Notices by The ol' tealeg 🐡 (tealeg@mastodon.online)

Long read, short summary: AI is really bad for the planet.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

@prahou

It’s going to be one of those days. 2 months before it’s due to be replaced, my work laptop has had an argument with gravity.

And now the train is stopped because there are forest fires.

Apart from the inconvenience, and the fact that my big toe is very bruised from the impact of the falling laptop, the most disappointing thing is that the eventual replacement laptop will also be running macOS.

One of my (very few) annoyances with #OpenBSD is that, in the event of total power failure, the filesystem can be left in an inconsistent state and require manual intervention to fix it before the machine will boot.

I'd find it more annoying, apart from the fact that I have to use the command `fsck_ffs` which perfectly mirrors my own sentiments when it occurs :-D

"Draft e-mails confidently with Gemini"?!?

... dang!

I've been pretty confident about drafting e-mails since, I dunno, at least the mid 1990s.

Know what I'm not confident about?

Any kind of message written with autocorrection of my typing and spelling. I experience a greater number of errors as a result of such technology.

Now you want me to trust the entire endeavour to an LLM using "the content of the fucking Internet" as its basis for good writing? Are you serious?

@GreenSkyOverMe ... worse still. We squander immense amounts of computing power achieving little or no more than we could have achieved 30 years ago.

Now we're fetishising AI because it can make this drudgery a little less, all at the cost of massive amounts more energy, computing power and natural resources, for a marginal gain in real terms.

I'm stating a sincere feeling that It would be better for our sanity, economy and planet if we stopped and simplified.

@GreenSkyOverMe I mean both.

We express everything in tools that encapsulate that information in difficult formats or behind walls of proprietary software and SaaS.

We spend time on confusing layouts, and complicated interactions in order to make our software and services look attractive or modern at first sight.

All of these things are far harder to custom programming around. All these things make our business processes harder to automate and less flexible when we do.

I know I'm getting old, or dare I hope to say, wise, because I can't shake the feeling that any and all demonstrable #productivity gains generated by the use of #AI could be outweighed by simply #teaching people to use and manipulate structured plain text efficiently.

Likewise, teaching new #engineers to do those basic things well instead of jumping straight to "this is how you install the latest framework".

@GossiTheDog this one is sooooo for @shriramk :-D

@shriramk that's a message with mixed blessings!

At the rate this presidency is going, Mastodon might be the only social network we Euro types can viably use. :-/

@shriramk @GossiTheDog - ah, I've pretty much given up on BSky again.

@rsc @oec now, now, Russ, don't mess with my emotions like that 😍 - I'm anyone's fool.

“Basic instructions” has become one of my favourite ways to pass a few seconds at the start of a busy day. This take of the threat of AI made my day.

https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2025/3/24/how-to-weather-change

Using #openbsd today means making some of the same sacrifices / accepting some of the same constraints, as being a #Linux user 20 years back. I’m generally ok with that, for my personal laptop. Work requires me to use a Mac , which I find ok, but generally a bit crippled and dumb compared to a Linux machine. If anyone ever tells you that Macs just work, give them a lollipop. Today I am still pretty convinced that Linux would be the best user environment for most software development.

@shriramk one could prefix the the colour with a "c", making "ctan" - that definitely wouldn't create any namespace clashes in the domain of computing commonly used in academia...

@shriramk I appreciate that mode of thought. Once, many years ago (the 90s), I wrote a little pre-processor so I didn't have to type "color" and "center" in HTML files when they clearly should be "colour" and "centre".

A #programming #language called #cricket?

I wonder if the etymology,
of this blessed terminology,
is based in purest entomology?
Or is it rather sorts psychology,
that shaped cricket for you and me?

https://github.com/RyanBrewer317/cricket_rs

cc. @shriramk

@shriramk perhaps they’ve been hanging out with the folks from Jane Street (OCaML nerds) or NuBank (Clojure geeks). Clearly what the world is lacking is a good Racket powered fintech.