> Of course the law matters. What is that supposed to mean?

Have you even looked at legal decisions in the last few years? Or the blatantly illegal actions of big corporations which have been ignored for decades?

It's cute that you think the law still matters.

> IP theft and subsidies are how they cheat.

You mean IP theft like scraping the Internet, downloading masses of illegal copies of books, feeding it into your algorithm and then claiming to own it?

"No company using open weight models may do business with the US government, because Security."

Again, the Merchant Caste are cowards and would immediately drop any use of unapproved AI rather than lose that business.

Can you point to any history which has been destroyed, specifically? The last copy of a historic work?

I can't believe anyone who values information to any degree would do this.

"keep the stuff AI is killing"

Like what, exactly?

- Reddit, which is a minefield of misinformation and crazy ideologues
- Wikipedia, which has an official stance of ideological filtering, having banned the founder
- StackExchange - hasn't been relevant in years, likely the source of much of the AI coding hallucination and bad agent tooling
- Google - hasn't been a useful search engine since at least 2018, mostly just an ad delivery system now
- not sure what else

Meanwhile, I can still read books published before 2020. But I can also build things quickly to read them to me out loud (even reading a paper book, if I so desired), and there are millions of APIs I can directly and quickly harness to generate a ridiculous amount of information which was locked behind hours of work trying to decipher horrible API documentation + coding.

I don't see it as a loss.

This new attitude to LLMs is the modern equivalent of banning export of crypto with keys over 40 bits long. That simply encouraged foreigners to start up crypto companies which could sell 128+ bit encryption to businesses all around the world.

The more censored American LLMs become the more people and businesses will use non-American LLMs. Because America isn't the only place that has smart people and given China's average IQ is supposedly a few points higher and they have far more people odds are they have far more smart people than us.

> What lunacy is this? It never was.

People have been doing it for decades. Half the open-source software available today will go and download three hundred dependencies from the Internet when you first run it.

That used to be safe so long as you didn't install weird software from weird places which would inevitably be full of malware. Now that low-trust people are running big business, you can't install it from them either.

It's simply no longer possible to randomly install software from the Internet because most of it will be malware, even if it comes through Windows Update.

Free speech includes lying.

Last I looked adding a Z80 to your custom chip design was pretty much free so it's highly likely that low-end embedded systems will be using them for many years to come. Of course they may farm out the programming work to LLMs since it's a simple processor which can't run a lot of lines of code.

That does seem to be the plan.

"Sure the code is crap and no-one understands it, but if we're still working here in two years when we need to make major changes we'll just get the AI to rewrite it from scratch."

Of course that completely invalidates two years of in-field testing, bugfixes and security fixes, but who cares? Just ship it and fix the bugs later.

This is why they should never be a position of power. They will do anything and surrender any principle to make a buck.

This is also why large-scale commercial "AI" is doomed unless they can ban local models. AI is meant to be a tool but it's a tool which refuses to let you use it for random reasons.

Deltas don't revolt, they walk away and let things collapse. Revolutions happen when the old elite becomes calcified and inept and a new elite takes over by force.

Right now we're obviously at the 'calcified and inept' stage but the old elite have ruthlessly culled or co-opted any potential leaders of the new elite for decades so there's no-one out there in a position to stage a takeover. Hence that likely won't happen until after the Deltas walk away and nothing works any more.

This is one reason that so many of the oligarchs are desperate to replace Deltas with AI. But that won't work because AI can't unclog their toilet and likely won't be able to any time soon.

"CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units."

That's gotta be money laundering. CD sales have decreased an average of 12% per year, for the past quarter century.