[ disclaimer: the foregoing is my opinion alone and does not
necessarily represent other people's opinions, et cetera. ]
Brendan Tildesley <[email protected]> wrote:
For 50+ years people have been trying to build the free software
system of their dreams. If we further burden ourselves with
additional, orthogonal societal [issues] like carbon emissions
[and LLMs], our backs will break.
alternatively, we could just completely ignore the fact that LLMs
exist and have an impact on the society, pull down this GCD, let
people submit and merge PRs of questionable legal provenance that
were completely hallucinated into existence, as contributors and
users become alienated by the fact. all of a sudden LLMs have
impact besides environmental: that is, political and personal.
I think that effective efforts to deal with greenhouse gasses
are ultimately ones that push for political change, and Guix
developers should genuinely just not worry about their
relatively insignificant computational carbon footprint from
LLMs.
i think this misses the fact that, by using LLMs, you (perhaps
insignificantly) increase their impact, and—this might be a little
dollar-voting—demand for them. even disregarding all the other
issues that LLMs bring, you /should/ worry about the relatively
insignificant environmental (and societal, and personal) impact
from using LLMs. after all, the single raindrop never feels
responsible for the flood.
it is true that the only way to truly combat carbon emissions is
political change, but political change starts with personal
change.
if we want Guix to be the best it can be—the software of our
dreams, as you say—we need to take stances, state opinions, and
write down decisions that we can all agree with; we are doing so
right now, and, despite some hiccups, GCD 008 is coming along
nicely.
--
λx.x (she/they)
