Re: Environmental impact of Debian's AI usage

On Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:04, Aigars Mahinovs <[email protected]> wrote:
>That just tells me that you failed to either read or understand the rest of
>the paragraph that you just qouted.
>
>BTW on the logic of some of this discussion, you using a computer and
>Internet to send this reply has used up some electrical energy and thus you
>just contributed to the destruction of the environment. And so did everyone
>else who sent or even read an email. Never mind the cryptographic
>computations needed to sign an email of a proposal or second.
>
>You know, a drop in a flood and so on.
>
>I disagree with usage of such reductionist arguments.
>
>

This is false equivalency. If I compute by myself, that is vastly 
different from a whole technology as LLMs taking 4% (!) of the USA's 
total energy consumption. 
[0]

All that for a slightly better autocomplete? Hardly worth the effort.

If all that computing resources were actually used to help free 
software, that would be a wholly different topic. Instead, institutions 
we rely on like [1] have to participate in fund raising.

What Debian would help is ample computing resources, not some 
datacenters wasting energy and resources so emails can now written by a 
machine, further enriching already obscenely rich people.

Furthermore, all major LLM companies instead hammer the very building 
blocks [2] that hold up all modern infrastructure.
We are one of those blocks; countless servers in the world run Debian.
TTBOMK no mail in this thread has acknowledged this cost externalization 
on us and other projects. packages.d.o, salsa, and bugs.d.o were not 
reachable for extended time periods. In the end, JS-based checks were 
established by DSA. Those scrapers work neither ethical nor logical. For 
instance, they scrape git repositories multiple times per minute (!),
not just once a week, straight-up ignore robots.txt, and run literal 
botnets with residential IPs, making blocks hard.

Apparently it is ok to let said companies just do that? For me, it's 
not. This is an blatant disregard to established practices, and the free 
software community as such. This is essentially a continuous slap in the 
face; to stand there and say "This is the cost of doing business" is 
laughable. There were multiple occurrences where I couldn't upload new 
upstream releases because the respective upstream site was down because 
of said scrapers.

That alone, if you don't care about the environmental destruction (which 
you should), should be enough to condemn LLMs.

Machine learning has its limited usage, such as breast cancer detection, 
etc. 

The current LLMs are a huge waste of resources, energy, a direct attack 
on free software maintainers, and inherently biased and unethical.

best,