345
Nobody Asked for AI
(jacobin.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
345 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
86987 readers
3235 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
You managed to set up that tech stack but needed an agent with unrestricted access to figure out the time was wrong ๐
There are skill issues and a lack of imagination here but it's not from people dismissing the use of LLM...
Using a sledgehammer to crack a wallnut can be satisfying :)
Besides, the kids are always finding fun and inventive ways to break the TV, so I figured set it up once and then let the bot handle it.
Twelfth Doctor: This is Clara, not my assistant. She's a... Some other word.
Clara: I'm his carer.
Twelfth Doctor: Yeah, my carer. She cares so I don't have to.
I get doing things because you can, that doesn't mean it's not wholly unsuited to the task and massive over kill that you only use because either 1. It's self hosted so you are already paying for it or 2. It's super cheap. You likely wouldn't entertain such a set up if you were paying the true price for training and running the models.
Actually, I've been toying around with doing just that.
https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
Given the surplus of power from solar I have, my set up (discussed elsewhere), I can run the training process end to end over about 50 days. It could be fun to make something truly bespoke from scratch.
Returning to my prior example - it was only overkill for this task (and only because the problem turned out to be relatively simple), but I wanted to answer against the claim that people were using LLMs and agents for just programming.
The example I cited IS silly, but it happened - IRL - 3 days ago. I can cite several much more "serious" use cases if you'd like.
On the broader topic of costs: none of us can really comprehend the embedded costs in the things we use everyday.
However unlike (say) the recurring embedded costs of buying bottled water, a cup of coffee or streaming a movie, the costs of my set up are paid once and pay off multiple times.
Ultimately, I get why there's a FuckAI sentiment... but really we should expand that to "Fuck Corpo AI". My feeling is that it's not AI that people are against per se, it's the corpos and what they're doing with them. Too much of that gets flattened and tribal.
The "true cost" argument only holds if you assume the only valid infrastructure is someone else's. I don't make that assumption, and I'd say that neither do others in the enthusiast community.