Bitcoin is dirty, dirty, dirty.

“The worldwide BTC mining network consumed 173.42 TWh of electricity during the 2020–2021 period, bigger than the electricity consumption of most nations. The mining process emitted over 85.89 Mt of CO2eq in the same timeframe, equivalent to the emission caused by burning [42 million tons] of coal or running 190 natural gas‐fired power plants.”

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871

#bitcoin #climatechange #climatecrisis

Helping someone debug something, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Edit: too many ppl reading this as "this person bad at programming" - not what I meant. Criticism is of deceptive presentation of LLMs.

“If more of us valued food & cheer & song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

J.R.R. Tolkien