Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Proton just joined the AI clown car show (proton.me)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

56 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Fuck this shit, why does every fucking thing need an LLM?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Funny you should mention blockchains. Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain after Bitcoin, switched from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake validation system two and a half years ago. That cut its energy use by 99.95%. The "blockchains are inherently a huge waste of energy" narrative is just firmly lodged in the popular view of them now, though, despite it being long proven false.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But that's really good! And also means that cloud based AI is even worse than blockchain in terms of environmental impact.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It means that even if AI is having more environmental impact right now, there's no reason to say "you can't improve it that much." Maybe you can improve it. As I said previously, a lot of research is being done on exactly that - methods to train and run AIs much more cheaply than it has so far. I see developments along those lines being discussed all the time in AI forums such as /r/localllama.

Much like with blockchains, though, it's really popular to hate AI and "they waste enormous amounts of electricity" is an easy way to justify that. So news of such developments doesn't spread easily.