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 threadkelFeb 20

@pluralistic

I am astonished that I have to explain this,

but very simply in words even a small child could understand:

using these products *creates further demand*

- surely you know this?

Well, either you know this and are being facetious, or you are a lot stupider than I ever thought possible for someone with your privilege and resources.

I am absolutely floored at this reveal, just wow, "where's Cory and what have you done with him?" 🤷

Massive loss of respect!

@simonzerafa @tante

Show threadDavid Fleetwood - RG AdminFeb 20

@kel @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante Not only that, but popularizing LLMs but running them all locally is less efficient than running them in the cloud. It's false that it minimizes harm when you are still consuming power, but more of it since the chip in your computer isn't nearly as efficient as the ones the providers use.

Plus it's all stolen and biased fashware.

Show threadlil5

@reflex @kel @pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante

Looking at how server farms are built not for resource efficiency but space efficiency, I’m not too sure about your point, ai server farms run; gasoline backup generators, freshwater usage, and the technical problems of scale.

My laptop never needed fresh water or gasoline to host a website, during it’s running lifetime.

Not to mention the collective noise pollution:

https://gerrymcgovern.com/data-centers-are-noisy-as-hell/

This is, on the other hand, no defense against LLM’s and the ignorant statements of Cory Doctorow, the continuing theft, unending greed, cannot be ignored by running the freeware models locally.

Data centers are noisy as hell

Gerry McGovern
Feb 20 at 10:25pmWeb