This is the kind of complexity I think is required to think through the ecological impact of technology in context . . . no one will be happy with this.
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A lifecycle analysis from the Danish government shows that compared to a standard plastic bag, an unbleached paper bag is better when considering impacts on climate change, but it would need to be reused 43 times to have a positive impact on all environmental factors. This is because “environment” means many things: pollution, ozone depletion, causes of human cancer, acidification of freshwater, resource depletion, and others. The worst thing you can do is replace a plastic bag with organic cotton which requires 20,000 reuses before it is better for the environment.
AND
If this happened in the US between two people in New York, the emissions factor is similar to the UK at 0.28839 kgCO2 per kWh but if it was between two people in Chicago, that would be 0.56191 kgCO2 per kWh. Location matters.
“Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily — Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity … One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.”
This is from the “Committee on Raising the Standard” in 1894.
What might be more surprising is that even when we adjust the temperature down to 0This means that the LLM always chooses the highest probability token, which is called greedy sampling. (thus making the sampling theoretically deterministic), LLM APIs are still not deterministic in practice (see past discussions here, here, or here). Even when running inference on your own hardware with an OSS inference library like vLLM or SGLang, sampling still isn’t deterministic (see here or here).
In his book In Search of Memory (2006), Kandel writes that for a memory to persist, “the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed. This is accomplished by attending to the information and associating it meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.” Without paying attention to a thought or experience, the neurons involved lose their excited state of electrical activity within a few seconds, and the memory is gone, leaving maybe only a small trace in the mind.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”