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I've never been so conflicted about a technology

marcjenkins.co.uk

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Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#111

Post by staunton »

raincole wrote: post #61
staunton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know how sausages are made. I'm doubtful. There's a few documentaries showing the process and I've had people tell me multiple times that they were genuinely shocked by it. I'm assuming those people "knew" and it's just that knowing "it's all the waste at the butcher getting stuffed into guts" is not quite the same as seeing it first hand.

And what happened after they told you they were shocked? Did they all become vegan once and for all?

Most just expressed their shock (which didn't seem staged) but changed nothing. One person became vegetarian for about a year, then started to eat meat again. I'm not sure if they still eat sausages.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#112

Post by staunton »

jfengel wrote: post #99
staunton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know how sausages are made. I'm doubtful. There's a few documentaries showing the process and I've had people tell me multiple times that they were genuinely shocked by it. I'm assuming those people "knew" and it's just that knowing "it's all the waste at the butcher getting stuffed into guts" is not quite the same as seeing it first hand.

I'm not sure what documentaries you're watching. Natural sausage casings are specialty items. If you're buying it at the grocery store, it's probably collagen (closely related to gelatin). And it's not "all the waste". It includes fatty cuts that people wouldn't want to eat whole, but it doesn't include organ meats outside of specialty items. Perhaps people find meat-grinding distressing, though it's really not all t…

Indeed, the images I remember most vividly myself (though I wouldn't say they shocked me at any point) is the guts being emptied. So it was some more traditional process for specialty sausages, not a huge factory.

Then again, some people find seeing a huge Industrial room full of raw meat distressing, perhaps somewhat analogously to how they might not be afraid of one spider but suddenly panick upon seeing hundreds at one spot.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#113

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

dgb23 wrote: post #68
metalcrow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would if the patient is alive and fighting them! In our case, the patient is society and it is quite definitely not all unified that we cannot pick and choose. If the doctors want to save their patient, they either need to tie them down and do what is needed, or they need to work within the confines of what the patient allows while trying to convince them to allow more.

The patient is kicking and screaming, because they are an addict. Regardless, I’m not convinced by the parent comment. It basically suggests we solve this without analysis of costs and effects. Sounds insane to me. Especially since the most promising solutions come from rapidly developing technologies and research. Turning off the lights just sends us backwards.

> Especially since the most promising solutions come from rapidly developing technologies and research

What solutions are you referring to?

This sentiment baffles me when I see it. It's not like we learned we'd this problem yesterday, and now we've to guess how we might solve it based on guessing.

For 35 years, "rapidly developing technologies and research" hasn't improved the numbers. I understand that there's a regular stream of news which touts one thing or another as a possible solution, but which one of them has done anything? How long do we wait for this techno-optimism to bear fruit?

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#114

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

roywiggins wrote: post #88
lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whataboutism is bad, but there's a distinction between whataboutism and making comparisons to get a sense of the true scale of the problem. If you're not allowed to ever compare relative scales of things without being accused of whataboutism then we're paving the way to making every molehill a mountain. Two average American's beef consumption for training GPT-3 would place the cost in water of training GPT-3 at 1/150…

if a few thousand westerners who want to atone for LLM water use skipped a few burgers, the planet would come out ahead on net I think

No burgers and no LLMs is better, though, in absolute terms. Or at least, that's one of the points being made, I believe

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#115

Post by UncleOxidant »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #104
Borg3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course water is not destroyed. It gets contaminated. And to clean it up, you need energy. Basically, we can simplify those equation to pretty much single argument: energy. Whatever you do, it needs energy. And people really really comes very lighty to that problem and waste management. If we would really like to recycle everything property I suspect global energy usage 10x fold at least. For now, its just better (…

Not in a data center. In a data center the water is either re-used (closed loop) or it's evaporated (open loop). In either case the water does not need decontamination.

Yeah, I'm not sure how water in a data center gets contaminated unless they're saying it's contaminated with heat. That can be an issue in some areas where raising the temperature of a river could have an adverse effect on life in the river, but I don't think many of these data centers put water directly back into a river.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#116

Post by int_19h »

teruakohatu wrote: post #71
perrygeo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the "whatboutism" angle. Running LLMs requires massive amounts of electricity and water. Period. That beef consumption and other activities also require massive amounts of resources is independent. Both can be true. And both need to be addressed. We no longer have the luxury to pick and choose which climate interventions we find most convenient; we need to succeed on all fronts. If the patient is d…

> massive amounts of electricity and water ... we need to succeed on all fronts Datacenters' used for training or batch jobs can be placed in places where water and power are plentiful, ambient temperature are relatively low and government/society are stable. A datacenter is going to be built at the bottom of New Zealand where all these things are true. There must be plenty of places in the world where this holds tru…

Given typical inference speeds for SOTA models, I rather suspect that you could also do it for inference without latency being particularly notable.

We might need to lay a few more cables to New Zealand though.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#117

Post by smitty1e »

staunton wrote: post #33
jebarker wrote: post #19

> “If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.” This isn't a very hopeful quote given how many people continue to eat sausages even though we all know how sausages are made.

> we all know how sausages are made. I'm doubtful. There's a few documentaries showing the process and I've had people tell me multiple times that they were genuinely shocked by it. I'm assuming those people "knew" and it's just that knowing "it's all the waste at the butcher getting stuffed into guts" is not quite the same as seeing it first hand.

Assuming a disdain toward sausage is straightforward and natural.

Hunger is an unforgiving teacher, and the reality that our forebears grew expert at squeezing every last calorie out of everything in sight might afford a lesson.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#118

Post by dgb23 »

-__---____-ZXyw wrote: post #113
dgb23 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patient is kicking and screaming, because they are an addict. Regardless, I’m not convinced by the parent comment. It basically suggests we solve this without analysis of costs and effects. Sounds insane to me. Especially since the most promising solutions come from rapidly developing technologies and research. Turning off the lights just sends us backwards.

> Especially since the most promising solutions come from rapidly developing technologies and research What solutions are you referring to? This sentiment baffles me when I see it. It's not like we learned we'd this problem yesterday, and now we've to guess how we might solve it based on guessing. For 35 years, "rapidly developing technologies and research" hasn't improved the numbers. I understand that there's a reg…

A few obvious examples are the large gains in grid stability and efficiency, electric cars, the adoption and progress of solar panels.

The latter is outpacing the expectations.

And it’s not just engineering and manufacturing. These things have to be installed, maintained etc. In different types of places, which means you need specialized knowledge for all sorts of things.

On the research side there has been much progress on climate and weather models.

Software also plays a role in all of these, and material science and…

I’m not a techno optimist, but rather see these developments as incredibly necessary. Yes they should have happened yesterday. Yes I’m incredibly frustrated with political leadership all around the world and especially with outdated economic models.

But the only way is forward if it’s not too late.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#119

Post by robinsonb5 »

roywiggins wrote: post #81
robinsonb5 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately we're trying to persuade people to reduce their quality of life in order to reduce their energy footprint. That's already a difficult sell. It becomes an impossible sell when any reductions that might be achieved are immediately offset by a new energy-hungry technology coming online - especially when the long-term effect (goal, even) is to reduce yet further the quality of life of everyday people.

convincing people to change anything is very hard, so why are people spending time wringing their hands over LLM use? if you convinced one person to go vegan or get into cold showers for a year you'd do more for the planet than convincing a hundred people not to pick up ChatGPT

I'm actually not wringing my hands over people choosing to use LLMs - I'm wringing my hands over the irresponsibility of the tech world in introducing and making available a technology whose existence will be responsible for a big chunk of the expected doubling of datacentre energy use over the next decade.

But the environmental aspects aren't even my main concern: my main concern is where that energy is coming from - and how the idea of Three Mile Island being restarted solely for Microsoft's benefit marks a huge shift (that no-one seems to have noticed) towards infrastructure that was previously at least nominally for public use being reserved for the use of a private corporation.

I'm also annoyed by the kleptocratic attitude towards training data, but I'll happily accept that reasonable minds may differ on that subject.

So while I don't use LLMs myself for ethical reasons, I don't have a problem with other people choosing to use them.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#120

Post by RetroTechie »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #79
perrygeo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the "whatboutism" angle. Running LLMs requires massive amounts of electricity and water. Period. That beef consumption and other activities also require massive amounts of resources is independent. Both can be true. And both need to be addressed. We no longer have the luxury to pick and choose which climate interventions we find most convenient; we need to succeed on all fronts. If the patient is d…

I used to live in a place where there are a lot of data centers now. There were only a few just a few years ago. Now there are tens and more under construction. I returned to that place to visit family and friends last year. It was an eye opening experience. The people who live there have taken a keen interest on curtailing further development of any new data centers. One of the chief complaints is the constant power…

Anyone else notice the parallels with crypto mining industry?
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