I guess it takes some people a long time to learn.
The signs of his corruption and sociopathic personality were there long before he got elected the first time. e.g. history of refusing to pay contractors who'd worked for him.
Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
If there weren't a wide range of options offered, there'd be a risk of it not actually reflecting what people want - which is, presumably, the whole point of putting it to the vote in the first place.
This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.
A few people certainly refused to use AI at all, but several actually used AI for programming and agreed it was useful, but stopped due to being conscious of the environmental footprint. (That’s very similar to the last proposal in this Debian debate.) I don’t really agree with them, but I concede it’s a valid opinion.
What does that have to do with it? Debian developers are the audience and most of them are not programmers. And the parent post was speaking even more generally.
There was one proposal that focused on environmental issues with AI. This is indeed pretty disconnected from reality when you consider that Debian doesn’t have any policy requiring you to be vegan in order to contribute
What is “disconnected from reality” about environmental considerations regarding AI? Growing AI usage = growing data center power draw = higher emissions from any non-renewable sources contributing to that power, as well as increased freshwater consumption which is itself a considerably difficult resource to renew. That’s about as direct of a causal link between point A (power hungry AI being used for Debian development) and point B (the environment) as you can get. On the other hand, please explain what the hell veganism has to do with Debian development? Like what are you talking about.
AI data centers need electricity, which can be from renewable sources and non-renewable sources, and the exact mix can change from day to day as well as long after these data centers are constructed. The electricity grid is decarbonizing at the fastest pace yet. It's simply a tenuous link. On the other hand there are clear non-renewable fossil fuel being used in our daily lives that desperately need to be electrified, think non-electric vehicles and commercial flights. Even without considering more renewable sources of electricity in the future, ask yourself, on a same carbon emission basis, how much can an AI data center accomplish versus a flight from JFK to SFO? How would the utility function even look like?
The way I see it, modern environmentalists like to pick on data centers just because it’s an easy target without entrenched lobbying. The fossil fuel industry is way worse but they have tremendous lobbying.
Have you considered how many data centers used the Linux kernel before anybody knew what a Chat GPT is? Does the project get a free pass on such activities?
The water usage from AI is so comparatively low that it doesn’t matter.
This is where the vegan point comes in. Do you eat meat? Congratulations, you consume 1000x more water than a dozen vegan vibecoders pumping out slop 24/7.
It’s good to be environmentally conscious, but big picture here. There are reasonable ways to reduce your water and electricity consumption. Not using AI is just not one of them. There are dozens of low hanging fruit before that. The most obvious is reducing your meat consumption. You can switch to LED bulbs if you haven’t already. Shower with warm, instead of hot, water. Buy second hand clothing or furniture. Etc.
He didn't say he was surprised by the options offered. He said he was reassured by what he considered to be the common sense option winning. As was I.
It didn't just win. Debian uses Condorcet voting, which does the equivalent of running lots of mini elections - pairing the options against each of the others in one on one contests. Close contests need a tie breaker mechanism as you get A beats B, B beats C, C beats A. Not this time - the winning option defeated all others in its one on ones.
I found that surprising. There are a few options close to option 5, the winner - only slightly less liberal. Effectively the most extreme option won, and not by a slim margin.
I, and I suspect the OP, wasn't surprised at the range of options offered. This is par for the course - Debian is a very robust democracy with its fair share of opinionated individuals. There has been a lot of noise about the LLM's. The surprising thing is what I regard as the common sense one was at one extreme, and that "extreme" position won easily.
I guess it's yet another illustration of the level of on online noise being a lousy indicator of what the normies are thinking. Yes, that's obvious, but when the level of noise is high it still can catch you by surprise.
Edit: The two most restrictive options were ranked below "None of the Above". That's the strongest rebuke a Debian GR can deliver to a proposal. Under Debians rules, if an option loses to "None of the Above" it can't win regardless of the outcome of the other mini elections. I don't think Debian could make it's position much plainer: LLM's are just another tool a developer can use at his discretion, and are to be treated no differently to any other tool.
"My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people."
The argument is that physical media was the one benefit consoles had. If you’re just buying a locked down, non-upgradable, low performance PC disguised as a console (without access to the superior Steam storefront), why not just get a PC?
Eh, I think you’ll be able to match it close enough between upscaling and the very low bar for console graphics. If consoles are a low/medium preset at like 1080P, most computers can hit that.
Upgrading to a 3070 is $150 to $200 depending on eBay pricing, an amount you could easily save over a few Steam discounts compared to buying games at full retail.
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