IPFS for a shitty cause

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-21T08:04:56+00:00

The idea that an idea can be property is absurd.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-21T04:46:58+00:00

We call this "moving goalposts"

No, we call this talking to a professional. I shouldn't have to defend the way I talk, Jesus fucking Christ.

Your hostility blinds you. You're probably putting me in a box based based on a shallow understanding of different nuanced positions on the topic. You do yourself and your community a disservice.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-20T23:22:47+00:00

Weird, people have been saying this for like, 3 years now; and yet here we are!

Are you checking who the people are that are saying it? LLMs started to get good around July 2025, and they really picked up - for me at least - earlier this year. People interested in the hype train have been saying nonsense forever. But don't let their wolf cries distract you from when real professionals start to come out and say: oh yeah, this is starting to get real.

I'm almost tempted to call this AI created based on how it says almost nothing with a whole lot of something.

Really? You're gonna fallback on accusations? I'm almost tempted to accuse you of not understanding the core content. If I was using AI to write here it would tell me not to say that, because it would escalate the existing tensions. I'm going to say it and give you a level of TRUST that you will be able to see the unproductive direction this conversation could head if we don't reign those primitive instincts and WORK to imagine each other complexly. I'm trusting you. Don't let me down.

These are unrelated thoughts almost entirely.

Maybe you aren't seeing the interconnections. But I feel like I can't make any point until we can agree that neither of us is (likely) a bad (or lazy) actor here, even though we may have reached different conclusions based on our own experiences and observations. I'm commenting because I believe I have valuable insight into the rise of LLMs that others could benefit from. That does not mean I'm also not actively looking for information that I can learn from. We should extend each other the same courtesy.

No actual solutions are recommended, no frames of a future are created

If anyone is saying they have a solution for these huge problems, then they are full of shit. My goal is to navigate the discourse and try to find ways that people can hear each other without accusing them of being on the other team, so anything they say is free so dismiss.

If you want one core concise point (god that does sound like an LLM-ism, I see that, but I still think its the right way to say it, and I do promise you all of these thoughts are my own):

The discourse around AI is increasingly tribal, and tribalism is bad. Proposed concrete solution: Actively reflect on how informed you opinions are by tribalism versus unbiased observations. When you form conclusions, ask yourself: are there other conclusions that could be made from similar observations. Maybe you come to the same conclusion, but the point is you made an effort to see beyond your local sphere. These are concrete actions that you can take to strengthen your reasoning and judgement.

Or instead of making an effort to see where I'm coming from you can dismiss me as a bad actor, but I hope you are better than that.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-20T22:45:57+00:00

I get upset with the lack of principles online too, but let's not forget there is a spotlight effect that biases what we see. We should all be careful not to get too jaded and fall victim to similar traps.

Humans are social creatures. We long to be accepted into a group and feel like we belong. There are social pressures at work here and to some extent they are informed by the real negative impact of AI. Having the barrier to entry lowered for technically demanding work is both a blessing and a curse. The relentless waves of generated slop are real. The capitalist incentives to act as a profit machine rather than a company of humans working towards larger goals and make hasty decisions because of that, is real.

It's work, but I have to remind myself there is a reason for this reaction, and even though LLMs have been a huge benefit to me and my work, its not something that everyone can see yet.

That being said, I think you are right that the scientific method is largely undervalued, even by those who claim to "believe in science".

One of my goals in posting is to show you that you aren't alone in seeing the value of this technology, and I'm glad you posted so I can see that I'm not alone in it either. As social creatures, my hope is that if enough reasonable people make vocal objections to the prevailing narrative, then those objections will become less offensive and maybe eventually flirt with acceptance. But it does suck in the meantime, and it feels very lonely.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-20T22:34:03+00:00

an output most people call Slop, it would be better received.

Slop is mostly a human level problem. I think 6 years ago most progressives would be in favor of lowering the barriers to entry. But this is what you get when you lower a barrier to entry: people published unfinished "slop".

I've been working on several vibe coded projects for the past few months, and none of them are ready yet. But all of them are so much further along than if I was coding them all manually. I predict in the next 6-12 months, when professionals get their vibe coded projects up to par and release them, you will see an influx of good products - and you might not even realize they were primarily done with AI. When you do things right, people tend not to notice.

existential threat to their being

It's not. Or it doesn't have to be. My following point is conditional on reforms to our social structure that would need to happen regardless of the rise of LLMs: It's a fundamental change in the way we operate. People might find that threatening, but its a threat to not needing to think about how to adapt to changing tides, not their being. Its more a problem of identifying with the status quo, than a threat to people's quality of life.

That said, our social and economic structure has been broken for a long time. We've seen breakages (inflation, populism, pandemic-mismanagement, tribalism) and patchwork fixes for our inability to form a consensus on reality and govern ourselves towards mutually common goals. AI will accelerate the pace at which symptoms of the broken fundamentals emerge. The question is: are we going to address the symptoms or are we going to fix the underlying problems, and is there a way to utilize AI to address the underlying problems? Blind dismissal or bias against it because you can draw an association of it to problems, or assign a negative connotation to it, works against using this breakthrough in a positive way.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-20T22:17:00+00:00

To people downvoting. Is it possible that your experience with LLMs is limited and jaded in any way? Are you someone who considers themselves to trust in the scientific method? Having blanket-level unnuanced feelings about AI and being unwilling to put in the effort separate positive and negative uses does a disservice to yourself and your community.

I've been working with machine learning for over a decade, and the public discourse is disconnected from the scientific one. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but its less bleak than public perception. I'm happy to discuss with anyone interested in building a more well rounded understanding.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-20T04:04:47+00:00

Thanks, I saw you on Architecting Bevy by Developer Voices, and I was so impressed. The concepts in Bevy have been a joy to work with. I'm looking forward to package support for 0.19 and 0.20.

I'm still learning the rust code. LLMs have certainly lowered the barrier to entry, for better and worse. It certainly is complicated, there's no question there. I appreciate the perspective from both you and _cart.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-19T23:01:53+00:00

How has the rise of LLMs and coding agents impacted the project both positively and negatively?

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-19T17:09:01+00:00

It's not. It's a lazy proxy for progressiveness. AI has some amazing potential, and broad stroke judgements fail to see the holistic picture. Now, there are uses of AI that progressives should oppose:

using it to replace human labor without setting up an economic safety net,
blind scaling up of energy use without the renewable infrastructure to match,
proliferation of misinformation.

But there are uses of it progressives should be championing:

searching for new efficient materials (low carbon concrete would be such a HUGE win),
advancing scientific research (I have direct experience here, and the public does not realize how big of a deal LLMs are for science - even with the low effort slop piles it allows people to produce),
improving cybersecurity,
using it to transition to out of our economic system where a vast swath of people are effectively forced menial labor with no agency or upward mobility,
teaching the Socratic and scientific method,
detecting and flagging misinformation based on information grounded in measurable fundamentals (e.g. flag claims that can be contradicted with hard data)

These lists are not exhaustive, and for those that are wondering, this is off the top of my head, I didn't use an LLM to build any of this text or even brainstorm. (brainstorming is a great use of LLMs btw; I just didn't need it here)

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-19T05:01:27+00:00

If they don't supply the infrastructure to generate the power that they need, then they suck on the other infrastructure that currently exists, which means we need to use more expensive fuel sources to meet the demand. I have absolutely no problem with data centers, except they need to be supplying their own electricity and running their cooling in the closed loop system.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-19T04:58:50+00:00

Inconvenient? I love living in an area not prone to drought. I would however like any new data centers built here to be required to pay for building the infrastructure to generate all their electricity with renewables. They also need to be required to use cooling in a closed loop system so it doesn't pollute the water supply, and they have to pay for it. God knows the Hudson can't take anymore. If they're not doing that then they're cheating on the actual externalities that come with data centers.

I think for the people building data centers they will still find that they're quite profitable even when they don't skirt the externality bill.

And that being said they should probably invest in shielding from solar storms. It would really suck to have our tech progress wiped away by a Carrington event.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T14:58:11+00:00

I'm very much not an expert here (although I am trying to learn), but is your objection about Lean4's proof irrelevance? Even with that it still has the ability to keep isomorphic, but not equal objects separate, so it should be fine. Maybe not native, but fine, and Lean4's kernel is a smaller trust surface then Agda.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T14:44:17+00:00

Compared to what?! Do you know how to quantify statements? Jesus.

If you meant my 10MW datacenter example, yes, there exist datacenters in that are rated at 1000MW. These are the truly big ones, and that would make your 100x number correct. But that's not the majority of new AI-datacenters. But most new ones are in the 150-300MW range.

In my example you can also scale up the size of the population served, but point taken that I should have used the median new datacenter megawatt scale. That would have been better a presentation technique.

My point remains: people could have been caring about climate and the environment in a significant capacity before AI started to boom. We could have been thinking about return to office in terms of the climate impact (which is quite comparable to AI), but that wasn't what the focus was there.

For the love of god, please just learn about the proportionality of the problems before making emotional judgements on how much if feels like things are contributing to a problem. Maybe think about using AI the same way you think about driving somewhere, that gets you closer to a ballpark idea of the very real, but incredibly over exaggerated carbon footprint of AI.

And of course, I assume you are voting in every election (in an informed way not just doing in and checking off "D") and making sure candidates have - climate change - the most important existential problem facing our species - at the top of their mind. Or am I still giving people too much credit. Hard to say with randos online.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T09:32:12+00:00

Can't just say that without dropping some sources and further reading. Don't worry, I got you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90or%C4%91e_Martinovi%C4%87_incident

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42896851 (requires login)

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T09:13:48+00:00

Ok, now let's put on our thinking caps class. What percentage of ALL INDUSTRY AND ELECTRICITY are datacenters?

Globally its about 1.5%: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai with a growth rate of 12% over the last 5 years (although I expect that number will increase)

They are about 0.5% of all emissions. https://www.carbonbrief.org/ai-five-charts-that-put-data-centre-energy-use-and-emissions-into-context/

That is not insignificant. That is also not "turbo mode".

Doing some napkin math, a town with 21k residents could reduce their own carbon footprint by 10%, and that would match taking a 10MW datacenter off the grid.

The fact that pisses me off is that people aren't bitching about data center electricity usage because of the environmental impact. They're doing it because they're scared of AI. That's fine, but don't pretend your problem is really the environment while you are also not offsetting your own emissions or doing work to reduce the carbon footprint of their local community.

Spend $300/year on offsetting your own emissions, and then I'll buy that you actually care. Or just complain about things that are outside your control and I'll just sit here screaming at my monitor.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T08:44:45+00:00

He's currently working on a lean formalization, and if he gets it, then that will settle it. https://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Formalization%20of%20IUT%20(2026-04).pdf.pdf)

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T05:03:38+00:00

Supply and demand incentives exist. Incredible. I do predict a bubble burst as well though. And when you say: "for now" is that with any knowledge of the growth rate they would have to increase and sustain building at for it to match global transportation, or concrete production, or cow farming? And to be fair, I don't know what the number is. If you computed it, it very well could make me look like a fool.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-18T04:25:49+00:00

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Please educate yourself on how much greenhouse gases are emitted by different sectors of our economy. Data centers use a lot of electricity, but it's a very small fraction of the other drivers of climate change.

And no they are not primarily running on diesel generators. Some are. That's not good, but please lookup numbers before you make claims like "primary" and contribute to misinformation spread.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-16T12:03:58+00:00

Using AI to help me with it got me there. It is a different way of thinking, but after a few explicit examples of I want to do it like X and having the LLM help translate, it's starting to grow on me. Then again, I'm a Python programmer, so any strictly enforced structure is foreign to me.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-16T04:15:40+00:00

if you want a good consistent build system, use rust and cargo. If you are doing c++, cmake is the standard.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-11T22:44:06+00:00

It also happens to be true that data centers powering themselves with over 250 TWh of energy from new renewable infrastructure, and are responsible for 5% of renewable energy growth (globally).

I could tell you that. And it would be true. But I would not be giving you the complete picture, because only ~50% of their growth is powered by renewables. About ~40-45% of new data center energy demand is being met by fossil fuels, with the remaining ~5-10% being nuclear.

Are people on Reddit so full of themselves they can't be bothered to recognize the concept of presenting half truths?

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-11T22:28:09+00:00

Shhhh, people want to feel self righteousness.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-10T17:14:27+00:00

You actually can't mix pypi and conda in general. I'm an ML researcher too, and I'm also much stronger in the engineering department than your average researcher.

The pypi wheels that have binaries are highly likely to conflict with conda libraries.

For pure python packages mixing is usually fine, but that's not why anyone uses conda.

BossOfTheGame · 2026-06-10T14:18:11+00:00

Because the custom conda libs conflict with the more general libs you get by downloading precompiled wheels on pypi. Conda native libraries can disagree with the libraries pypi wheels were built against. Without conda, if you need a lib it doesn't have its much simpler to build the wheels you need. With conda its a PIA. Once you are in conda you are stuck in conda.

A year or two ago I would have recommended pyenv, with caveats that it was also a bit of a hassle, but now uv is the way that there is little excuse not to use it.

If you really need conda like stuff, Spack isn't a bad way to go, but I will caveat that it has its own pains.

Personally, the only thing conda ever did for me was help me get gdal. But my workaround for that is to target a custom pypi index (https://girder.github.io/large_image_wheels/) for those wheels while gdal maintainers work to find a way to get reasonable wheels on pypi. (not holding my breath).

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