AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
Just that.
There is no true life within a false life.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno sums it up quite well.
Slavery, for example, wasn’t solved by handing slaves over to nicer owners, but by ending it.
In a similar way, it’s not possible to improve the world by using exploitative tools, you can’t improve something while destroying it.
For example, not using text generators because of the fossil fuels that this will burn is a good point. Just because it could use electricity from sustainable sources, does not mean it won’t hurt humanity to use it.
Just because it could be better does not mean it is.
I decided to not have a car, because while those can be made to hurt the planet less, they do hurt the planet a lot. And there’s already public transport. Even electric cars aren’t better than taking the train. And I live in a place where this works quite well, so I do that.
I can do better now, not in the future when LLMs might (or might not) better.
I don’t buy products that will quickly be trash just because the companies could build bettee products. We have a choice.
(Footnote: Adorno wrote that sentence looking at the fascist terror in Europe in the 40s. What he is saying, basically: You can’t do the right thing when you live in a system that punishes that. Try to start a protest against cruel Nazis and you’re dead. You can’t further understanding among nations under those circumstances.)
Sorry for the wall of text, having lots of thoughts.