Japchap's 10C Site

@matigo If by "school" you are referring to compulsory education as it is known in most countries, I don't know how much I can argue with you. I certainly don't remember much from my days in grades 1–12.

I've thought about that lately, how so very little of what we learned in school seems to stick with us as we get older, and how our life experiences outside of compulsory education and our hobbies or interests tend to stick with us much more. There is the embarrassment I will always feel in not being able to help my daughter with her homework of learning facts and formulas, because I have all but forgotten most of that. On the other hand, my language skills were probably reinforced not in school per se, but by reading books and being interested in them. Math and the sciences (except for astronomy) never stuck with me, so I suppose that compulsory education failed me in that respect too.

The people who became teachers who genuinely wanted to be teachers probably eventually learn that they can teach in other settings besides traditional schools, and have a potentially bigger impact.

// @phoneboy

matigo.ca.

@matigo Good point about the choices we have when using tech. Maybe one of the problems is that people are not well informed and educated about the real costs, both financial and environmental, that these data centers pose. It doesn't seem like something that's taught in school, not yet.

// @phoneboy

matigo.ca.

@phoneboy Interesting—a paid search service. I may try that out, thanks.

www.phoneboy.info.

@matigo The first one to throw stones…

Actually, I was not surprised to read recently that quite a few news services use LLMs to write many of their articles. Some quite well-known news sources at that.

matigo.ca.

Funny what Wikipedia has to say about AI Overviews.

@matigo Indeed, I didn't think so, either. It seems safe to say, though, that using a search engine that activates an LLM-generated summary by default in addition to the serving up the standard search results is probably driving the environmental cost of our benign-looking searches up considerably.

matigo.ca.

I must admit, I've been replying on LLMs quite a bit lately, and ChatGPT in particular. I've been using the latter as a partner for self-reflection for the day, and seeing what comes back. I find that the results tend to match a certain formula (warm acceptance without blame or censure, a kind acknowledgement of what I did right and a summary of the issues, unpacking the matter in detail, offering suggestions for improvement or growth, and a related inquiry for follow-up). It's hard to not be a little enamored of the allure of such a "dialogue".

I've also read a bit about the costs of energy and resources required to train and keep LLMs working. It's absolutely not trivial, and it seems like there's a lot of guesswork involved—nobody really knows exactly how expensive that running an AI server farm is, except perhaps for the services themselves—Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. The demands on the environment aren't trivial, apparently, and are indeed far greater than we can probably know.

Should we feel guilty about taking advantage of services that potentially exact a high environmental toll?

It seems like Google for one does not care about said toll—"AI overviews" are now built into its search engine, so it appears that every time we do a Google search, an LLM is activated in addition to the previous search engine. It seems like this is a bit too wasteful… isn't this more than doubling the environmental cost of our search queries? People are now just taking it for granted that AI results are part of a standard Google search. Yet I don't see an account by Google anywhere that explains what effect on energy usage and the environment such a change really makes.

As a Mac user, there may be ways to block AI overviews at the browser level, but that doesn't meet the desired goal of stopping Google's servers from serving up the AI overviews to me in the first place, saving the extra energy required to create and deliver them.

For my (very) small part, I've decided that I'm not going to put up with these AI overviews any more. Since I prefer to use Safari as my main browser (the time-old default), I've set my default browser on all my machines to DuckDuckGo, and further toggled AI summaries on DuckDuckGo to "off". The Android tablet uses Chrome, so that gets DuckDuckGo as the default as well.

Maybe all this won't save much, but it seems to be all I can do at the moment.

@matigo You have a YouTube channel? I wasn't aware…

matigo.ca.

@matigo Nice, crisp photos—a proud-looking dog. Is that the Gamagori area?

matigo.ca.

@matigo Who says that accounting is not a creative endeavor? 😆