[bluefirebrand]

The difference is that food is important and live-giving and LLMs are a very fancy magic 8-ball

[j-pb]

You don't need beef, beef is a lifestyle choice.

I use LLMs to do all of my coding these days, it's certainly more essential for feeding me than beef.

[leksak]

Also a lifestyle choice

[j-pb]

Yes but one with a much much much smaller impact as we just demonstrated.

This is exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance in people that I meant.

You literally see the math and go "but I like my meat, why should I give that up if you got your AI".

Because, as I just demonstrated, my AI takes a infinitesimal fraction of your meat.

It literally takes you only going vegan for a day to offset your entire AI usage of a year.

[jrflowers]

This is spot on because there can’t be two issues that exist simultaneously. There can only be one thing that wastes enormous amounts of energy and that thing is beef

[j-pb]

You can try to misconstrue and ridicule the argument, but that won't change the math that if you have one thing that causes 1 unit of damage, and another thing that causes 100.000 units of damage, then for all intents and purposes the thing that produces 1 unit of damage is irrelevant.

And any discussion that tries to frame them as somewhat equally important issues is dishonest and either malicious or delusional.

My guess, as I've expressed earlier in the comment chain, is that it's emotionally easier for people to bike-shed about the 0.01% of their environmental impact, than to actually tackle things that make up 20%.

And no it's not only beef (which is a stand-in for meat and diary), another low hanging fruit is also transport, like switching your car for a bike.

But switching from meat and diary to a vegan diet would reduce up to 20% of your personal environmental impact, in terms of CO2.

And about 80-90% of rainforest deforestation is driven directly or indirectly by livestock production.

So it's simply the easiest most impactful thing everyone can do. (Switching your car for a bike isn't possible for people in rural areas for example.)

[jrflowers]

>1 unit of damage, and another thing that causes 100.000 units of damage, then for all intents and purposes the thing that produces 1 unit of damage is irrelevant

You make a good point. A problem is only a real problem if you can’t find a bigger thing that makes it look small by comparison. For example, the worldwide concrete industry creates more co2 than beef does so there is no reason to stop eating beef if you enjoy it.

Now I know that some might say that “all of this is cumulative” or “the material problems that stem from entrenched industries is actually a reason not to invent completely novel wasteful things rather than a justification for them” but in reality only two things are true: only the biggest problem is real, and the only problem is definitely some other guy’s doing. If I waste x energy and my neighbor wastes y amount, a goal of reducing (x+y) is oppressive whereas a goal where I just need to try to keep x lower than y feels a lot nicer.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-...

https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publication...

[mlnj]

Nothing stopping us to live the hermit life in the mountains. But here we are trying to get bits and bytes to write that JIRA ticket instead of us.

[motoxpro]

You could eat a few bites less of beef in one meal and that would be your equivalent AI use for a lifetime.

[tptacek]

Where does a Youtube LetsPlay video fall into that calculation? My understanding is that a single watch of a video is orders of magnitude more than a day's active use of ChatGPT.