1077
Am I the only one bothered by this? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 5 days ago (6 children)

My reasoning was that when you buy from a big business, then 100% of what you spend goes there, while less than 100% of your spending go to big business if you buy from a small business that supports big businesses itself.

It doesn't make sense to compare the total amount a small business contributes to a big business with the total amount an individual person contributes, unless you have some further factors you think I have failed to take into account.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    Why wouldn't it make sense? If I want to minimize the amount of support corporate LLMs get, it absolutely makes sense to stop endorsing other businesses that use it.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    The original claim I made was that supporting small business is better than directly supporting big businesses. You are 100% right about minimising the amount corporate LLMs get, it's just that your responding to my comparison of small business vs big business. What you want to do is to support neither of them, so I wouldn't really spend more time analysing what I said since I don't think it's relevant to you.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (3 children)

    Yes, I don't really support this "lesser evil" type argument, since both options in the end proliferate corporate slop. If a business can't exist without using corporate LLMs, it shouldn't exist.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Black and white opinions are fine on the internet but they don't work very well in real life. You have to have nuance and make educated choices.

    If the the small business doesn't use AI, they sure as hell still are using Intuit for bookkeeping or Sysco for supplies or Microsoft for email. You can't get any from indirectly supporting the mega corps. But you can minimize your impact by making smart choices, like picking the lesser evil sometimes.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Yes, I'm minimizing my impact by not supporting said small businesses. You can't rationalize away your subpar decisions by claiming "nuance".

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  • [–] 0 points 5 days ago

    Sure, you get to pick with you wallet and go with the causes that are meaningful to you.

    Personally I do not buy products that are made by Nestle or Proctor & Gamble. Because of this sometimes the other option for shampoo is then going to be a Unilever product. Great - don't really like them either but don't like them less than I don't like Proctor & Gamble and I still need shampoo.

    Sometimes to support a small business that doesn't use AI posters I might not just have to pay more than I would at Walmart or Target. They might have gotten the supplies for their homemade soap on Amazon and and the only way I can pay is thru their Shopify point of sale system and then they emailed me a special offer via Mailchimp and then followed up with on email set up in Microsoft 365. And then at the start of every year, they used Turbo Tax to file taxes. Did I pick the lesser evil?

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