this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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using AI to create these images is really gonna help with the hole in the floor
There's no way I will find it but I could swear I've seen that image before the AI hype.
This is why I can't take "The purpose of a system is what it does" seriously
Why? The purpose of the system is to not work, so there are no democratic checks.
Seems fatalist to me. Take your preferred system of government, introduce on flaw, and critics will say the flaw is intentional rather than proposing ways to fix it. Also, the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a hospital is to cure just enough patients.
And the purpose of Ukraine is to be caught in a stalemate. The West gives them just enough support to never lose, but never enough support to win.
And the purpose of the British government is to pretend like it is responsive to protests.
And the purpose of buses is to burn gasoline and support the oil industry, when trains or trams would be much more efficient.
And the purpose of arguing on the internet is to waste everyone's time while accomplishing nothing
Etc etc
Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn't the hospital curing more patients? "That's not its purpose!"
The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don't have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.
The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.
Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there's no point in trying to fix anything. There's no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That's different of course from my perspective -- revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.
If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; "Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?"
You aren't supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?
It implies that the system is working as intented, and that's why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.
Oh, maybe it was this one.
It's so ironic that this one is made by the Russian artist, and the whole story repeats itself so far with one part of the nation being in the hostage of the other.
We're losing this battle so quickly. It's unreal to me how fucked we are.
First time? If there's one thing I've learned, it's that normies don't give a fuck and just want their simple distractions, regardless of what the greater cost to society is.
Like sweeping the tide with a broom
In what way won't it help? Be specific.
Training large models like an LLM (text generation) or a stable diffusion model (image generation) consumes a lot of energy and using these models isn't cheap either. It's bad for the climate in the same way cryptocurrency is.
AI is quite energy intensive
How energy intensive?
Like, compared to random cat videos on youtube n all?
And would the addition of renewable energy be able to handle it?
Using it, not all that energy intensive (one llm use is roughly the same as 3 pre-ai-bullshit google searches iirc). Training it, very energy intensive.
Yes it would but we haven't even replaced all our previous needs with renewables so it aint helping.
According to this article, this is not considered true anymore:
I think there's a reason why OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Facebook hold the energy consumption and water usage numbers so close to their chest.
Oh damn. Very good article btw.
According to numbers floating around online, thiat would mean one llama query is around as expensive as 10 google searches. And it's likely that those costs will increase further.
It still seems like the biggest factor here is the scale of adaptation. Unfortunately the total energy costs of AI might even scale exponentially since the more complex the queries get, the better the responses will likely be. And that will further drive adaptation.
This pace is so clearly unsustainable it's horrifying, and while it was obvious to some degree, it seems it's worse than I thought.