Comment by HendrikHensen

Comment by HendrikHensen 2 days ago

I think this is a strange, and honestly worrying, stance.

Just because there are worse problems, doesn't mean we shouldn't care about less-worse problems (this is a logical fallacy, I think it's called relative privation).

Further, there is an extremely limited number of problems that I, personally, can have any impact on. That doesn't mean that problems that I don't have any impact on, are not problems, and I couldn't worry about.

My country is being filled up with data centers. Since the rise of LLMs, the pace at which they are being built has increased tremendously. Everywhere I go, there are these huge, ugly, energy and water devouring behemoths of buildings. If we were using technology only (or primarily) for useful things, we would need maybe 1/10th of the data centers, and my immediate living environment would benefit from it.

Finally, the site could perhaps be run on a Raspberry Pi. But the site itself is not the interesting part, it's the LLMs using it.

observationist 2 days ago

I don't think it's odd at all- having taken a deep look at the potential impact and problems surrounding AI, including training and datacenters, I've come to the conclusion that they're about as trivial and low ranking a problem as deciding what color seatbelts should be in order to optimize driving safety. There are so many more important things to attend to - by all means, do the calculus yourself, and be honest about consumed resources and environmental impacts, but also include benefits and honest economics, and assess the cost/benefit ratio for yourself. Then look at the potential negatives, and even in a worst case scenario, these aren't problems that overwhelm nearly any other important thing to spend your time worrying about, or even better, attempting to fix.

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oneshot2150 2 days ago

It’s odd that people seem to be so against the AI slop in particular, because energy and water and whatnot. I’m fairly sure video games eat a lot more power than AI slop and are just as useless. So is traveling - do people truly need to fly 3000 miles just to see some mountains? Why do people demand food they like when you’d survive just fine off of legumes and water?

> Everywhere I go, there are these huge, ugly, energy and water devouring behemoths of buildings.

Everywhere you go? Really?

The water consumption is minor, btw. Electricity is more impactful but you’d achieve infinitely more advocating for renewables rather than preaching at people about how they’re supposed to live in mudhuts.

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observationist 2 days ago

I land here: it's probably not the best, most useful thing to spend electricity and compute on, but in order to compel people to spend it on what I consider to be optimal, you'd have to make me dictator, and there are a million other people who have equally strong and well reasoned opinions about where those resources should be spent, and if you're going to be fair about resource allocation, you inevitably end up with something that looks and works like a marketplace. None of them can ever be perfect, so you aim for reasonable and fair, and push for incremental improvements to the fairness over time. You gotta be realistic about least and lesser evils, and have gratitude and appreciation for the genuine good, and be extremely pragmatic about the measure and rate of progress. Things are pretty damn good - not utopian or optimal, but pretty damn good. And getting better, 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, consistently, decade over decade.

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seba_dos1 2 days ago

> I’m fairly sure video games eat a lot more power than AI slop and are just as useless
What makes you so sure? I'm fairly sure they eat a fraction of what AI slop does and are much more useful.

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