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Comment by taffydavid | Hacker News Reader

> Now is probably a good time to liquidate your pension, fly to a remote island somewhere, and live out the remaining 6 months or so of civilization in peace.

> So maybe the open source apocalypse won’t happen yet.

Sorry I wasn't at the last doomer meeting, when did we decide good open source models are a harbinger for the apocalypse?

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If anything open-source models are a hedge against the apocalypse. Or at least against the cyberpunk dystopia.

It's an apocalypse for the paid SAAS providers, which is the best thing that could possibly happen to help prevent the completely feudalist future they want to enact down the line. The world's knowledge on a USB stick is the the greatest danger to those that would like to restrict and sell what they freely benefited from themselves.

I assumed it meant that when open weights reach the capability of frontier models, and tounge in cheek referencing the terrible consequences of us all getting our hands on mythos+ capability models without restrictions.

Cute. Climate change’s apocalyptical impact on food crops and cancer rates (post-ozone collapse) never convinced people to enact change.

But hey, it’s open-model LLMs, the boogeyman! Can’t have that, it must be OpenAI or Anthropic safely controlling the market and calling all the shots.

Are you sure you haven't gotten your catastrophes crossed? Ozone depletion was a different crisis and people did enact change, the ozone hole has been closing fairly steadily. Wikipedia [0] thinks the prospects for the ozone layer are pretty good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Prospects_of_o...

If only climate change was as easy a solve

Ozone action occurred before the rise of social media.

We were fortunate. 20 years later and we’d have been screwed

I think it was more that the change required was relatively simple, and the industry was sort of already phasing out CFCs anyway. Banning them in fridges and aerosols was mostly frictionless and a win for everyone.

Turning the entire planet carbon neutral is so much harder a problem.

Also the fossil fuel industries have been trying to bury research on global warming since long before social media existed

Some climate models expect permafrost decay and/or mere GHG rise to erode the ozone layer. It’s not 1:1 proven, but there’s indication that in a post-4C world (with feedback loops), we might slowly lose our protection against the sun’s radiation.

I don’t recommend getting into the literature, it’s… depressing.

(Your point about the global, concerted effort to limit the “holes” in the ozone layer reminds me that we can, when pressed, come together to tackle serious issues.)

I'm quite happy to read literature, typically what happens when I do is I come away with the impression everything is pretty good. If you've found something that is actually going to be a problem then you're the first person in something like 5 years and I'd like to know about it. What models are you referring to?

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion, specifically the Global Warming section:

> The same CO2 radiative forcing that produces global warming is expected to cool the stratosphere. This cooling, in turn, is expected to produce a relative increase in ozone (O3) depletion in polar areas and the frequency of ozone holes.

Mark Lynas was my introduction to the matter. I agree with you (and the author) that things were pretty good, but I think my final years (and those of my family) won’t be very pleasant.

Hydrogen sulfide is the other ozone killer the author references, in case the oceans become anoxic and the “wrong” kind of bacteria proliferate.

Without the ozone layer’s protection, even short-term exposure to the sun would cause severe sunburn within minutes and cause DNA damage. It would also wipe out food production at scale. Not a good world to live in.

The sulfide issue is modelled after this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253350203_Role_of_h... -> I’m not sure how up to date it remains.

I think the cooling-as-a-problem model was the IPCC’s polar stratospheric clouds proposal, but I don’t remember 100%.

The man wrote pretty decent books, but it’s hard to tell how cataclysmic it all really is vs. newer science that came up since then.

I'm not seeing any predictions here that there is a problem with the ozone layer. The citation for the wiki quote you include seems to be saying that they still expect improvements in the ozone layer vs the present because we have made changes that should lead to the ozone hole repairing itself. This is also the overall conclusion that the Wiki article appears to support too. The sulfide modelling paper is saying they have expect problems at sulfer emissions far greater than currently anticipated.

I'd say that the reason nobody is doing anything is there does not seem to be a threat being detected. There are scarier problems to work through (mainly war and access to energy).

> is expected to produce an increase in ozone depletion … and the frequency of ozone holes

Sounds bad to me. Not the worst to come out of climate change, but potentially very negative if it comes to happen. More ozone holes and more ozone depletion can’t really be spun positively.

this is a blog post from a company that hosts open weights LLMs (https://www.doubleword.ai/). I think its possible it might have been tongue in cheek

Doomerism is at all time high

People becoming more and more neurotic by the day

perhaps doomerism is just the logical reaction to our real-world conditions right now

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