Hi Bas, On 13/08/26 at 07:39 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote: > I agree that we need to look more globally, and that is precisely the > problem I have with this response. > > > 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: > > On the contrary. The standard cannot be "The contribution to this problem > that Debian makes through its LLM requests (ignoring the training that was > used to make this possible) is relatively small, therefore don't worry about > it". We are discussing to make a position statement: a message to the world > about a subject that we care and know a lot about.
[..] > This is why I believe Debian should make a statement to the world, telling > people "you are not crazy, LLMs are indeed a huge problem". Not because we > personally cause all of that, but because we are experts in this field and > when we make such a statement, people may actually listen to us. It may be > used in hearings about building a new data center, for example. Do we really know a lot about the environmental impact of AI? I have the impression that we have legitimate questions or concerns about it (that are acknowledged in several ballot options including the one I proposed), but not that we are experts on the topic. I would feel a bit ashamed if Debian made such a position statement, because it really sounds hypocritical, as our own house is not in order. It sounds like: LLMs have a huge environmental impact -- we should all stop using them immediately. Also, we just closed Debconf26 in Argentina, and we will be happy to fly all our contributors to Japan for Debconf27. And we never really evaluated or even questioned the energy consumption caused by Debian development -- we probably use massive amounts of resources for CI, build daemons (we insist on building all packages on all architectures, even niche ones), reproducibility testing and other QA activities. I'm not denying the importance of environmental impact and climate change, but I think that it is an issue that should be addressed properly by Debian. Hence my proposal to have a team that looks at all this more globally, and makes recommendations to the project. Lucas
