This is actually a good link. Thank you. It's usage that is the big driver, and LLMs are a big driver in emissions and other damage to the environment.
I won't belabour the point, but I think someone needs to correct their misconceptions. You're comparing a single, average person's usage of AI in a day -- not the billions who actually use it. Then you are comparing it to an American's two-hour commute in an oversized SUV. (A commute on the Tube costs about 0.02991 kg per passenger, per kilometre.)
What about training those models? Or the usage of all of the data centres? The projections are that by 2028 a fifth of all energy consumption in the U.S. alone will be for AI.[1]
The one thing that had me reading to the end was the mention near the top of the environmental impact of LLMs, but he never got back to it.
I'm currently writing an onboarding doc for my team, encouraging LLM use for some tasks. (OK, well, I'm actually procrastinating by reading HN).
At the same time, I'm in a darkened office with tinfoil on the windows and a fan pointed at me because it's hell outside and it has been for weeks, and every year it seems to get hotter and hotter and we have longer and longer heatwaves.
This seems ... discordant, at a minimum.
Really, _should_ we be using these things to speed up, say, dependency updates if the cost is the planet? I wanted to know what the author thought about that.
I too am a bit surprised this made it on the front page. Mu4e is definitely niche, and I wouldn't crow about it like I do org or magit. I've only been using it for less than a month and it will be a while before I know whether it is a net win.
Also, the real test would have been my much more voluminous work email!
The HTML rendering isn't great, as you said, but you are two keystrokes from opening that email in a browser, if you have to.
And I have tweaked the config several times now, but I think that's mostly because I'm changing my (and the charity's) email, which involves a lot of shuffling about. Again, in six months, I'll have another look and decide whether it _really_ helped.
This was my second attempt to get email working on Emacs and I gave up the first time, too. I persisted this time and I _think_ it will pay off. There is the obvious danger of this becoming another "project", but I'll make a note to check-in again in six months. It's an experiment!
I've not seen the other things you mentioned. I only check for email every 10 minutes, but opening and (especially) searching for emails seem much faster than doing it in Gmail. Plus, I can do searches across email accounts, like all unreads across all three accounts. That was definitely slower in the online clients.
Finally, there's a quick ('a' then 'v') way to just open a message in a browser if the HTML is too thick.
This is an important point that I missed and didn't mention: My work and school life were really hard and chaotic. This is so intrinsically part of me that I didn't even notice, but has generated a lot of stress on me and my family. I guess getting treatment would have saved me a lot of that. I wonder if it is worth it, as a 62-year-old and probably within 5/6-ish years of retirement?
I worry about all of this labelling that we apply to various ends of the "normal" spectrum. Where does it lead us? Is it actually helping?
I easily score as ADHD, but I'm in my 60s now and have never been diagnosed or treated. I have muddled through all my life. Yes, I often self-medicated unhealthily (cigarettes, various over-the-counter uppers), but also relatively healthily (I've been practicing meditation for decades). I managed to have two, long, fruitful careers (20 years of journalism, coming up to 20 years of software engineering) that (I'm betting) was at least partly attributable to me being on the outer edges of normal.
I think that's OK. I'm not looking to be "treated" because I'm a bit different.
I love these packages (like this, Spacemacs, Doom, etc.), even though I've used Emacs for over 30 years. I don't use them directly, but they give me ideas and alert me to packages I haven't heard of (eat?). And that gives me an excuse to go on another round of config-tweaking, which any Emacs user loves.
I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
I absolutely understand that, but it seems concerned with the same things (preserving a minority language) and there are lots of initiatives in this area all over the U.K. Literally, right next door.
I find it odd that the article makes almost zero mention of how Ireland is doing with its very closely related form of Gaelic. Ireland has arguably been at least slightly more successful.
Or Wales? Or other minority languages, such as Basque? Just nothing -- not a mention.
So, I saw this link and immediately thought, "I bet the discussion will be about how we should use N100s, instead." I wasn't disappointed. Even on dedicated Pi forums, you see that happening.
I guess I understand this point of view if you were trying to use Pis to experiment with Kubernetes or something. You'd have built your own (desktop) PC or a personal server rack for that kind of thing, years ago. But for the vast majority of typical uses (Home Assistant, VPNs, etc.) a Pi is going to be way more than you need. It will sit there and silently and reliably run, for years at a time, powered by a USB cable. I know mine have.
Why would I consider replacing those with a bigger box, fan noise and a power brick? Maybe I'm missing something?
I think I've been operating this way for a long time: My notes, software and wiki are almost all in plain text -- source, markdown or org mode in Emacs, usually -- and open image/video formats (jpeg, mp4) and synced with a replaceable combination of services (git, Dropbox, Syncthing, etc.). It lets me switch the conduits/pipes regularly, to whatever works best for my needs at the time.
When the zombie apocalypse finally hits (or the Internet implodes), I still have everything important, in plain text.
I did pretty much the same thing. The issue wasn't cats (I have two, but they'll gladly let anyone pet and feed them), it was that I can't hear the doorbell from my WFH office. I wanted to flash the light. I already use Home Assistant for loads of stuff.
I tried ESP32 and a 433MHz antenna thingy, so that I could continue to use my cheapo bell. That proved unreliable (a press got picked up, at best, about 90% of the time).
Then I went through two zigbee buttons. The issue is that Amazon and other delivery drivers appear to use a hammer to press doorbells. That's the only explanation I can think of for the state of the buttons after a few weeks.
I finally just caved and bought the cheapest (still expensive) Ring doorbell and disabled the camera. It's been solid, but I feel dirty and regret it each time I pay the annual bill. It's my last cloud-enabled device, but I can't afford to just keep throwing Zigbee buttons at the gorillas who deliver my packages.
That's an excellent point. I don't think HA is anywhere close to being something that could carry a separate professional services industry, like many more mature projects (e.g., Redis, MQTT or whatever). It's just moving too fast. But I could imagine in the future it developing a "long-term support" version model.