dude our entire lives have been built on people fucking the environment. Unless you live like a medieval monk that's still going on. So much basics even in supermarkets is out of season, yet we get it by forcing it in foreign countries and bringing it in by jet. I'm probably using less CO2 than most people even with the odd AI use, haven't had a car in 20 years, haven't flown for 20 years. Only willing to travel about 1.5-2 hours by train.
And IDE's don't generate code unless you engage AI. And no, it can generate some really clever code. Better than some stuff i've done. And will write you tests for it as well. Problem is in complexity, the more complex the system, unless you are very strict on telling it things it will just create "hacks". Something that works but isn't scalable or reusable.
Also a lot of the basic stuff I do with local llm on my macbook pro m5. draws about 25 watts with the gpu maxed out (qwen 3.6 35b) less than my pc needs to just idle. only use claude/codex for the more complex parts.
(, Tue 19 May 2026, 0:48, Reply)
and just to add... why is ai so bad? there are approx 125 million playstations in circulation. at 250w as an average power draw, when on that would be 31.250 billion watt hours per hour of use. thats just playstation. add in x box and PC drawing twice as much - just to shoot aliens in the face in FPS... isn't that a bad use of energy?
Should we waste any money/energy/time broadcasting eastenders? Allow cars that don't have 50mpg+ on the road (and locked so you can't reduce that by driving like a twat) ?
(, Tue 19 May 2026, 1:24, Reply)
When I used IDEs, LLMs were not a thing, AI data centres were not a thing,
AI was what you used in single player computer games. The entire purpose of IDEs was to move boxes, connect with lines, and output code. Not sure why you think AI is involved in SynthEdit, or Macromedia Dreamweaver circa 2001, or why you think a virtual instrument/effect can exist without code, or why the actual html output by Dreamweaver isn't code. Maybe our lexicons are at odds with each other.
I'm not impressed with your cherry picked wattages. Playstations are not all run at the same time, 24 hours a day. Datacentres are using 6% of our total national electricity output, 15% of worldwide energy output. Energy depletion from Playstation use is, one assumes, comparatively negligible, because I can't find any headlines or studies about it. Nobody seems to be worried that use of game consoles is driving up energy prices or causing mass extictions. You might be onto something though, perhaps you should publish a paper to get the ball rolling.
Your nihilistic attempt at diminishing the importance of environmental harm is not an impressive argument. It is undermined by your insistence that you do care about your own personal carbon footprint (a false argument literally invented by the oil industry to shift blame from the powerful architects of the energy structure to the individual powerless consumers).
Much of the out of season food you worry about is grown locally under grow lights these days. Thank the cannabis industry for the improvements in energy efficiency that has allowed that to happen. Very little food is brought in by jet, around 1% of the volume of global trade is 'shipped' by air. Not really something to worry about in the grand scheme of things.
Ultimately we will have to decide on a case by case basis just what energy consumption is worthwhile, and every day the problem becomes more urgent. Musk's Starlink eco-terror experiment could wipe out the ozone layer in 20 years meaning we won't have to worry about any of this.
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brb Monkhouse Stampede, Tue 19 May 2026, 15:59,
Reply)