this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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Let's stop using all ai chatbots. That shit is harming earth.
Good luck arguing that my local AI models are harming Earth.
Yes, you can argue phones themselves/lightbulbs harm Earth. I don't care at that scale.
Username checks out.
Are you perchance ignoring the petawatt-hours that were needed to train and distil your local AI model?
Yes, it is already developed. Nuclear bombs killed people, does not mean we should stop all research into fusion.
Me downloading the model does not light up a data center somewhere else. I run it on my local laptop.
No. No no no. It is still being developed, with exponentially increasing resources. You downloading the model adds at least 1 but probably 10 increment to the "downloads" and repo watches CEOs 100% use to validate their insane echo chamber. And you're literally paying for it all if you live in US and they built a data center in your neighborhood and your electricity bill 4x increased! Or if you ever want to upgrade to ddr5, and ever need more storage space! Or in many other myriad of ways!
Generally, you're right, it's just the left over tools from the gold rush, why not use them if they're useful! No point in throwing them away. It's good that you're honest with yourself and will never validate the wild amounts of cosmically ironic cancer-inducing data centers they (I hope only Musk) are operating, by upgrading your local model distilled by your unfavorite AI cloud company that is negative profit for 5 years and somehow still alive
Well, if I want to do anything worthwhile, I sure as fuck will have to at some point for the Clawd agent. Will probably need a server of my own as well. The desire for solar is more for independence, than environmental reasons anyway.
Oh, you're right. Everything being plugged into massive datacenters that use more power than whole countries is ok, because your computer somehow doesn't use much power per query. I stand corrected, sir.
A model being local doesn't make it magically better than cloud based ones. Especially since your local hardware may not be as optimized as professional hardware.
And I say that as a local AI user.
The way to make it less harmful mainly comes from external factors :
Edit:
I'd add to that that you can reuse the heat generated to heat your apartment. But it only works during winter, as during summer any heat generated will make your AC (if you have one) work harder.
Yeah, I tend to do a bench test on my Laptop to heat myself up. It's really neat!
No, I don't have a gaming rig. It's not going above 65W, and I actually have an ideological reason I want to switch to solar power too.
Soon, my local AI's will be solar powered as well, and offline.
Sadly, so far I have the capability to only charge my Tablet and phone, which are actually decent for AI in their own right.
Better than a benchmark, you should try Boinc or Folding@Home.
Heating by science.
There was this citizen science project where few tried to manually fold proteins. Unfortunately, the computer was better than us at it, and we didn't contribute much. I sucked. However, I contributed my PC resources for a rather short while to some random cancer research project. I don't remember the details, I figured it was a better use of idle computer time than mining bitcoins.
Boy was I wrong.