this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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"It's just good enough for some things once in a while, but is too bad to rely on in any serious way," doesn't sound like a great use of my electricity, but I guess I've wasted electricity on less. Still, doing it on purpose seems worse.
I mean, it sounds like a tool they occasionally find useful and don't use otherwise. I'm not sure how "occasionally use a tool good enough for my purposes" is a waste. Whether it's the most efficient application of that electricity is a different question, but without knowing their particular scenarios I can't really compare whether other tools use less electricity for the same purpose.
(Yes, of course, "just do it all in your brain" is even more efficient, but if that's an argument against utilities, you probably shouldn't waste electricity on Lemmy either)
If I have a tool that consumes resources whether I use it or not, and I rarely, if ever, use it, that can be a net waste. Nothing in this world exists in a vacuum. You mentioned wasting electricity yourself, then failed to count it, for example.
Using resources does not equal wasting them. I find that tool uses an exceptional amount of resources, electrical, cognitive, and others, to achieve a goal that can typically already be achieved with tools that are older, better, more well established, and that use dramatically less resources.
Burning lumber in an abandoned alley would be a more efficient resource use than some of these AI applications.
They were talking about a locally hosted LLM, weren't they? In that case, I'd be pretty confident in saying it eats resources if and when you use it, not all the time.
Mind: I'm not the person running the local model.
I did say that the efficiency would be a different question neither of us can answer in this case, but I fully agree with you. I merely pointed out that a local model wouldn't be a permanent waste of electricity.
That's relative to how much space you have. I also have games on my disk that I haven't played in a while, so they're more or less wasted space. But they're not particularly large, so I can spare a few GB for them, and if I do want to play them, I can jump in spontaneously.
Well I'm usually using these models to prettify matlab figures, it's something that I can do but would take me a while, using an llm it takes a minute or two and gives a good enough result. The llms regression to the mean is also exactly what I want. I want a legible figure. I'd say that the electricity that the llm uses is less than the beefy consumed by me burning food to actually write the thing myself.