The government told social media companies to silence people who were critical of Biden.
When did this happen? Citation, please.
You are aware that Joe Biden, while seemingly a nice enough guy, was wildly unpopular as a leader, including among the left? It was the Democrats, after all, who convinced him not to run for a second term.
Nothing what is being accused of here covers the act of monopolising. Following a common standard approach is not anti-trust, in fact whole bodies exist to standardise how things are done, and whole industry bodies self regulate the way industries operate.
What's being alleged here is closer to price fixing, which is also an antitrust violation. Hypothetically, let's say four major automakers got together and said, "We all know we have access to the latest in brake technology, but we collectively agree not to deploy it until two years from now," presumably for business reasons. That kind of collusion is illegal.
Everybody seems to be complaining
So I ask you (everybody): Is anything good? Cuz we ain't gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop without a UI. Do we all switch to Enlightenment?
Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.
I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.
local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.
The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.
And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.
Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?
Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?
No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.
Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.
So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?
Your comment is pants.
North Korea is using a TRS-80 running Eliza
Surely you know that's an absurdly dismissive opinion? North Korea has the capacity to gain access to anything anyone else does, especially if it comes from China.
Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)
It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.
agencies can't be trusted to oversee themselves.
We knew that. But now we have proof.
Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.
This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.
And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.
Someone please bash some sense into Apple.
I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.
Mine too. I was starting to run out of storage and I _finally_ took the time to set up Thunderbird. This made it easier to delete all the accumulated spam.
Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.
It's really useful as a spam-sink.
Nebula is actually the one streaming service I ever subscribed to for a while, mostly because I like documentaries and for all I've heard their business model is more in favour of the actual creators.
Dude, what is your problem?
I mention not owning a TV because it's topical - it means I didn't not notice the quality going down slowly over time, so I might notice the difference more than those who did.
Nowhere did I imply that not owning a TV makes me better in any way. It's a personal choice, that's all.
Why you jump on that so aggressively - maybe ask yourself why that is.
A sine curve goes off to infinity, or at least the end of the blackboard. -- Prof. Steiner
