tanteFeb 20

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.

EDIT: Diskussions under this are fine, but I do not want this to turn into an ad hominem attack to Cory. Be fucking respectful

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

Acting ethically in an imperfect world

Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

Smashing Frames
Show threadSimon ZerafaFeb 20

@tante

That doesn't seem to be the best idea @pluralistic

AI and LLM output is 90% bullshit, and most people don't have the time nor the patience to work out which 10% might actually be useful.

That's completely ignoring the environmental and human impacts of the AI bubble.

Try buying DDR memory, a GPU or an SSD / HDD at the moment.

Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 20

@simonzerafa @tante

What is the incremental environmental damage created by running an existing LLM locally on your own laptop?

As to "90% bullshit" - as I wrote, the false positive rate for punctuation errors and typos from Ollama/Llama2 is about 50%, which is substantially better than, say, Google Docs' grammar checker.

Show threadKid ManiaFeb 20

@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
"What is the incremental environmental damage created by running an existing LLM locally on your own laptop?"

I dunno. But how about a couple of million people?

The person who coins the term 'enshittification' defends LLM. Just...wow. We truly are fucked.

Let's all do what Cory does!
☠️
Meanwhile:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20737314952&gbraid=0AAAAADgO_miNIDzn-BdCIXzZ6r87g94-L&gclid=Cj0KCQiA49XMBhDRARIsAOOKJHbvIzPACe0EdEyWK86TnS7rNlnUaePKc5y22qT0ZsfqUeGDe72zzc0aAhFFEALw_wcB
#doomed #ClimateChange

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

MIT Technology Review
Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 20

@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model on my laptop?

Show threadKid ManiaFeb 20

@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
Missed the point, sir.

When one person does it...no big deal.

When a couple of million people do it...well, see the MIT article above.

Show threadKid ManiaFeb 20
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
Subhead quote from the article:
"The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next."
Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 20

@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

You are laboring under a misapprehension.

I will reiterate my question, with all caps for emphasis.

Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model ON MY LAPTOP?

Show threadVery Exhausted Parent Who Cannot Possibly Be The Easter BunnyFeb 20

@pluralistic @clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model ON MY LAPTOP?

Anyone who's hosting a website, and is getting hammered by the bots that seek content to train the models on. Those of us are the ones who continue getting hurt.

Whether you run it locally or not, makes little difference. The models were trained, and training very likely involved scraping, and that continues to be a problem to this day. Not because of ethical concerns, but technical ones: a constant 100req/sec 24/7, with over 2.5k req/sec waves may sound little in this day and age, but at around 2.5k req/sec (sustained for about a week!), my cheap VPS's two vCPUs are bogged down trying to deal with all the TLS handshakes, let alone serving anything.

That is a cost many seem to forget. It costs bandwidth, CPU, and human effort to keep things online under the crawler DDoS - which often will require cold, hard cash too, to survive.

Ask Codeberg or LWN how they fare under crawler load, and imagine someone who just wants to have their stuff online having to deal with similar abuse.

That is the suffering you enable when using any LLM model, even locally.

Show threadthe eevee the eevee the eevee
@algernon @pluralistic @clintruin @simonzerafa @tante I host on low-cost hardware out of my house and crawlers made my forgejo unusable until I forcefully blocked access to useful features (viewing commits) for everyone. Now they just hammer my login page a bunch but not at a rate that impacts my use anymore
Feb 20 at 3:50pmWeb