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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic ..."

I've been "doing this" for over 30 years now and I consider these LLM results to be fantastic.

If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications, these LLM tools are like being granted superpowers.

In fact ...

My next project upon which to bring LLM tools to bear is a fully local, solar-powered, self-hosted LLM toolchain.

Not only do I intend to never work without these tools again, I intend to do so without the ongoing environmental externalities that they produce.

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> If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications

Most people already don't have the ability to do this and their use of LLMs atrophies the little they had. "AI natives" will be completely doomed.

Umm, hate to break it to you, but by the time you load up an open weights model, the environmental externality has already happened

This is a fair point - and well taken.

However, I never asked for LLMs nor did my consumer nor professional behavior send market signals that I would use them. They were thrust upon me apropos of nothing.

Now that I find them useful, the least I can do is stop making the problem worse.

As a rule of thumb the energy use to produce a silicon wafer is roughly equal to the energy it will use in its lifetime. For GPU and VRAM this is considerable. To equip yourself with the capability to run an LLM locally is making an upfront investment in the production of extremely toxic and resource intensive products.

Why buy a personal EV with 600 mile range that sits idle 95% of the time when you can take a bus (aka the cloud) that maximizes the resource utilization?

But you do plan on continuing to work, not have the AI bootstrap itself into a machine god and do all possible work for humanity instead.

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