Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture".
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@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa As always, yes and no. A bug zapper is designed to zap bugs, it is a simple mechanism that does that one thing, and does it well. An LLM is designed to read text and generate more text.
That we have decided that the best way to do NLP is to use massively overparameterized word predictors that we have trained using RL to respond to prompts, rather than just, like, doing NLP, is just crazy from an engineering standpoint.
Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave!
Remember when Usenet's backbone cabal worried about someone in Congress discovering that the giant, packet-switched research network that had been constructed at enormous public expense was being used for idle chit chat?
The nature of general purpose technologies is that they will be used for lots of purposes.
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@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.
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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.
@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!
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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 -
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.
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 (tante.cc)
Oh boo! boo CD!
It's a good thing no gods no masters is my mantra.
Also yes!
The problem isn't the use of them as much as the apologetics.
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Remember when Usenet's backbone cabal worried about someone in Congress discovering that the giant, packet-switched research network that had been constructed at enormous public expense was being used for idle chit chat?
The nature of general purpose technologies is that they will be used for lots of purposes.
@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa indeed, I guess the question is whether the scale of the *ahem* waste, fraud and abuse *ahem* of resources that LLMs seem to imply, even in benign use cases like yours, is out of line with historical precedent or not.
Am I an old man yelling at a cloud?
No, it's the children who are wrong!
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@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@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model on my laptop?
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@pluralistic @tante @simonzerafa indeed, I guess the question is whether the scale of the *ahem* waste, fraud and abuse *ahem* of resources that LLMs seem to imply, even in benign use cases like yours, is out of line with historical precedent or not.
Am I an old man yelling at a cloud?
No, it's the children who are wrong!
Rockets were literally perfected in Nazi slave labor camps.
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@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
Which "couple million people" suffer harm when I run a model on my laptop?
@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.
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@tante Dunno where you got the idea that I have a "libertarian" background. I was raised by Trotskyists, am a member of the DSA, am advising and have endorsed Avi Lewis, and joined the UK Greens to back Polanski.
@pluralistic
Fair enough, but that's not the core of the argument
@tante made. He had the same complaint for starters (your argument was heavily drenched in 'you ppl are purists' ), but he also makes the valid argument that technology isn't neutral in itself. Open weights based on intellectual theft and forced labor is still a problem. Until we have a discussion on how the weights come to fruitition, LLM's are objectively problematic from an ethical view. That has nothing to do with purism. -
@mastodonmigration @shiri @pluralistic @tante The only ethical use of a LLM would be one where the training dataset was ethically acquired, the power was minimized to the level of other methods of providing the same benefits, and the 'benefits' were actually measureable and accurate.
None of those are true today, and so far as I know there is little to no path to them.
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@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.
@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." -
@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."@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
But hey, you do you, Cory.
I'm nobody...your Cory Doctrow.
Let's all do what Cory does... -
@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."@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?
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@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
But hey, you do you, Cory.
I'm nobody...your Cory Doctrow.
Let's all do what Cory does...@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
Well, you could "do what Cory does" by familiarizing yourself with the conduct that you are criticizing before engaging in ad hominem.
To be fair, that's not unique to me, but people who fail to rise to that standard are doing themselves and others no good.
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@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?
@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
I'll reiterate my response.When you *alone* do it...no big deal.
When a couple of million do it ON THEIR OWN LAPTOPS...problem. -
@FediThing @pluralistic @tante i feel in the similar way as big tech has taken the notion of AI and LLMs as a cue/excuse to mount a global campaign of public manipulation and massive investments into a speculative project and pumps gazillions$ into it and convinces everyone it's innevitable tech to be put in bag of potato chips, the backlash is then that anything that bears the name of AI and LLM is poisonous plague and people are unfollowing anyone who's touched it in any way or talks about it in any other way than "it's fascist tech, i'm putting a filter in my feed!" (while it IS fascist tech because it's in hands of fascists).
in my view the problem seems not what LLMs are (what kind of tech), but how they are used and what they extract from planet when they are used by the big tech in this monstrous harmful way. of course there's a big blurred line and tech can't be separated from the political, but... AI is not intelligent (Big Tech wants you to believe that), and LLMs are not capable of intelligence and learning (Big Tech wants you to believe that).
so i feel like a big chunk of anger and hate should really be directed at techno oligarchs and only partially and much more critically at actual algorithms in play. it's not LLMs that are harming the planet, but rather the extraction, these companies who are absolute evil and are doing whatever the hell they want, unchecked, unregulated.
or as varoufakis said to tim nguyen: "we don't want to get rid of your tech or company (google). we want to socialize your company in order to use it more productively" and, if i may add, safely and beneficialy for everyone not just a few.
@prinlu @FediThing @pluralistic @tante I agree with most things said in this thread, but on a very practical level, I'm curious what training data was used for the model used by @pluralistic 's typo-checking ollama?
for me, that training data is key here. was it consensually allowed for use in training?
because as I understand, LLMs need vast amounts of training data, and I'm just not sure how you would get access to such data consensually. would love to be enlightened about this
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@pluralistic @simonzerafa @tante
I'll reiterate my response.When you *alone* do it...no big deal.
When a couple of million do it ON THEIR OWN LAPTOPS...problem.@clintruin @simonzerafa @tante
OK, sorry, i was under the impression that I was having a discussion with someone who understands this issue.
You are completely, empirically, technically wrong.
Checking the punctuation on a document on your laptop uses less electricity than watching a Youtube video.
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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.
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 (tante.cc)
@tante
while we're pointing out logistical inconsistencies..there is zero reason to stop masking in an ongoing pandemic - especially as someone who acknowledged the benefits previously
nothing has changed to make this a rational choice and it can't be said to be in solidarity with disabled people (or folks in general)
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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.
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 (tante.cc)
@tante People like Cory who mock others for their disabilities are not worth paying attention to.
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@prinlu @FediThing @pluralistic @tante I agree with most things said in this thread, but on a very practical level, I'm curious what training data was used for the model used by @pluralistic 's typo-checking ollama?
for me, that training data is key here. was it consensually allowed for use in training?
because as I understand, LLMs need vast amounts of training data, and I'm just not sure how you would get access to such data consensually. would love to be enlightened about this
@bazkie @prinlu @FediThing @tante
I do not accept the premise that scraping for training data is unethical (leaving aside questions of overloading others' servers).
This is how every search engine works. It's how computational linguistics works. It's how the Internet Archive works.
Making transient copies of other peoples' work to perform mathematical analysis on them isn't just acceptable, it's an unalloyed good and should be encouraged:
