This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

It’s a big, big grift.

Have to say, when I’m strictly looking for hard info, like, what are the command line switches to achieve the right config for a thing, the AI is pretty much always right. It’s not without use, but Doing Things For You is not its best use.

If you’re running a site that anyone from the public can sign up to, resources are not some afterthought you add to your argument like pepper. Resources are everything. I have been on this Internet since NCSA Mosaic; look up the term “hugged to death”.

NYPA

Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled. We have a giant contingent of people who have never gone through the hell of actually developing a skill but are now “developers” in much the same way that typing “make me a song like ______” now makes you a musician. No theory, no chords, no building of callouses, just load up our AutoPlagio and dance the night away!

And these sudden Developers and such are all very upset at having their legitimacy questioned by a bunch of… of… NERDS.

Response guy seems to think that “legitimate crypto” is a thing.

My SSH keys are legitimate crypto. Fake money for criminals is not legitimate.