Bluntly, they can't. That genie is already out of the box for anything already available; and even going forward - Unless China itself blocks export, there's no realistic way to stop us from using a non-Chinese non-US mirror to grab them.

Realistically, hardware is the sole limiting factor for open-weight models, so restricting H200's is probably the closest we can come to a meaningful embargo. There's no practical way for most of us to run a model like Kimi K3 with almost 600GB (at BF16) of weights. Even using CPU offloading and/or multi-GPU sharding (if those are even possible for K3, I haven't looked at it in depth yet), the performance drop would give a throughput best measured in minutes or even hours per token, not particularly useful.

What this will accomplish is exactly what the OP quoted - It won't be possible to run these legally, so virtually all commercial use would be DOA. Joe Hobbyist couldn't care less though.

Because what amounts to a simple financial breach of contract is being enforced unilaterally and extra-judicially - And by parties traditionally known for being some of the sleaziest and least ethical bastards on the planet at that.

In a situation where the burden of proof is on the lender and the disruption to the customer's life severe, we should absolutely not be allowing ScumCo Lending to pull that trigger absent a court order.

To be clear, I'm not claiming there's no precedent for this (and when we're talking about microwaves and TVs, hey, pay up deadbeats!). But phones are unique in that it's virtually impossible to function in the modern world without one. Personally, I might get two calls a week and missing those wouldn't disrupt me much; but I literally can't even log in at work without an MFA app tied to my phone.

I was actually wondering exactly the opposite - If this only works for three satellites per launch, would it be overall cheaper and easier to just launch three new satellites? Not to mention, the tech on a new satellite is likely far better than was available ten+ years ago.

Sure, it's one launch vs three, but moving between different orbits and physically latching on to another satellite is delicate work. I wouldn't be surprised if, on average, one of those three attempts went catastrophically wrong.

As someone who demands my devices are my devices, this is complete unacceptable.

As an investor, though - Let's be serious. This is an extension of the "buy here pay here" model loved by used car scammers everywhere to prey on those who can't really afford it but need one anyway. And those are stupidly profitable, because what are people going to do, just not have a car / phone?

It's morally repugnant but fiscally a slam-dunk.

I might have agreed with you 20 years ago.

The rise of modern streaming all but ended music piracy because a cheap and easy legal option is available. We have proof of concept, this is effectively a settled issue.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People generally prefer to stay legal as long as the money is reasonable and the friction to use what you've fairly paid for is sufficiently low.

Meanwhile, we're talking about Microsoft "letting" us do something many of us are already doing via emulation. Gee, you bought a physical disc rather than a worthless digital entitlement? Sucks to be you, pay again... Except... Yeah, I really have no need for this new option when the old one is still superior.

And to be clear, I'm in no way talking about actual piracy. I've paid for a looot of media over my lifetime, and quite often I'll still use a "fixed" version because it's in every way the superior product.

You're proposing we hold kids responsible for violating laws created under the pretense of kids being too irresponsible to safely use social media.

You see the problem there, right?

we're about to buy a $2400 m4 pro mac mini to grind away at a useful but low-medium priority task in perpetuity using one of the qwen 3.6 models. The ROI vs haiku api cost is less than 5 months. SOTA models are cool but a quantized 30B class model can do most any batched work if structured carefully, and you have a fairly flexible failure budget

The big issue is GDDR6 memory which is pretty new and there's not a ton of capacity already, and it's all been bought out through the end of 2028. Plants take 3 years to come online and are expensive (Read: risky) to build if the demand falls off
 
I would love to be able to buy a 4TB GDDR7 machine and never have to use cloud services again, but it's not happening before 2035

Move further south, I guess. The rest of the country is much warmer, more livable, and doesn't freeze solid for three months out of the year. The fact that you have to change your clocks twice a year to cope with it isn't my problem.

Given your user ID # I think you know the reason(s)

It is like, $20 a month and far, far cheaper than cable or whatever. I don't like paying for services, but I don't like dealing with ads even more. If there's an option for an ad-free experience, I will always take that option.

Basically everyone who works in a regulated industry, or industry that should be does, yes.

I've been paying for Kagi ($10/mo?) now for over a year across both personal and work devices and I don't miss it at all. The only time I still use google is if I need to buy a product and want to see what is available besides what is on amazon, i'll seach "toaster oven" to get inundated with ads (and then 12-48 hours later see ads for toaster oven across all my social medias and youtube). Turning off the googs cold-turkey and then selectively using it, it's been very interesting to see what kind of targeted ads I see.

Jet fuel is set to skyrocket by August and I don't think jet travel will remain affordable for most of society. Looking at the proportion of the airplane that is Economy Plus, or Economy Plus-Plus, about 5%, I don't think there's enough demand for a tremendous amount of supersonic travel between any two cities besides perhaps NYC and LA, and NYC and Atlanta/Miami