Mastodawn

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

Simon Zerafa Feb 20

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.

Cory Doctorow Feb 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.

Kid Mania Feb 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

Cory Doctorow Feb 20

@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

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

Kid Mania Feb 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.

Kid Mania Feb 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."

Cory Doctorow Feb 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?

Very Exhausted Parent Who Cannot Possibly Be The Easter Bunny Feb 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.

komali_2 Feb 20

@algernon @pluralistic @clintruin @simonzerafa @tante

Ok, sure. But you won't stop that train by purity testing other leftists. So what's the plan to stop openai ddosing all our blogs?

@komali_2 @algernon @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
In the big scheme of things I don’t care if Doctrow is using some local LLM to proof his writing. The fact he happens to be the same fellow who coined the term ‘enshittification’ smacks of a dark irony, but whatever. That’s merely how I view it. He’s convinced it’s copasetic, and I don’t really give a fuck. But when we consider that this tech is contributing enormously to the much larger problem of climate change, there’s a real issue. 1/

Kid Mania Feb 20

@komali_2 @algernon @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
2/Doctrow has explained he does not believe his use of a local LLM is contributing to that overall problem. I don’t know if it is, or it isn’t. But that does not derail his fame, or that others may view his use as a tacit approval of this tech in general. Is it fair to lay this on him merely for using a local LLM to proof his work? Should he even be concerned about this?

Kid Mania Feb 20

@komali_2 @algernon @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
3/I dunno. I’m not the writer who coined the term enshittification. Frankly This other side of it...”purity testing leftists”...I don’t even know what that means, and I’m certainly not looking at the issue in this regard. Likewise the use of the term “neoliberal”...same thing. I’m not viewing it in this light. However, climate, and the well-documented contributions of LLMs to that problem, are most definitely my issue with this. /end

komali_2 Feb 20

@clintruin @algernon @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante

Purity testing means picking something and saying "if you don't do things exactly in the way I say, you aren't a good person/leftist." It's a halting state and imo leads to catastrophic long term results like Trotskyism vs Stalinism terminating a revolution.

There's a great song, "I'm a better anarchist than you," that I think illustrates the issue well: it's dangerous to purity test because none of us are pure. Blowback inevitable.

komali_2 Feb 20

Also, are you saying you also don't know what the term neoliberal means, or you just disagree with applying it to the tendency to purity test?

Personally I've believed for a while that purity testing is a dagger that can only cut the holder that is given to leftists by liberals any chance they can get so as to defang leftist movements. Liberals are always more concerned with aesthetics than results.

Kid Mania Feb 21

@komali_2
I do know what neoliberal is...I'm not applying it to my conversation regarding the issue discussed in this thread.