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" ?

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.

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.

Seriously, if you want to be far better educated about this issue, listen to the All-in podcast. These guys know way more than everyone else in the media is telling you. The latest horseshit is the so-called "whistleblower" who worked for AI company for a mere six weeks and suddenly knows everything. He also had zero activity on his X account before spouting off. Oh, and by the way, before going to work at the AI company, he worked for an NGO whose sole purpose is to bork AI.

Then there's the Hugging Face issue. Oh, did they forget to tell you that Hugging Face left API keys in public repositories? Yeah, didn't think so.

This is all FUD designed to do two things. One, to gin up support for yet another unaccountable government agency. The big two or three will have regulator capture and no new startup will ever be able to get off the ground. If you like the FDA taking ten years to approve a new drug that can save lives, wait till you want to get a new AI model approved. Does "never" work for you? The second reason is that China is definitely behind much of this FUD because they are going full-tilt on AI. You want China to have superior AI to the rest of the world?

There is no way in hell that Flock ever comes out of this as a viable company. No amount of "Flock solved this crime" edge-cases are ever going to be enough to overcome the consistently bad PR. Probably the ONLY case that might save their bacon is if they recorded the election being stolen.

"Ambitious European" that's cute. Ambitious Europeans don't have a great track record.

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.

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.

Those of us who have lived longer than the last few years know that this kind of thing has happened many times. Every time some new technology gains traction, the luddites get all chicken-little. Try finding yourself a typist or a research librarian. Try finding someone who knows how to make a fax machine. Try finding a door-to-door salesman. So many tasks that used to be performed by humans no longer are. It happens over and over throughout history. The same is true of AI.

Back in the 1980s, if you were in college and had an assignment, you went to the library. You tried to find what you needed in the card catalog. Maybe you found something that might help. You go to the stacks to look for it. Lo and behold, some asshat has checked out the one book you need and it's not due back until after the assignment is due.
Along came the internet and search engines. Now you could Google things. The information was never checked out. You might also find more information than you thought you needed and you didn't have to wade through some 400 page tome to get to the meat. Fortunately, the internet is not some thing that's controlled by government who would restrict its use if it could.
This was the second stage of the democratization of information access. Printed books were the first stage. Of course, the more mature it got, the more bit rot there was. Information became dated and superseded. You also had to hack through a jungle of advertising.
AI is the third stage of the democratization of information. Now, you can ask a question and get good answers with sources. You can ask followup questions to really drill down. You can build things and AI is the best collaborator by far. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't tell you that your ideas or questions are stupid. It doesn't engage in gatekeeping by demanding that it get paid a king's ransom or condescending to you by saying that you're trying to stand on the shoulders of giants even though a human saying that is probably not that great. It doesn't stab you in the back and try to steal your idea.

But what about this potentially bad thing or that terrifying thing. Son, you've been watching too many movies and listening to entities who want to keep you in your place. Everything, and I mean everything, ever devised by humans can be used for both good and nefarious purposes. If you deny yourself the best tools out of fear, someone else will happily use them and you will be left behind. The key is to make sure the doomsayers don't get to bork the tools. Case in point, there was a brief attempt to charge people money to send email. The word sabotage came from hand weavers trying to prevent automated weaving machines from displacing them. It didn't last, of course. The people opposed to AI and data centers are the modern-day saboteurs. They are the people who need a reality check instead of a paycheck.

I haven't owned a TV in decades. My new gf has a Netflix subscription. I only now realized how much utter TRASH there is out there. So, for all I care: AI slop fits right in.

When you have built something useful. Then maybe we'll talk. Anything. Anything at all. Until the, STFU.

Signs that the bubble is about to burst. They are now claiming AGI despite being fundamentally away from it. An LLM can not ever achieve AGI. It may reasonably well PRETEND to be AGI, but at the core it's just a highly successfull letter-prediction machine. Or as a metaphor: It is "intelligence" in the sense that a toddler carefully placing one foot in front of the other while trying hard to not fall over is "running". Nope, isn't and never will be. You need a qualitative change to get there.

If they now CLAIM that they've achieved AGI, it's a sign we're nearing the end of LLM development and they're getting desperate selling the latest incremental updates. Which means the illusion is about to come crashing down.

Which is good news. Fewer data centers and lower memory prices will benefit us all.