Just another example of why everyone needs to start running LLMs locally and not have them refuse to do things at random on a 'cloud' service.

It's because the government threw vast amounts of cheap credit into the economy which turned a short-term crash into a long-term depression where kids can't afford houses and the cost of living is increasing by far more than the fake inflation figures economists churn out.

And it's also why we now have a Potemkin economy where nothing really works and we pretend to get rich by selling houses to each other at ever-increasing prices.

The 1930s depression was also caused by economists who refused to let things crash and wasn't resolved until their plans were scrapped after WWII.

"Economist" should be one of the easiest jobs to replace with AI. Ir's not as though they ever do much other than says whatever their employer wants them to say.

Why is it that "modernize" always seems to mean "do more to turn humans into bug-men"?

Probably due to Microsoft forcing a lot of people to buy new PCs to run Windows 11.

I think the British way would be to require a license to vape.

Iran has been "two weeks away from a nuclear bomb" for at least thirty years now. It's all been part of Israel's plan to convince American boys to die for Israel in a war on Iran.

Well, they got their war and it turns out that a) no sane American boy wants to die for Israel and b) all those expensive American wunderwaffen don't win wars.

So Iran will do what it wants. If it wants nukes, there's nothing American will do about it. And the Iranians now clearly see that the only way to be safe from American attacks is to have nukes like North Korea does.

As for Sharia law, we're going to have Christian Sharia law or Muslim Sharia law. There's no future in which 'uman rights' and 'wimmin's rights' continue to exist much longer because they're utterly destroying Western society.

Yes. A year ago we were scrapping old PCs at work so I took one home thinking it might come in useful one day. Thanks to the AI Bubble I turned it into a home server this year instead of building something new and it works fine with Linux even though Windows 11 won't even run on it. The only real downside is that it's an old i7 so the idle consumption is around 40W when it could probably be quite a bit lower with a more modern CPU and motherboard.

China could well find they have plenty of old hardware Windows won't run on that they can use after installing Linux on them.

'nvidia-smi' tells you pretty much everything except the percentage of the GPU usage per app. Doesn't have the pretty graphs, but most people who care about those things probably have their own Grafana setup for it.

> I hate AI as much as the next person that has been in IT for 30 years

As someone who's been in IT for 30 years, I think it's great. But I'm also aware that it means I may have to go looking for another line of work in a year or two.

I'm also also aware that if the AI companies start charging the actual cost of their products instead of massively subsidizing it then replacing me doesn't look like such a great deal.

No, LLMs are pretty good these days, at least in software development. Yesterday I was helping on a Python project and I don't know Python that well; I was able to use Claude to make the changes I needed to make, sanity-check its changes and get the work done much faster than I would have by myself.

Also I was on Windows last week and didn't have a Markdown viewer installed so I got my local Deepseek LLM to write one for me in .Net, which I also don't know very well. Wouldn't ship it to customers but it worked well for what I needed.

What it's becoming increasingly bad at is any kind of creative writing because it's being trained to produce Corporatespeak instead.

This is the only time in my life that the value of computers and parts is rising rather than falling.

Literally the only reason we're in this mess is because governments have been keeping interest rates artificially low for thirty years to enrich their cronies. No company would be borrowing trillions of dollars if interest rates were 10-15%.

> a 30 TB Iron Wolf Pro HDD is ~$1 600.

And that's at AI Bubble prices, not the prices these people would have been paying. I bought some 20TB drives last year and they were about $300 each... so for $2000 they could have had a local RAID with more than 50TB capacity.

Backups are only difficult on Windows because apps store data in random places all over the system instead of in your Documents folder. If Windows was a real operating system you'd just backup your home folder and that would be everything you might need.

I moved all the user folders from C: (a small boot SSD) to d: (an 8TB SSD) and it's insanely hard to stop programs still writing to C: because "obviously that's where the user files are".