Hi Hugo,
On Sat, 23 May 2026 at 10:00, Hugo Buddelmeijer via "Development of GNU Guix
and the GNU System distribution." <[email protected]> wrote:
> Unless we believe that we as humankind cannot handle such technological
> progress and that we cannot refrain ourselves. While that might be
> true, such a stance would make a project like Guix pointless to begin
> with in my opinion.
Because the discussion is already large, I refrain to engage an
out-of-scope discussion about our technological society. Such
auto-refrain makes me feel old. ;-)
My comment was to point that all isn’t only black or only white but the
hard choices between different variant of greys, sometimes choices that
might contradict themselves. Hey, we are doing our best as human.
I think we have evidences that data centers (LLM, GenAI, Cloud, etc.)
have detrimental consequences; ecologically speaking. As we also have
evidences that hardware industry is detrimental; ecologically speaking.
For example, pointing the Jevons paradox seeing in hardware industry
which leads, e.g., to software obesity – issue that Guix itself suffers
– does not imply by some mechanical purely logical reasoning that Guix
is pointless.
Well, Guix might be pointless but that another topic. ;-)
My point is to say:
• We have evidences about the increase of energy because of GenAI.
• It’s hard – if not impossible! – to evaluate our own individual
energy gain in the whole picture.
Therefore, I would refrain from the argument of “probably a net positive
in energy use”. Otherwise one might to challenge this “probably”. :-)
All the rest of the use-case you underline appears to me worth to
discuss. And it would appear to me sad that this use-case would be
neglected because some variant of “straw man” using this “probably”.
Cheers,
simon
