I’m actually telling the facts and you’re the one being detached from reality, but normally people like you are “not interested in hearing about it” anyway, so I’m honestly not surprised you say that.

I’m done arguing with you for the same reason I don’t debate climate change deniers.

Not even. The internet is the highway. The datacenters running the internet are the department of transportation. Average internet users are the compact hybrids, EVs, and cyclists who use the road. Prompts and outputs are the couriers driving various kinds of vehicles. AI datacenters are the giant trucks with smokestacks that smokescreen all the old grannies behind them.

The prompts and outputs traveling over the internet consume a negligible amount of energy. The bulk of it is consumed by training giant LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters. A lesser portion is consumed by the inferencing those models do to produce outputs, which is done at the AI datacenters, and not what travels over the internet via internet datacenters.

You’re missing the point so hard it’s not even funny.

The datacenters hosting the internet are not the same datacenters hosting AI.

The ones hosting AI are the problem. Eliminate those, and the ones hosting the internet are fine (although could still convert to greener practices like on-site solar and closed-loop/greywater cooling systems, etc.).

Eliminate the internet datacenters and the AI corps are still going to destroy the environment, you just won’t have access to wikipedia or the fediverse.

Couldn’t find a better nibbler gif, this is a travesty

He’s adorable.

Oh, my bad. I didn’t really need to take offense to it, I was probably just grumpy and didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t that big a deal.

But no, I wasn’t trying to be dismissive of your argument qua software engineering, but I see how it came off that way. I think it was a good argument, I was just bringing up something tangentially related out of nothing more than free-association style banter. In hindsight it wasn’t really that relevant to the conversation anyway…

I’m only shocked that the “euphoria” hasn’t collided with the disappointing reality yet. At least not catastrophically.

It seems the more abstracted the financial systems are, the more the finance industry can bullshit its way through. And at this point, money is just whatever numbers they type into their computers. Just completely made up and detached from reality.

“strategic customer agreements”

Quick question: what consumer is agreeing to this?

Yeah the explanation was fine but the “What? That’s a very different situation” seemed unnecessarily hostile. But maybe it just have my panties in a bunch today, it could be me

Okay, so the argument does not apply to that situation. A simple “no” would have sufficed…

Does the same argument apply to calling janitors custodians “sanitation engineers”? I’ve seen that some places.

Like, if the word “custodian” is too offensive, then maybe it’s just because the job sucks and comes with stigma, and anything you call it is going to sound derogatory after a few years…

I get that it’s a critical job, and the people in those roles should be treated with dignity and respect like everyone else. The social stigma is wrong, for sure. But simply changing the title doesn’t solve anything…

Should be immediately disbarred