I really want Google to launch a Claude Code/OpenAI Codex CLI alternative. also if they included a small VM in one of these subscriptions I'd seriously consider it!
> Firstly, there’s the environmental impact. Models require massive amounts of electricity and water (to cool servers). An AI chatbot contributes more to the climate crisis than a Google search.
I really dislike the "people should be better and use less energy" argument for solving macro-problems like this
> My naive optimism led me to believe that technology would help us fight climate change. I was wrong: AI and Crypto are net negatives in this regard.
...why? why would technology that specifically requires a lot of energy help "fight climate change"?
this entirely article is missing any point to me -- it's very vague and speaking in generalities.
> “If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.”
why? if you generate code with a LLM, then read and deeply understand the code, what's wrong?
> I can’t help but feel the web would be a better place if the technology had never existed in the first place.
if we didn't invent the wheel, we wouldn't have so many cars/trucks polluting the planet
this is a bad argument in the abstract. "drivers are fully capable of navigating intersections without Daddy Goverment getting involved" so we shouldn't have traffic laws and stop lights
the evidence says otherwise. I agree an outright ban probably isn't the best solution
the only one of these points I personally care about is:
> The protocol has a very LLM-friendly interface, but not always a human friendly one.
similar to the people asking "why not just use the API directly", I have another question: why not just use the CLI directly? LLMs are trained on natural language. CLIs are an extremely common solution for client/server interactions in a human-readable, human-writeable way (that can be easily traversed down subcommands)
for instance, instead of using the GitHub MCP server, why not just use the `gh` CLI? it's super easy to generate the help and feed it into the LLM, super easy to allow the user to inspect the command before running it, and already provides a sane exposure of the REST APIs. the human and the LLM can work in the same way, using the exact same interface