The climate change alarms have been sounding for decades and yet vehicles keep getting bigger. Even in formerly "doing it right" countries like Japan. Turns out humans will always choose vanity and status symbols over facts. Oh well
replyOne person's waste is another's value. Do you have any idea how "wasteful" tik tok or any other streaming platform is? I'll grant that AI is driving unprecedented data center development but it's far from the root cause, or even a leading clause, of our climate issues. I always find it strange that this is the first response so many have to AI, when it poses other more imminent existential threats IMO.
replyIt was a reply to what the GP said about running local generation 24/7 for no good reason, just because it's possible (and electricity is too cheap, apparently). There are many more threats, but those are beside the point in this specific context.
replyA lot of code is "useless" only in the sense that no one wants to buy it and it will never find its way into an end user product. On the other hand, that same code might have enormous value for education, research, planning, exploration, simulation, testing, and so on. Being able to generate reams of "useless" code is a highly desirable future.
replyObviously "useful" doesn't just involve making money. Code that will be used for education and all of these things is clearly not useless.
replyBut let's be honest to ourselves, the sort of useless code the GP meant will never ever be used for any of that. The code will never leave their personal storage. In that sense it's about as valuable for the society at large as the combined exabytes of GenAI smut that people have been filling their drives with by running their 4090s 24/7.
Optimists will imagine it to one day be as taxing and thus as wasteful as firing up MS Paint.
replyNo that’s a stretch, but firing up a AAA game.
At least you (hopefully) get hours of entertainment from firing up an AAA game. Whereas generating vast amounts of code that you're never going to use has… some novelty value, I suppose. Luckily the novelty is going to wear off soon, I can't really see many people getting their daily happiness boost from making code machine say brrrrt straight to /dev/null. Even generating smut is a vastly more understandable (and vastly more commonplace, even now) use case for running genAI every day for hours.
reply> I can't really see many people getting their daily happiness boost from making code machine say brrrrt straight to /dev/null
replyHow long time do we have to wait before these people get bored? Or might they actually find what they generate useful and it doesn't all go straight to /dev/null, since seemingly it seems to gain usage, not drop in usage?