In a press conference this week on New York City’s $12 billion budget gap, Mayor Zohran Mamdani zeroed in on the previous administration’s artificial intelligence chatbot as one of “a number of different things we’re going to pursue for savings.”
Wild that a politician deciding to terminate an application (and its associated contract) because the application doesn’t actually work as intended seems so odd.
But I like it.
Yes! It is so sad this seems like such a bold move, but we’ve just become so fucking conditioned to bullshit politicians gaslighting us about why everybody else is just going to have to go without in order to keep giving handouts to the most entitled and useless pieces of crap just because they’re already wealthy.
Why? Allegedly because they generate more money… But do they really? Have they ever?
Trickle-down economics, or Reaganomics, is built on the tired promise that handing tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations will magically fix the economy through reinvestment and job creation. This is just a recycled version of the horse-and-sparrow theory, which basically argued that if you feed a horse enough oats, the sparrows can eventually pick through the manure for the leftovers. It is the same gaslighting we see with austerity measures where politicians ignore the actual damage they cause to chase some supposed “greater good,” even though their own policies usually created the economic mess in the first place. You can see it clearly in Arkansas with the new ABAWD food assistance laws that claim to encourage work but actually strip benefits from orphans aging out of foster care and families with kids over fourteen. These policies intentionally gut government revenue to benefit the wealthy and then use that manufactured budget crisis as an excuse to slash public services like education, infrastructure, and social programs.
It feels ridiculous I have to say this, but it feels so good to hear about a politician just immediately saying “oh yeah, we needed to figure out where to make cuts, and these shitty AI chat bots seemed like an obvious place to start.”
the bot provided answers that, if followed, would lead to illegal behavior by businesses, like taking a cut of employees’ tips.
and
Today, the bot advises visitors to “ask an NYC government question only” and cautions that “responses may occasionally produce inaccurate or incomplete content.” Visitors must agree to accept the bot’s limitations before using it.
It is also the environmentally responsible thing to do.
I dunno I’m in favor of telling businesses to shut themselves down.
I can’t figure out what this comment is supposed to mean
It’s a joke because AI tells people to kill themselves, so presumably an AI talking to businesses will talk them into shutting themselves down.
And as Mamdani is a socialist, he presumably wants private businesses to shutdown (and be replaced by cooperatives)
I’m guessing some variation on “capitalism bad”.
So, entirely fair.
Being anti-capitalist is entirely fair, but I think being opposed to all businesses is a less justifiable position to hold.
Because we all know there are no businesses in socialism.
I guess the anarchists are all planning to grow their own vegetables, then? In… the middle of NYC…
we used to do that fine before the conception of the word “corporation”
Well things aren’t gonna magically go back to the way things were just because someone makes all the businesses shut down. There was always commerce, even before corporations and capitalism. Thinking there was ever a time when everyone grew their own food is false.
Hence the comment chain where we’re ragging on a commenter saying to shut down all the businesses with no foresight into what would result. Some random dude running a bodega is not a capitalist oligarch.
I just saw this clown making a fool of themselves in the whatsapp privacy thread. do yourselves a favor and block them before they drag you into troll levels of stupidity.
You can just admit you don’t understand the joke or security.
I like him better every day.
He’s got a lot of low-hanging fruit to pluck and he’s not afraid to roll out a wheelbarrow for it.
Oh, look, a leader leading…how strange, not beholden to anything but his constituents? I love this guy.
We’re not used to seeing that around here. Feels a bit odd.
unfortunately we live in times where saying “we’re getting rid of this thing that no one ever asked for and never does anything good” is unusual.
Real heroism.
sorry to bother yall but this guy has been fucking harrasing and creeping on my freind at my collage please send him cursed pics, or like horrifying memes or something, like its gotten so bad that she got fucking injured just trying to avoid the guy his number is 571-420-4603. also take care of yourself, if you can, shits hard right now. and we all deserve better. this is real by the way im not a bot(though who knows thease days) im just on a revenge quest,
Mamndani??? What lmfao
Way to go, Mayor Mamdani!
Has he made any comment about the massive data center increasing the cost of living there yet? /gen
Based. Good to see him going for common sense easy issues to keep people engaged while he works on the harder to tackle issues.
isn’t going for the common sense easy issue the opposite of “based”?
Based is for doing something useful or good.
Thank you. A very useful and helpful response.
These days? Really?
No because the expectation is they won’t do common sense issues so its based when thry finally do
Let’s stop using all ai chatbots. That shit is harming earth.
Good luck arguing that my local AI models are harming Earth.
Yes, you can argue phones themselves/lightbulbs harm Earth. I don’t care at that scale.
Are you perchance ignoring the petawatt-hours that were needed to train and distil your local AI model?
Yes, it is already developed. Nuclear bombs killed people, does not mean we should stop all research into fusion.
Me downloading the model does not light up a data center somewhere else. I run it on my local laptop.
No. No no no. It is still being developed, with exponentially increasing resources. You downloading the model adds at least 1 but probably 10 increment to the “downloads” and repo watches CEOs 100% use to validate their insane echo chamber. And you’re literally paying for it all if you live in US and they built a data center in your neighborhood and your electricity bill 4x increased! Or if you ever want to upgrade to ddr5, and ever need more storage space! Or in many other myriad of ways!
Generally, you’re right, it’s just the left over tools from the gold rush, why not use them if they’re useful! No point in throwing them away. It’s good that you’re honest with yourself and will never validate the wild amounts of cosmically ironic cancer-inducing data centers they (I hope only Musk) are operating, by upgrading your local model distilled by your unfavorite AI cloud company that is negative profit for 5 years and somehow still alive
Well, if I want to do anything worthwhile, I sure as fuck will have to at some point for the Clawd agent. Will probably need a server of my own as well. The desire for solar is more for independence, than environmental reasons anyway.
Username checks out.
A model being local doesn’t make it magically better than cloud based ones. Especially since your local hardware may not be as optimized as professional hardware.
And I say that as a local AI user.
The way to make it less harmful mainly comes from external factors :
- The origin of the electricity (renewable)
- Shift consumption to a time of low demand (or use a residential battery)
- Use specific hardware for specific tasks (use less energy per token)
Edit:
I’d add to that that you can reuse the heat generated to heat your apartment. But it only works during winter, as during summer any heat generated will make your AC (if you have one) work harder.
Yeah, I tend to do a bench test on my Laptop to heat myself up. It’s really neat!
No, I don’t have a gaming rig. It’s not going above 65W, and I actually have an ideological reason I want to switch to solar power too.
Soon, my local AI’s will be solar powered as well, and offline.
Sadly, so far I have the capability to only charge my Tablet and phone, which are actually decent for AI in their own right.
Better than a benchmark, you should try Boinc or Folding@Home.
Heating by science.
There was this citizen science project where few tried to manually fold proteins. Unfortunately, the computer was better than us at it, and we didn’t contribute much. I sucked. However, I contributed my PC resources for a rather short while to some random cancer research project. I don’t remember the details, I figured it was a better use of idle computer time than mining bitcoins.
Boy was I wrong.
Oh, you’re right. Everything being plugged into massive datacenters that use more power than whole countries is ok, because your computer somehow doesn’t use much power per query. I stand corrected, sir.
This is the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that Elon was supposed to be getting rid of.
DOGE was Federal not Local
