's post touches on and so on.
Unfortunately, part of the polycrisis seems to be a difficulty in discussing things clearly.
I refuse to engage in "LLMs are evil, period" views. That's like walking out into a battlefield with a samurai sword, while your enemy has Gatling guns. You'll be shredded. The pressure to survive means new tools have to be examined and incorporated as and when needed. The resources needed to run a 24B LLM on a gaming GPU are not costing the earth.
It's just the current moral panic. The views aren't even relevant; LLMs will either stick around because they're useful or the industry will collapse if they're not.
And even if people still don't like them, they'll eventually stop caring about hating them.
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