I use LLM regularly as a coding aid. And it works fine. Yesterday I had to put a math formula on code. My math knowledge is somehow rusty. So I just pasted the formula on the LLM, asked for an explanation and an example on how to put it in code. It worked perfectly, it was just right. I understood the formula and could proceed with the code.
The whole process took seconds. If I had to go down the rabbit hole of searching until I figured out the math formula by myself it could have maybe a couple of hours.
It’s just a tool. Properly used it’s useful.
And don’t try to bit me with the AI bad for environment. Because I stopped traveling abroad by plane more than a decade ago to reduce my carbon emissions. If regular people want to reduce their carbon footprint the first step is giving up vacations on far away places. I have run LLMs locally and the energy consumption is similar to gaming, so there’s not a case to be made there, imho.
Do you?
Also do you what are the actual issues on fresh water?
Do you actually think cooling of some data center it’s actually relevant? Because I really, data on hand, think it’s not. It’s just part of the dogma.
Stop trying to eat vegetables that need watering out of areas without a lot of rain, much better approach if you care about that. Eat what people on your area ate a few centuries ago if you want to be water sustainable.
That’s nothing compared with intensive irrigation.
Having a diet proper to your region has a massively bigger impact on water than some cooling.
Also not every place on earth have fresh water issues. Some places have it some are pretty ok. Not using water in a place where it’s plenty does nothing for people in a place where there is scarcity of fresh water.
I shall know as my country is pretty dry. Supercomputers, as the one used for our national AI, had had not visible impact on water supply.
I’m already familiarized on industrial and computer usage of water. As I said, very little impact.
Not all food is needed to survive. Any vegan would probably give a better argument on this than me. But choice of food it’s important. And choosing one food over another it’s not a matter of survival but a matter of joy, a tertiary necessity.
Not to sound as a boomer, but if this is such a big worry for you better action may be stop eating avocados in a place where avocados don’t naturally grow.
As I said, I live in a pretty dry place, where water cuts because of scarcity are common. Our very few super computers have not an impact on it. And supercomputers on china certainly are 100% irrelevant to our water scarcity issue.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up luxuries like avocados. I don’t remember the last time I ate an avocado, or a banana, or any exotic fruit for that matter.
I somehow feel like you won’t listen to LLM criticism from me either, so it’s a disingenuous argument.
IRL the first step to cutting emissions is what you’re eating. Meat and animal products come with huge environmental costs and reducing how much animal products you consume can cut your footprint substantially.
It depend where you live. If you live where I live a fully plant diet is mor environmentally damaging that omnivore diet. Because I would need to consume lots of plants that come from tropical environments to have a full diet, which means one of two things, import from far away or intensive irrigation in a dry environment.
While here farm animals can and are feed with local plants that do no need intensive irrigation.
Someday I shall make full calculations on this. But I’m not sure which option would give best carbon footprint. But I’m not that sure about full plant diet here.
The catch is there’s nowhere on earth where a plant diet has a higher carbon footprint unless you go out of your way to pursue foods from foreign sources that are resource intensive.
Realistically it will always take more to grow a chicken or a fish than grow a plant.
Realistic, as in real life, my grandparents had chickens “for free”, as the residues from other plants that cannot be eaten by humans were the food of the chickens. So realistically trying to substitute the nutrients of those free chickens with plant based solutions would be a lot more expensive in all ways.
If your answer is going to be again some variation of the dogma: “Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants.” without considering that some plants used to feed animals are incredibly cheap to produce(and that humans cannot live on those planta), and that some animals live on human waste without even needing to plant food for them. Then don’t even bother to reply.
I did read your statement And the costs of those feeds are not free. You are growing a feed plant to full maturity. Then you harvest said feed which has its own costs and then you give it to the animal which produces its own footprint.
Eating a different plant would have a lower cost than growing feed for an animal.
Same im not going back to not using it, im not good at this stuff but ai can fill in so many blanks, when installing stuff with github it can read instructions and follow them guiding me through the steps for more complex stuff, helping me launch and do stuff I woild never have thought of. Its opened me up to a lot of hobbies that id find too hard otherwise.
So… AI taught me Spanish and made me fluent in a year. But I haven’t used it for tech stuff until I read this thread yesterday. I’m a Linux DABBLER. Like zero command line level but a huge user… daily driver but a fraud because I know so little. Anyway… my laptop ran into some problem and I knew I could spend hours parsing the issue in manuals and walkthroughs etc but I thought I would allow AI to walk me through … and it was great. Problem hasn’t been resolved but I learned a great deal. When another dabbling window opens, I’m on it.
Check out deepseekapi + cline vscode, just toss 5$ in deepseek and itll take forever to run out, i dont reccomend autoapprove tho, it doesn’t work that well and you don’t learn much using it lol, it is nice when going through templates, instead of editing manually and finding stuff you just tell the ai to ask you questions based on what can be customized.
Why is everyone making this about a U.S. vs. China thing and not an LLMs suck and we should not be in favor of them anywhere thing?
We just don’t follow the dogma “AI bad”.
I use LLM regularly as a coding aid. And it works fine. Yesterday I had to put a math formula on code. My math knowledge is somehow rusty. So I just pasted the formula on the LLM, asked for an explanation and an example on how to put it in code. It worked perfectly, it was just right. I understood the formula and could proceed with the code.
The whole process took seconds. If I had to go down the rabbit hole of searching until I figured out the math formula by myself it could have maybe a couple of hours.
It’s just a tool. Properly used it’s useful.
And don’t try to bit me with the AI bad for environment. Because I stopped traveling abroad by plane more than a decade ago to reduce my carbon emissions. If regular people want to reduce their carbon footprint the first step is giving up vacations on far away places. I have run LLMs locally and the energy consumption is similar to gaming, so there’s not a case to be made there, imho.
What are you doing to reduce your fresh water usage? You do know how much fresh water they waste, right?
Do you? Also do you what are the actual issues on fresh water? Do you actually think cooling of some data center it’s actually relevant? Because I really, data on hand, think it’s not. It’s just part of the dogma.
Stop trying to eat vegetables that need watering out of areas without a lot of rain, much better approach if you care about that. Eat what people on your area ate a few centuries ago if you want to be water sustainable.
Are you serious? Do you not know how they cool data centers?
https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water/
https://cee.illinois.edu/news/AIs-Challenging-Waters
That’s nothing compared with intensive irrigation.
Having a diet proper to your region has a massively bigger impact on water than some cooling.
Also not every place on earth have fresh water issues. Some places have it some are pretty ok. Not using water in a place where it’s plenty does nothing for people in a place where there is scarcity of fresh water.
I shall know as my country is pretty dry. Supercomputers, as the one used for our national AI, had had not visible impact on water supply.
You read all three of those links in four minutes?
Also, irrigation creates food, which people need to survive, while AI creates nothing that people need to survive, so that’s a terrible comparison.
I’m already familiarized on industrial and computer usage of water. As I said, very little impact.
Not all food is needed to survive. Any vegan would probably give a better argument on this than me. But choice of food it’s important. And choosing one food over another it’s not a matter of survival but a matter of joy, a tertiary necessity.
Not to sound as a boomer, but if this is such a big worry for you better action may be stop eating avocados in a place where avocados don’t naturally grow.
As I said, I live in a pretty dry place, where water cuts because of scarcity are common. Our very few super computers have not an impact on it. And supercomputers on china certainly are 100% irrelevant to our water scarcity issue.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up luxuries like avocados. I don’t remember the last time I ate an avocado, or a banana, or any exotic fruit for that matter.
I somehow feel like you won’t listen to LLM criticism from me either, so it’s a disingenuous argument.
IRL the first step to cutting emissions is what you’re eating. Meat and animal products come with huge environmental costs and reducing how much animal products you consume can cut your footprint substantially.
There’s some argument to be made there.
It depend where you live. If you live where I live a fully plant diet is mor environmentally damaging that omnivore diet. Because I would need to consume lots of plants that come from tropical environments to have a full diet, which means one of two things, import from far away or intensive irrigation in a dry environment.
While here farm animals can and are feed with local plants that do no need intensive irrigation.
Someday I shall make full calculations on this. But I’m not sure which option would give best carbon footprint. But I’m not that sure about full plant diet here.
The catch is there’s nowhere on earth where a plant diet has a higher carbon footprint unless you go out of your way to pursue foods from foreign sources that are resource intensive.
Realistically it will always take more to grow a chicken or a fish than grow a plant.
Try living on lucerne. Then, come again.
Realistic, as in real life, my grandparents had chickens “for free”, as the residues from other plants that cannot be eaten by humans were the food of the chickens. So realistically trying to substitute the nutrients of those free chickens with plant based solutions would be a lot more expensive in all ways.
Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants.
You didn’t even read my statement.
If your answer is going to be again some variation of the dogma: “Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants.” without considering that some plants used to feed animals are incredibly cheap to produce(and that humans cannot live on those planta), and that some animals live on human waste without even needing to plant food for them. Then don’t even bother to reply.
I did read your statement And the costs of those feeds are not free. You are growing a feed plant to full maturity. Then you harvest said feed which has its own costs and then you give it to the animal which produces its own footprint.
Eating a different plant would have a lower cost than growing feed for an animal.
Same im not going back to not using it, im not good at this stuff but ai can fill in so many blanks, when installing stuff with github it can read instructions and follow them guiding me through the steps for more complex stuff, helping me launch and do stuff I woild never have thought of. Its opened me up to a lot of hobbies that id find too hard otherwise.
Which hobbies? That sounds interesting.
webdev, anything where you use github, houdini vexpressions, any time I have to use any expression or code something I don’t know how to do.
So… AI taught me Spanish and made me fluent in a year. But I haven’t used it for tech stuff until I read this thread yesterday. I’m a Linux DABBLER. Like zero command line level but a huge user… daily driver but a fraud because I know so little. Anyway… my laptop ran into some problem and I knew I could spend hours parsing the issue in manuals and walkthroughs etc but I thought I would allow AI to walk me through … and it was great. Problem hasn’t been resolved but I learned a great deal. When another dabbling window opens, I’m on it.
Check out deepseekapi + cline vscode, just toss 5$ in deepseek and itll take forever to run out, i dont reccomend autoapprove tho, it doesn’t work that well and you don’t learn much using it lol, it is nice when going through templates, instead of editing manually and finding stuff you just tell the ai to ask you questions based on what can be customized.