Lobsters (Hacker News clone) loses their shit when a macOS Terminal emulator iTerm2 adds *optional* support for ChatGPT. Includes the very online Xeno .

The lead dev showed up

Hi, I'm the author and I wanted to comment on this.

Opt-in

The AI features are entirely opt-in. If you have ethical considerations regarding the use of AI, you do not need to enable these features. Don't provide an API key, and the AI functionalities will remain inactive. I don't have VC funding and I'm definitely not footing the bill for you :)

Copyright Concerns

The issue of copyright in the context of AI, especially for code generation, is complicated. I think the principles of the GPL align more with using code for model training purposes, but I'm not a lawyer and I could be convinced otherwise.

Energy Usage

The energy consumption required for training these models is a huge problem, but that's a sunk cost. The decision to use AI involves weighing the environmental costs against the benefits. It is not my place to make this tradeoff for every user. Each individual or organization must evaluate whether the productivity gains and other advantages justify the energy expenditure.

Usage and Practicality

Users are going to use LLMs to help them use a terminal emulator whether support is built in or not. By building it in, the tool is more useful for these users. LLMs make mistakes all the time, but in my experience the quality is good enough to be useful.

The energy consumption required for training these models is a huge problem, but that's a sunk cost.

Each individual query also costs considerable energy. Surely you knew this already.

To say nothing of the fact that using existing models via web APIs both encourages the development of bigger models (with their associated training costs) and provides training data itself. It's safe to assume that anything and everything sent to OpenAI is logged and retained indefinitely, irrespective of their public claims, as their track record demonstrates that they are more than willing to violate copyright and data privacy laws when it's convenient.

“To say nothing” is right. Nothing has been said - not the actual energy costs of the API, nothing has been said to justify it as “considerable”, nothing has been said on the projected costs, nothing on the context of those costs, nothing on the development of those costs over time, nothing on the source of that energy (is it running off of crude oil?), nothing said really at all.

Maybe I'm asking for too much but I'd like a little more than this. An assertion has been made - that individual queries cost “considerable” energy. Am I the only one who wants to see that sourced? Who wants to see “considerable” defined properly, put into context, and justified?

I don't think it's obvious to everyone that the costs are considerable. Am I just way behind on this? Is it common knowledge now? I don't think so, having looked into it a bit it has seemed to me that a query to the API is indeed quite cheap, you would be reasonable to compare it to running a lightbulb for some number of minutes. Is that considerable?

I mean, if you're going to say that a developer surely knows that these costs are so considerable, it feels worth taking time to: a) Charitably assume that they don't b) Show them that the costs are indeed considerable

What's “considerable”?

I can run mixtral on M3 MBP using 50W-70W of power for the entire machine.

That's comparable to how much an external monitor uses. I can get an answer from the LLM in seconds, but my monitor is on for hours and hours. Is having a second monitor too much?

My gaming PC draws 400W. Is gaming over four times worse than having a chat with an LLM?

So is Gentoo evil?

Looks like nobody here even bothered to check what this thing does, and it's just all unfounded ranty speculation here.

It's off by default.

It's invoked entirely manually (Edit -> Engage AI). It opens a separate text box that merely sends a question to OpenAI API. It seems to send only the question entered, without any context from the terminal.

The response is also separate text box that does not run commands automatically. You can review and edit the command, and Shift+Enter sends it to the terminal.

OpenAI is a pre-paid API, and has quotas and spending limits. It was a faff to set it up, because the default quota was 0, and there are different per-user per-project quotas and keys.

Essentially that's just a text box that makes an HTTP request. Its existence may be a faux pas, but the comments here “oh no it's going to rm -rf / and then bankrupt you” are just uninformed rants.

Honestly this thread has me extremely disappointed in Lobste.rs comments. This is fabricated outrage with no substance.

This is literally a case of: it's an option, don't use it if you don't want to.

The stock terminal app on Mac is fine. It's more featureful than the fd.o world terminals I've used out of the box; I've never had a desire to reach into the iTerm featureset.

The stock terminal app on Mac is not fine. Please do not use it if you can avoid it.

Aside from the fact that it supports basically no terminal features invented in the last 20 years (including 24 bit color), it has known bugs:

It prints escape sequences it does not understand. If a terminal does not support an escape sequence, it should not turn around and print it to the terminal. See 1, 2.

It does not handle Unicode grapheme clusters properly at all. See Mitchell Hashimoto's writeup on this topic for details. Relevant quote:

[Apple Terminal is] living in its own cursed little world

“Do not use it if you can avoid it” sounds kind of extreme when your reasons are that it doesn't have All The Colors and it might do obscurely incorrect things with some escape sequences. I've been using Terminal.app for (literally) 25 years without noticing these problems.

From that post you linked to:

when I did proper grapheme clustering, fish shell would redraw my prompt in the wrong place when I moved my cursor. 😞

This is supposed to make me, as a terminal user, want proper grapheme clustering? Maybe in a few years when this all gets sorted out and I don't encounter weird regressions…

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No, we should get over this AI hype.

If this AI thing is hype, and you acknowledge it is hype, and you suggest that we should not give into it then… Why are you being so reactive to it?

There are a million tedious tech trends that come and go. Why does this one specifically require external signaling of terminal software choice?

I would have had exactly the same reaction if they announced new optional cryptocurrency functionality

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I would be fine of getting rid of the whole ad industry too. For the same reasons and some more.

Alright, may I recommend you stop promoting google cloud usage on your personal blog? Maybe not hosting video game servers in said cloud? Perhaps put some sort of disclaimer up about the dangers of cloud usage to the environment as you explain to people how to use it? Have you measured the carbon footprint in any scope for these projects you run?

For article on hosting a counterstrike 2 server via kubernetes would be a great place to then discuss strategies to reduce the carbon footprint of those deployments, if I may offer blog topic that I'd upmarsey. I'm not asking you to lowtechmag the server, just show any awareness at all of it in your descriptions of how to use cloud computing.

You may find that unreasonable, but I don't. Any time I recommend cloud computing OR discuss home computing technology, I make sure to at least mention that in aggregate these practices drive up carbon emissions in the scope-{2,3} sense. I think it's responsible, and since we both care about these issues I'm recommending this in good faith. It would better reflect your advocacy.

That guy trolling is what made me want to post this !anticommunists !codecels