It may sound odd but I’ve heard people bring up the above point a few times. “AI isn’t bad - if you run it on a sustainable off-grid system it’s perfectly fine.”
But I have NOT encountered people actually doing this even once, let alone a few times. That’s why I was asking.
Anything that wastes energy can be recast as harmless if you put it on an imaginary sustainable setup but that just seems like fantasizing.
It just sounded like the kind of thing that makes good sense on paper but I’m wondering if it actually works out well. Sounds like you are in the process of getting ready to try it.
Do you know anyone doing all of that? Running a local model on off-grid power?
It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.
Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.
The pasta manufacturer and the tomato farmer would like to have a word with your metaphor.
It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.
Brave showing, bravo. I’m glad someone came out of the woodwork to illustrate the monomaniacal mob behavior I was talking about. You did just perfect.
I’m anti anything mob. The fucking groupthink on certain issues is real.
I’m also anti people who make shit up and then try to sell it as a long strings of “inferences.”
And after having AI shoved down my throat at work for two years while my teammates get laid off, I’m pretty anti AI too. At most I have direct experience with it that teaches me it has some uses, like summarization.
You’re full of shit. You’ve been told. And you know it by now. But you’ll probably bleat on with more of the same because it’s all you know how to do. Proceed, I guess.
I said nothing pro-AI. But by accusing me of that, you reveal where your own bias (and defensiveness) lies. So thanks for that.
You’re also exaggerating the facts. They didn’t stage an intervention. He turned to his wife and brother and said “do you think my AI use is unhealthy?”
I don’t even know what that second one is, and I wouldn’t touch Xitter with a ten foot turd.
Let me save everyone a click.
This December 2025 video, 20+ minutes long, barely contains any information about Hank Green on AI. The Hank Green content there is consists of one or two lines he spoke in Sci Show videos buried deep in a diatribe about how AI is overblown.
I don’t think the video is worth watching at all, but it is certainly not a relevant contribution to this thread.
Hank Green has earned the right, with me anyway, to have his point of view heard. And frankly he has more credibility with me than the garden variety pitchfork-wielding anti-AI mob. I think Hank is a person who finds AI interesting and sees upsides as well as downsides. But the aforementioned mob is not interested in anything other than the emotional catharsis of railing against something they hate.
Now ask me if the mob is in the room with us, because it probably is.
I like the sound of that. I don’t even know what I would ever want to manage. Turn on,connect to the internet, launch games. That’s all I need.
Well, I do like Destiny :(
I’m seeing this is a hard no for Linux. Seems dumb since they support cross play on multiple other platforms. Is Linux just too open for them to feel like they can handle anti-cheat?
Thanks - I think I read once about “immutable” distros… is this the same as what you mentioned about being able to revert to previous bootable state?
I am a convenience oriented PC gamer who doesn’t enjoy fiddling with the command line. What’s the Linux distro for me?
Yes, anyone who wants to protest any use of AI whatsoever in software development, just on pure principle, is on the fringe at this point. It is a tool and needs to be used responsibly but it’s no longer credible to say that it has no use or can’t be used responsibly.
Wow I’m starting to feel bad about that time I asked AI to make a joke about scatology & eschatology sounding similar.
From good ol’ Liberal Fig Leaves, LLC
What bogus hysteria. Do you have any idea how many people play video games? Would you expect them not to advertise a recruitment drive on television because we don’t want our air traffic controllers to just kick up their feet and watch the screens? Let’s not be idiots.
It’s far more interesting to ask why they need to advertise a recruitment drive. The profession has been losing skilled people because its high skill, high stress, high stakes, and their paycheck gets jerked around every time there’s a government shutdown. Let’s focus on that instead of clutching our pearls over them hiring people who have played video games before.