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 threadRay McCarthyFeb 20
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
But Google Docs anything is rubbish.
Show threadCory DoctorowFeb 20

@raymaccarthy @simonzerafa @tante

I see. And do you have moral opinions about whether people should use Google Docs? Do you seek out strangers to tell them that it's dangerous to use Google Docs?

Show threadLisPiFeb 22
@pluralistic @raymaccarthy @simonzerafa @tante I do. It's proprietary SaaSS and should be avoided.
Show threadRay McCarthy

@lispi314 @simonzerafa @pluralistic @tante
Pros: Handy for real-time collaborative editing of something that will be made public.

Cons:
Like 1960s; a terminal to someone else's computer. A browser is more overhead than an editor.
Google can deny access without warning.
Google used to scan for advertising/profile purposes, now also for LLM AI.
Don't do formatting; export is poor.
Needs Internet.
On ChromeOS, for text only Jota Android is better, or install Crostini & have any Linux editor / WP.

Feb 22 at 9:40amWeb