Quantized to 2 bits you might just about be able to run it with 512GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM. But it would lose a lot of its intelligence.

However, there are people who've been running big models on consumer hardware by streaming data from an SSD rather than keeping it all in RAM. Significantly slower but doable.

> I don't think there's evidence of either of these statements.

You're claiming that Western countries haven't imported millions of low-trust people and haven't put low-trust people in positions of power? Are you living in a VR simulation of the 1980s or something?

> They say on yet another story about the current admin of homegrown Americans getting into politics to make their family and tribe rich.

"Homegrown Americans" often now come from low-trust immigration. Somalians, Haitians, Irish and Italians can now be "homegrown Americans."

It's just another Boomer phrase that's been redefined until it's meaningless.

Late-stage democracy will always end with the elected leaders looting everything they can. Because why wouldn't they? No-one is going to stop them and they may only have a few years to loot before they get voted out.

Sure, it's a problem that oligarchs can just buy politicians, but that's a feature of democracy, not a feature of capitalism. Kings usually won't sell out their country because they own it and want to keep it. Elected politicians are just renters and don't care what happens to the country after they're gone.

I'm not an AI lawyer, but isn't it a legal requirement to not delete documents that may be related to a court case once you're informed that you may have documents related to a court case? If so, they could end up in court themselves if they do delete them and aren't friends of powerful political figures who will protect them.

You don't get high-trust behaviour in a low-trust society. And you don't get a high-trust society when you import tens of millions of low-trust people and put them in positions of power.

Political grift is the norm in most of the world and governments have imported it into the West en masse. People in low-trust countries don't go into politics for the good of their country, they go into politics to make their family and tribe rich.

They made a political calculation to ask under oath about an affair that was nobody's business, hoping to catch him in a lie. I believe the word here is "entrapment". So the GP is right about when it started; he/she just incorrectly understood which party started it.

It was always the Republicans.

Nixon tried to start it back in the 1970s. He just found out the hard way that there were still too many Republicans with morals and ethics remaining in the party. So they spent the next four decades driving them out. What remains is the shell of the former Republican Party, surrounding a core of rot and disease. And that is why "President" Trump is still in office.

Dude, we're well into the "loot the treasury" phase of late-stage democracy. Pretty much everyone in a position of power is looting everything that isn't nailed down, which is why the reaction to the left shrieking "MUH TRUMP IS GRIFTING!" is just "yeah, whatever."

If it's legal for Congress it should be legal for everyone. Politicians just want to keep the grift for themselves.

3. Download it off a torrent site, wait to get threatened by the copyright owner, show them proof that you purchased the product. If they sue you anyway, counter-sue both the copyright owner and Sony for conspiracy to defraud. Ask for seven figures on account of their vexatious litigation.

This is essentially how marriage worked for most of human history. Not just arranged marriages, but parents were supposed to find potentially good matches for their kids who they could marry. The idea of random "dating" is a recent invention and it's clearly been a disaster.

Talking about "victim blaming" is so 2020.

Yes, there are real victims we should have sympathy for. But most of the time when people talk about "victim blaming" they're just trying to avoid taking responsibility for the obvious consequences of their own actions.

Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

... if I didn't have to search for apps because the Start Menu wasn't a piece of junk that does everything possible to hide the apps I want to use.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)