This is an example of "overthinking," also known as "underthinking" or "over-concluding."

Based on your UID, you're old enough to remember when games actually worked at release and have no excuse for your ignorance. The current situation is one we allowed to happen with prebuys and a passive acceptance that all software is now effectively in beta forever.

It doesn't need to be like that and you damned well know better.

Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn't need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.

The entire point of gaming consoles is that we can stick a game in, turn it on, and we're more-or-less instantly in the game. Absent that fundamental benefit, why exactly would anyone want yet another locked down computing appliance in their house?

I'm not sure Sony has really thought this one through - They're not just killing physical media (and more importantly, second-hand markets), they're shifting markets entirely. Rather than competing with only Microsoft and Nintendo, they're effectively making themselves nothing more than another AAA gaming studio combined with a lock-in to their walled garden of a marketplace.

Effectively, they're now competing with Steam rather than Nintendo. And unlike Sony, most customers like Valve.

That's what they're trying to claim, yes.

It's not a flawless argument, however. At it's broadest, a swap could basically refer to any financial transaction whatsoever. Courts generally frown on such promiscuous definitions, however, and the CFTC and SEC have both issued several clarifications on how they interpret that - For example, they don't consider insurance as a swap, even though by any reasonable interpretation insurance is absolutely a form of swap, and the way swaps are used in practice (prior to this gambling nonsense) is almost indistinguishable from a type of insurance.

That said, Minnesota and New York have a serious uphill battle ahead. Feds just love throwing around the "supremacy" clause, and rarely care whether or not their rules make the least bit of sense. NY does have a pocket ace, though, in that both Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC; they may not be able to force the CFTC to play nice, but they can make life hell for both companies if they so choose.

It would still be encrypted at rest. This was someone opportunistically walking off with a milk-crate full of hard drives, not a sophisticated attack on their network.

Of course, you could still be right - I've grown numb to how often people fail to communicate sensitive information over alternative secure channels. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to see the instructions, including the password, written on a post-it note slapped right on the drive itself.

"Persons" means not tracking and logging everyone that walks by via facial rec. "Papers" refers to your identifying documents - Like your license plate or IMEA. "Effects" refers to your possessions, explicitly including mobile ones, like say a car or phone. Every aspect of Flock's business model violates the 4th amendment...

...That said, you're not wrong because Flock is a private company and we Americans are apparently dumb enough not to make the connection between corporate mass surveillance for the government's benefit, with mass surveillance by the government itself.

The fact we've all gotten used to workarounds for laptops' abysmal battery life isn't a palliating factor, it's a condemnation.

If you need a permit from the government to criticize the government...

The limiting factor for top models is primarily hardware.

You're right that you're not going to get Kimi K3 performance, requiring roughly 600GB of VRAM to run, from a small number of 24GB consumer GPUs. You're also not going to get closed-top-model performance, because you simply don't have any way to get the weights.

If we're talking about K2.7, Deepseek R1 Distilled, Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.2 though - All of which can be run locally -The question really becomes what you expect from them. They're all strong models that know more than we (individually) do about 99% of topics. A "high-school level education" is more than enough for most humans to get by in the world. Now imagine a "high-school level" understanding across every topic. It's not doing calculus, but it can tell you what patterns to use. It's not writing Shakespeare, but it can likely recite most of his works to you from memory. It's not going to come up with a clean-room reimplementation of Windows 11, but it can check your syntax and tell you the function prototypes of every publicly-available library in every programming language without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, to the GP's point - Is a model "smart" enough to understand you're trying to abuse it necessarily better than one that just carries out your orders successfully? Case in point, lately I've found Gemini's new "watcher" blocks a good 90% of my totally legit questions before the question ever makes it to the real model. Umm... No thanks? The best AI is the one that works, not the one that gives the deepest philosophical reason for saying no.

Very much so! Unfortunately, they're still vaporware.

Or more accurately, I'd very much like a $10k BYD, but Detroit has bought DC wholesale to block any meaningful competition for Ford's Coal Roller 150.

That puts you on an iPhone 7 at the highest. iOS 15 is the oldest version installable on those, and not by coincidence, also the oldest iOS still receiving security updates. It was released five years ago as of September 20th.

So while you're 100% technically right... You might want to start planning for a new phone before October.

On the whole you're right because we simply don't know how to do it yet.

The GP isn't entirely wrong, though - It's also safe to say more training data is needed. Model weights vs training data follow a pretty clear power law, and current top models are already orders of magnitude underdetermined for their number of weights. Problem being, the current data set being used by the major players is effectively the sum total of all digitally-available human knowledge.

Unsupervised training is the hot new thing, but it doesn't really matter much if there's no more data for the AIs to find on their own.

Anthropic just accepted a USD$1.5 Billion court settlement for using illegally-acquired copyrighted content as training data.

Which side is not cheating here?

Bluntly, they can't. That genie is already out of the box for anything already available; and even going forward - Unless China itself blocks export, there's no realistic way to stop us from using a non-Chinese non-US mirror to grab them.

Realistically, hardware is the sole limiting factor for open-weight models, so restricting H200's is probably the closest we can come to a meaningful embargo. There's no practical way for most of us to run a model like Kimi K3 with almost 600GB (at BF16) of weights. Even using CPU offloading and/or multi-GPU sharding (if those are even possible for K3, I haven't looked at it in depth yet), the performance drop would give a throughput best measured in minutes or even hours per token, not particularly useful.

What this will accomplish is exactly what the OP quoted - It won't be possible to run these legally, so virtually all commercial use would be DOA. Joe Hobbyist couldn't care less though.

Because what amounts to a simple financial breach of contract is being enforced unilaterally and extra-judicially - And by parties traditionally known for being some of the sleaziest and least ethical bastards on the planet at that.

In a situation where the burden of proof is on the lender and the disruption to the customer's life severe, we should absolutely not be allowing ScumCo Lending to pull that trigger absent a court order.

To be clear, I'm not claiming there's no precedent for this (and when we're talking about microwaves and TVs, hey, pay up deadbeats!). But phones are unique in that it's virtually impossible to function in the modern world without one. Personally, I might get two calls a week and missing those wouldn't disrupt me much; but I literally can't even log in at work without an MFA app tied to my phone.