[conspire] Discussion: Using LLMs the Right Way: 10/1/2025 7pm Eastern Daylight time

[Don Marti]

On 10/2/25 01:44, Rick Moen wrote:

> True but not relevant to Deirdre's point.  You knew that, right?
> The profligate overuse of drinking water (to name just one squandered
> resource) for server farm cooling for, lately, huge LLM installations
> (previously cryptocurrency mining) may not be a problem in climates with
> year-round watercourses everywhere (like Dad's native Norway), but it's
> already horribly damaging in, say, the American West.

It's also a labor vs. capital thing -- the AI boom is part of the 
reaction to the tech worker union movement.

Longshore workers were unionized and had a lot of control over an 
economic choke point -- the ports -- so the next move by management was 
to containerize and push more of the cargo handling to warehouses, which 
are smaller workplaces that can be geographically isolated from the port 
area. Cargo handling became more efficient with containerization, but a 
big part of the appeal for management was in reducing the number of 
people working close together at the port where they could organize.

When organized labor started to catch on at the "Big Tech" companies, 
management did something similar. A lot of "AI" is about moving work 
away from a potential point of leverage to somewhere where it can be 
managed indirectly.

Big picture, "Mr. Market" is pressuring Big Tech management to keep 
making more and more profits so they can keep their positions as "growth 
stocks" -- but they make their money from advertising, which only grows 
as fast as the economy in general. So how do you get profits to keep 
increasing at double-digit rates in an economy that grows at 
single-digit rates? The answer, apparently is keep cheating... 
https://blog.zgp.org/accounting-help-needed/