I would assume, that the fines are on top of all damage compensation these crooks will have to pay. I am also a bit unsure, whether the crooks will have the funds to both reimburse their victims and pay the fines, especially now, when they rightfully face decades of FPMITA prison. Not sure, whether raising the fines would have any effect on the actual outcome.

I am fully aware, that very few years from now we'll be laughing at the models we use today, just as we laugh at the hallucinating mess we admired so much two years ago. GPUs will improve, CPU memory bandwidth will go way up, we'll have Raspberry Pi like systems which can do quality inference. I look forward to using each and every one of them.

However: some people want to run lobsters today, and they are mostly left out to dry for now. These folks paid a few dozen dollars per month to perform mundane tasks like creating optimized grocery shopping lists or scheduling appointments, and now their operators are about to discover the true cost of these toys. Few of these operators can afford the quoted "US$ 1000-5000 daily".

Qwen 3.5 is light years ahead of llama 3 and deepseek, but no comparison to Claude Opus 4.6. Sorry. Plus: the full 35B model requires either a massive GPU (in the multi thousand $ range), or at least a lot of RAM (which is currently a bit pricey). Either way: I have the strong impression, that OpenClaw will lose quite a few users over this.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but qwen is no match for Anthropic's premium models. I've used both for coding relatively easy stuff, and qwen 3.5 puts lots of bugs even into three page shell scripts, while Claude's code can often be taken as is.

Why does this matter a lot? The biggest threat against lobsters is "prompt injection", and only top of the line LLMs are moderately resistant to it. Running an OpenClaw install based on an entry level LLM can be very risky once you give it access to passwords or personal data.

Anthropic evidently knows this, that's why they see little risk when they massively jack up their prices. Those dropping out now were never the type of people who would ever throw significant money at the effort.

We all remember, how openclaw agents tend to take names with a crustacean reference, like MJ Rathbun (named after zoologist) taking aim at Scott Shambaugh.

And now a dude called "Krebs" (German word for Cancer) shows up in the scene ...

PS: to the humor impaired: I know who Brian Krebs is ;-)

You may conflate Russia's block of Telegram service and Starlink's sudden disconnection of Russian users. I would suggest, that the latter rather than the former was the main reason for the success of Ukraine's counter attack.

I was in the epicenter of Silicon Valley right when the dotcom bubble started inflating unreasonably. Looking at the level of douche baggery drawing millions from clueless but enthusiastic investors was breath taking. Yes, PEPE is trash, PEPE2 (whatever this is) is likely even worse trash, but neither are worse than some of the things I saw back then, and neither deserved their crazy valuations.

PEPE and these pathetic meme coins were by far not the only tokens created in this time frame: many tokens were created to finance and support otherwise quite reasonable projects, many of which floundered nonetheless (which is typical for startups and does not necessarily imply fraud. BTDT.).

Please tell me, what percentage of Silicon Valley startups survived in this time frame, what percentage of "new media" outfits made it through this time, and which restaurants opened and stayed open. This is really nothing new. This is, how capitalism is supposed to work: present idea, find initial funding, see, whether you can make money with this. Fail early, fail often, find your path to success.

You realize, that most web startups from late 90ies went up in smoke, but you'll agree, that the web is here to stay ....

By the time you shoot at your own people with machine guns, and no, sniper rifles won't kill thousands of people in so few days, the economy is about the least of your concerns. I assume, that the monsters committing these crimes are well fed and have all the water they need, even if Iranian economy shuts down completely.

The situation in Iran has moved from "murderous fascist dictatorship a la Chile" to "completely nuts like Sudan".

Yes, libs have their own share of agenda driven "experts", and caused a lot of damage with their drivel. Some of their "experts" got enough traction to cause real damage (inflation thanks to UBI like covid payouts, increased public hostility to strangers thanks to stupid open border policy, downtown districts deteriorating thanks to open hard drug use, women's sport turning into a charade).

Still, the damage caused by the current agenda driven "experts" like "RFK's end vaccinations", "CBP/DHS chase the darkie" and "trump crypto embezzlement fund" seem to be much worse and also insensitive to popular backlash. These new agendas also do little to fix the problems created by left wing "experts".

There are serious considerations to remove all vaccine requirements, which could create changes in liability insurance for vaccine side effects (yes, they exist, but are still a good trade for all the side effects of the actual disease they prevent), and also in insurance coverage of these (sometimes expensive) vaccines. Yes, the discussion about this is ongoing, but it's clearly visible where Kennedy is trying to take this. He is quite open about this.

Could it be, that an empty oil tanker doesn't hold much oil and is therefore not such a big issue?

As others have already pointed out to you elsewhere (with little effect it seems): yes, anti-vax used to be a left wing hippie thing, which was always considered fringe and never went mainstream there. Contrast this with the right, where Trump himself was in charge of getting the covid vaccine developed, praised it and got vaccinated, only to surrender to a torrent of lunatics demanding otherwise and effectively forcing him to change the tune. I can not remember an anti vaxxer running the show in HHS for the libs, and Robert Kennedy knew exactly which party would eventually elevate him to this position.

Ukraine has severely damaged some Russian shadow fleet tankers. If they are not loaded, it doesn't seem to be much of an "ecological disaster". If, however, a NATO member country overtly sinks a Russian ship, the resulting effects may be much, much worse than some local oil spill.

This is nice for us to know, but Joe Shmoe Microsoft user will not be able to make that determination and can, unfortunately, not rely on amateur level sanity checks "the message comes from microsoft.com, so it's probably legit". This is what we teach our friends and relatives "no, USPS/DHL/UPS won't contact you from an delewareflowers.com domain". And Microsoft actively destroys this one bit of helpful information through their pathetic domain name setup.

We wouldn't need any of these, at least in this case here, if the link contained therein pointed to a domain, which even imbeciles could positively identify as legit. No, get[dot]activate[dot]win" does not fit into this category.