Hi Bas, On 11/08/26 at 23:17 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote: > Lucas Nussbaum <[email protected]> schreef op 3 augustus 2026 14:08:40 CEST: > >Hi Bas, > > First of all, it worries me that mails which say 'climate change is the > primary issue, but also X and Y' get responses about X and Y, but not about > climate change. > > IMO you (Lucas) make a fairly convincing point that LLMs are more than > 'planet-burning slop extractors': if careful, I believe you that it is > possible to create non-slop. However, I have seen no serious attempt (by you > or others) to claim that they are not planet-burners. > > I don't understand how anyone can agree that LLMs destroy our ecosystem and > not feel like that is a deal-breaker. > > The only response I've seen to this point was that other activities are also > bad (some even worse) for the climate. How is this even an argument? The > planet is burning, we should try to stop that as much and as fast as we can! > If others aren't stopping, isn't that even more reason to compensate for > their irresponsible actions? > > And while I'm on that point: All of our users live on this planet, so > protecting that planet is a matter of life and death for them. In other > words, caring about something as big as climate change during our Debian > work is not (as was suggested elsewhere in the discussion) a violation of > the social contract. On the contrary, I would argue that the social contract > requires us to care about climate change and prevent it as much as we can.
I'm not trying to dismiss the topic of climate change. However, if we are discussing the environmental impact of Debian development, I think that we should do it more globally. Singling out AI on this sounds like AI-bashing, not like a well-reasoned discussion about the impact of Debian on climate change. The standard cannot just be "it emits CO2, therefore stop it", as Debian development has a clear positive impact on the world. We should consider the environmental impact of Debian practices, compared to their outcomes. For example, other Debian practices could be changed: - make all salsa CI runs manually triggered. After all, they mostly succeed, so we could trust maintainers to decide when it's useful to double-check them. - stop large-scale QA efforts such as reproducible builds, ci.debian.net, archive rebuilds, etc. After all, if bugs matter, they will be found eventually. - stop building niche packages (all non-key packages, as an approximation?) on each and every architecture, where they might not ever be used. Or maybe "optimize" our set of architectures to remove the ones that are the least used. - always organize Debconf in Europe or North America (or stop organizing non-online Debconfs) to minimize travel-induced CO2, since most of our contributors are in Europe or North America anyway. Why would Debian encourage me to travel to India, South Korea, Argentina or Japan for Debconf, but at the same time, decide that it is unacceptable to use AI assistance to make it possible to develop/maintain udd.debian.org or debaudit.debian.net (at current maintainer's capacity)? Maybe we could have a team that looks at all this more globally and make recommendations to the project? Lucas
