Well Anthropic chose to settle their piracy lawsuit out of court which probably indicates that they thought there was a reasonable chance they could have lost the case. No legally binding precedents set yet though afaik.

“AI can’t replace you but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can’t do your job” - Cory Doctorow

Grid-tie is technically legal in my area, but the hoops you have to jump through are insane and there’s a high likelihood of being denied by the power company over the most bullshit of minutiae (

That’s insane. In the UK most solar installs are grid tied and it’s standard practice to get paid by the utility company for back-feeding since they can reduce their natural gas consumption.

I pay £0.26 ($0.34) per kWh imported and received £0.10 ($0.13) for export. Some utility tariffs are dynamic with demand so if you have a battery system you can do arbitrage with import/export

Yeah I agree. Small models is the way. You can also use LoRa/QLoRa adapters to “fine tune” the same big model for specific tasks and swap the use case in realtime. This is what apple do with apple intelligence. You can outperform a big general LLM with an SLM if you have a nice specific use case and some data (which you can synthesise in come cases)

Unlike the dotcom bubble, Another big aspect of it is the unit cost to run the models.

Traditional web applications scale really well. The incremental cost of adding a new user to your app is basically nothing. Fractions of a cent. With LLMs, scaling is linear. Each machine can only handle a few hundred users and they’re expensive to run:

Big beefy GPUs are required for inference as well as training and they require a large amount of VRAM. Your typical home gaming GPU might have 16gb vram, 32 if you go high end and spend $2500 on it (just the GPU, not the whole pc). Frontier models need like 128gb VRAM to run and GPUs manufactured for data centre use cost a lot more. A state of the art Nvidia h200 costs $32k. The servers that can host one of these big frontier models cost, at best, $20 an hour to run and can only handle a handful of user requests so you need to scale linearly as your subscriber count increases. If you’re charging $20 a month for access to your model, you are burning a user’s monthly subscription every hour for each of these monster servers you have turned on. That’s generous and assumes they’re not paying the “on-demand” price of $60/hr.

Sam Altman famously said OpenAI are losing money on their $200/mo subscriptions.

If/when there is a market correction, a huge factor of the amount of continued interest (like with the internet after dotcom) is whether the quality of output from these models reflects the true, unsubsidized price of running them. I do think local models powered by things like llamacpp and ollama and which can run on high end gaming rigs and macbooks might be a possible direction for these models. Currently though you can’t get the same quality as state-of-the-art models from these small, local LLMs.

I think there are two things. There’s definitely a level of brainwashing where mediocre MBAs who have built a career on “failing upwards” project their own lack of scruples onto their workforce i.e. “if I worked from home I’d just play golf all day so I assume this is true for everyone”. They genuinely don’t understand management models beyond micromanagement because they have no frame of reference for “self-motivated” or “autonomous”.

Then the other factor is that many of the c-level execs at these companies or their bosses (the board) have commercial real estate portfolios. Propping up the value of those units is contingent on companies renting office space. The bosses know which side their bread is buttered and even if they don’t have skin in the game directly will happily do favours for ‘friends’ who they want to impress to help them climb that next rung of the ladder.

Relative privation is when someone dismisses or minimizes a problem simply because worse problems exist: “You can’t complain about X when Y exists.”

I’m talking about the practical reality that you must prioritize among legitimate problems. If you’re marooned at sea in a sinking ship you need to repair the hull before you try to fix the engines in order to get home.

It’s perfectly valid to say “I can’t focus on everything so I will focus on the things that provide the biggest and most tangible improvement to my situation first”. It’s fallacious to say “Because worse things exist, AGI concerns doesn’t matter.”

Here’s how I see it: we live in an attention economy where every initiative with a slew of celebrities attached to it is competing for eyeballs and buy in. It adds to information fatigue and analysis paralysis . In a very real sense if we are debating AGI we are not debating the other stuff. There are only so many hours in a day.

If you take the position that AGI is basically not possible or at least many decades away (I have a background in NLP/AI/LLMs and I take this view - not that it’s relevant in the broader context of my comment) then it makes sense to tell people to focus on solving more pressing issues e.g. nascent fascism, climate collapse, late stage capitalism etc.

A lot of people in England get Turkey Teeth these days. Few things are more godless than that.

Presumably it’s selling snake oil and convincing people to trust them?

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In the United Kingdom yes because of our authoritarian Online Safety Act that came into power earlier this year. If I join a discord channel marked as nsfw I get a prompt for id which I bypass with a VPN in another country.

Same take my friend. I agree - Tim’s personal politics are kinda irrelevant in this context. Best for apple=compliance with whoever is in charge so they get to keep their money printer. Corpos gonna corpo

You’re giving apple too much credit. Tim Apple literally gifted trump a golden statue. The press are reporting that this is directly in response to a request from the DOJ. This isn’t apple having a moral epiphany and thinking they’re doing ice targets a favour. Corporations don’t do that sort of thing unless it will make them $$$

My Gmail account is old enough to buy drinks in a bar in the US (21)

At the lower end of the budget you could consider libreboot - it’s a one person band who ships refurbished Lenovo thinkpads with Linux pre-installed

In the UK we already have a law where isps block porn by default (blacklisting) the adult who took out the plan can contact the isp and ask them to opt out of these blocks. That’s been a thing for about 10 years. You can own a Pay-as-you-go sim as a minor but you have to send government id to prove you are over 18 to get the adult content filtering turned off.

That’s one of the things that made it clear to me that the new law is an authoritarian data mining operation and blatant power grab. Like… We already have these tools in place. If you don’t want your kid accessing porn, don’t opt out of the filters provided by your isp.

You could argue that putting the onus on the platform is more effective at “protecting kids” than having the isps maintain blacklists but there will always be small sites that don’t comply and enterprising kids who find a way around any block. Just like the law requires you to be 18 to buy alcohol or tobacco here but there are always dodgy shops who sell tobacco to underage kids. There are older siblings and relatives willing to buy cigarettes and alcohol for underage teens.

This was never about protecting the children. That was the Trojan horse used to justify these laws to the technically uninformed.

I can’t imagine any sane person who lives their life guided by marketing hype instead of direct knowledge and experience.

I mean fair enough but also… That makes the vast majority of managers, MBAs, salespeople and “normies” like your grandma and Uncle Bob insane.

Actually questioning stuff that sales people tell you and using critical thinking is a pretty rare skill in this day and age.

Regular reminder that Ben and Jerry’s are wholly owned by Unilever who definitely do some shady shit.