IDK, it seems almost transparent to me those in control of the US are doing a racketeering-like thing to solicit bribes, and doing whatever whoever bribes them the most wants. They aren’t thinking on a national level, just personal; and would burn the US or any other country to the ground to gain more power and wealth.

Alibaba has released Qwen models under Apache licenses (and they are some of the best models that can reasonably be ran locally). Some argue that models aren’t really open source unless the training code and datasets are made available though.

The Fediverse is social media. Wouldn’t instances be required to do age verification? I mean, I guess that’d only be enforceable on Australian instances, but it seems like the whole world is going in that direction.

Port forward/poke holes in firewall + dynamic DNS.

I’ve been going down this rabbit hole myself. Already set up a solar Meshtastic node and MeshCore repeater. Kinda cool, very low bandwidth and pretty unreliable though.

It’s my understanding that encryption is illegal on amateur radio bands. I’m thinking about getting a license anyways; looks fun.

HaLow, BATMAN, Reticulum and stuff like that also look cool, but I haven’t messed around with those yet.

I think radio will always have bandwidth/congestion problems. It’s like everyone within range is using the same “wire.”

I also like overlay networks like Tor and I2P, but it’s possible those will eventually be blocked or made illegal in many countries, if governments keep heading in the direction they seem to be heading.

Not really. TSMC has a near monopoly on the advanced fabrication, and ASML has a near monopoly on the lithographic machines TSMC uses. Nvidia is a fab-less designer. Google has its TPUs, and Amazon has some kind of custom chip too.

I was thinking about this earlier. The password manager browser plugin I use (Proton Pass) defaults to staying unlocked for the entire browser session. If someone physically gained access to my PC while my password manager was unlocked, they’d be able to access absolutely every password I have. I changed the behavior to auto-lock and ask for a 6-digit PIN, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t take an impractical amount of time to brute-force a 6-digit PIN.

Before I started use a password manager, I’d use maybe 3-4 passwords for different “risks,” (bank, email, shopping, stupid shit that made me sign up, etc). Not really sure if a password manager is better (guess it depends on the “threat” you’re worried about).

Edit: Also on my phone, it just unlocks with a fingerprint, and I think law enforcement are allowed to force you to biometrically unlock stuff (or can unlock with fingerprints they have on file).

I believe these cars drive on the same roads all day, whereas people are likely to be driving in and out of areas these systems are not familiar with. I suppose a good comparison would be of a taxi driver that only operates in the same area as the driverless cars, if that exists.

The judiciary “interprets” the constitution. Trump filled the judiciary with loyalist or otherwise ideologically aligned judges during this term and his previous. The supreme court ruled last year that the president has immunity, and the president has the ability to pardon people, so it seems the administration is pretty much “above the law.” Even when the courts do push back, they’re acting like they’re powerless, and the admin’s tactics seems to be just ignoring, stalling, or taking the “ain’t no rules says a dog can’t play basketball” approach to working around the courts. Yes, the constitution has been severely weakened, and will probably continue to weaken.

Ain’t broke and I can’t be bothered to update. Not accessible publicly either. It also runs some software with very specific and brittle dependencies and I don’t care to risk breaking it. If distro is EOL (probably is) then it’d be a pretty time consuming getting everything set up again.

When something doesn’t work. I.e. when an app update causes incompatibility with a service. I think I have one server that’s a few years without an update (distro version may actually be EOL for all I know).

IonQ’s timeline doesn’t look realistic. Perhaps IBM’s is; idk anything about this space. I see it’s been 6 years since quantum advantage has been demonstrated, but nothing useful has been done yet. Hard to speculate on timelines when the tech is still in its infancy.

The problem is the capitalist investor class, by and large, determines what work will be done, what kinds of jobs there will be, and who will work those jobs. They are becoming increasingly out of touch with reality as their wealth and power grows and seem to be trying to mold the world into something, somewhere along the lines of what Curtis Yarven advocates for, that most people would consider very dystopian.

This discussion is also ignoring the fact that currently, 95% of AI projects fail, and studies show that LLM use hurts the productivity of programmers. But yeah, there will almost surely be breakthroughs in the future that will produce more useful AI tech; nobody knows what the timeline for that is though.

Yeah, that could also provide an incentive for companies to produce stuff in ways that reduce carcinogens, yet still have some amount. I think traditional bacon that doesn’t use synthetic curing salts contain less nitrates, for example.

For these large businesses, I imagine they get favorable deals, and all the executives probably know each other and scratch each-other’s backs. For smaller businesses, AWS can decrease time-to-market, it’s easy to find people who are already familiar with it, and is seen as less risky than going with some smaller provider. Though, I hate the “cloud” with a passion, and whenever I’m given the choice, I avoid it. It’s quite a bit cheaper in the long run to avoid cloud providers too. On one long project I worked on, we hadn’t had downtime on any of our VPSs longer than a couple minutes over the course of 8 years.

Hmm, looks like he was prejudice 10 years ago, and perhaps a white supremacist before that. But, he called rural-whites racist more recently (and they definitely are more racist in aggregate), so looks like his POV changed. IDK, that seems fine to me.

Excessive use of em-dashes, emojis, and other characters that aren’t on standard keyboards. I think these companies purposely have the models generate this stuff so it is easily detectable (so they avoid training on their own slop).

The first one at least seems to think people want the people who do work for them to not have a life. Indicates they think their customers have no empathy or class solidarity; which is probably mostly true. We use a lot of products that involve slave labor or something close to it.

I don’t know the answer, but during 2008 onwards (seems like the economy didn’t fully recover until the end of Obama’s presidency), every industry slowed down. Was hard for me to get a fast food job or consistent minimum wage assembly line work through temp agencies. Things can go into vicious positive feedback loops during downturns (investors afraid to invest due to bad economic outlook -> factories and such don’t get built or expanded -> unemployment rises -> people spend less -> companies start laying off -> economic outlook worsens -> investors selling and moving to "safer’ assets -> …). The entire banking system pretty much imploded during 2008; I don’t know how much exposure banks have to AI (commercial real estate is another thing to worry about though). With any luck the AI crash would be more like the dot-com crash, which mostly just hurt one industry (but I remember my father talking about factory layoffs during that too).

A lot of the companies and people responsible for having all these datacenters built are heavily invested in SMR. So they’ll probably be used anyways.