I have to wonder if this is a first step to abandoning POWER. I can see IBM wanting to get out of the game of trying to build performance competitive CPUs they don't have many outside customers for any longer.

Especially when they could put commodity designs in their shiny black boxes and still charge super premium prices for them.

Speaking as someone who does think we need stronger age, and locality verification on the internet; I too find the whole thing unseemly.

There are plenty of good reasons to want know if someone is over the age of majority whatever that is defined to be wherever they are, and what laws the other party to your interaction may or may not be subject to in terms of jurisdiction.

I also believe this is achievable while preserving some degree of privacy/anonymity. States could as part of issuing IDs for example provide everyone with a set of certificates with various assertions - and you could select select the one you with the those you need to present. - but this a digression.

There are enough good arguments for age and locality verification that lobbing for it does not need to be done in secret. Especially because the broader public, seems to be somewhat receptive even if tech and geeks have their panties fully bunched. Which makes me assume Meta, OpenAI are not really interested in solving the real problems like endangerment of children, trafficking, terror funding, terror recruiting, all manor of contraband distribution, money laundering, structuring, AstroTurfing, public comment stuffing, etc - but are rather just seeking to create an environment that locks competitors out of the marketplace or otherwise creates a situation where they are allowed to occupy a short list of gatekeepers.

All of that is true but I think it is far more about barriers to entry. For all the talk about the need for these massive datacenters, a lot of, maybe most of, the use cases for the the frontier models that actually are worth $$ like code assistants etc rapidly falling into the range where what OpenAI is selling just isn't needed. Qwen is not as good as GPT but it is close, a Mac Studio maybe can't pump out tokens quite as fast as an API hosted on OpenAI's infrastructure but it is knocking on the door (for one human consumer, applications).

Is there going to be market for hosted models, of course not many are going to want to onprem the LLMs running the chat bot on their websites. A lot of companies will want to onprem their RAG tools and anything handling data they care about protecting.

At one point Microsoft people were saying workstations were over, that developers, engineers (not in the software sense), Architects (not in the software sense), were going to use Azure hosted VDIs...Yeah have not seen that, yes I know its possible and someone here will tell us how wonderful their thin-client virtual desktop experience is, but the lion's share of these professionals that I encounter anyway are still buying workstations (or near-workstations pro-line Mac). Point is people are going to want to run their GenAI work loads locally, and they very nearly can. The free and "Open" models combined with affordable performant hardware are going to eat OpenAI's lunch, in a huge slice of the market.

Unless - they could somehow make it impossible to distribute and bundle these things for compliance reasons....Then they'd have nice little moat that would be difficult to cross.

Or a supply chain attack!

Prove you compromised one bird! Then you say can do stuff to some unknown quantity of the others, not like anyone can go check. They have to either let you blackmail them or call your bluff.

yeah I was speaking historically. I use a Mac M1 at work and I like it. I know the newer machines are even better. I am not sure based on what I read mostly, that Apple Si is better than Zen, better at certain things but not all things. MacOS is better than Windows11, Windows11 is a steaming pile that should make anyone forced to use it want to scream, I know I do every encounter.

I love my Slackware PC at home. I XFCE is a better UI than MacOS at least if you are willing to tailor things to your liking.

Amazing how Mr. Regulations, suddenly gets it when "wrong people" people are able to use them to obtain a barrier to entry.

Yet regulations are never a problem, when small shops are threatening to out compete big union controlled entities, private schools make public education officalls running indoctrination mills look like clowns, etc.

No infringement on the rights or property of adults is to great if it advances your Bolshevik agenda; but when government actually steps in to protect people who actually are able to be responsible for their own well being, like children, suddenly - government bad...

Very interesting indeed... Says so much about you!

Yeah but Work 6.0 on Windows was actually pretty good. It had everything you'd expect for the most part even in a contemporary word processor to day.

I don't think if took Word 2019 away from most users and gave them 6.0 they'd care much, if you could some how make the document compatibility issues vanish.

The problem with Word on Mac's was the Macs, by the time PC got 33 or 66mhz 486 CPUs, PCs were just better than Macs all around.

So much this. Unless there is a reason you CANT continue without an update, or possibly on first run, you should never ask a user to update on start up. They already use the software. They did not click it because felt installing something right now. The clicked because they wanted to do something. Let them! Ask if they want to update on close and do it in the background!

If you feel you really must, you can pop up the 'what's new' dialog the next time they fire it up.

So basically the FCC said guys, say your really sorry and promise not do it again.

Wikipedia is choosing to die. There is a lot wrong with a lot of what people are doing with GenAI but it is also super useful.

Even on for authors, of encyclopedia articles, and this notihing wrong with telling ChatGTP to, "take this list of bullets and write it up as a paragraph."

Nor is there anything wrong with asking it to make a diagram of some process etc.

Someone else is going to clone wikipedia and the authorship will no doubt migrate to where they are allowed to use contemporary tooling.

Imagine expecting an organization to have real plan and concrete assets in place to meet their defined benefit contractual obligations to employees.

I mean they should be able to use rosy predictions about asset performance and when it does not work just dump the bill on the taxpayers like state and local pension funds for teachers, police, etc do! Or maybe they should be like the cool kids in corporate American declare bankruptcy, sell all the assets to an other entity that just happens to be owned by the same people and again leave the problem to the tax payers with PBGC..

Nope congress is required to establish a post office but the post office is not an agency, constitutionally I suppose it could be but the model is more like Fanny/Freddie. Congress takes a supervisory role.

Indeed, which raises the question especially in the cause of this court's prevailing theory that the law should be read in the context of Congresses other positions at the time, if PLCAA's existence should imply the congress did not believe liability would not extend to product manufacturers otherwise.

This is the right decision here, because to decide any otherway really would invite chaos. I mean what if drive some nails partly into a baseball bat, and beat someone half to death, are the hardware and sporting goods stores liable, how about the manufactures of the bat and of the nails, there is no rational place to draw any lines, except around the principle actor who formed the intent to do the unlawful act.

Yes there are some laser counter measures being tested, but there is no way we are going to be able to reliably swat down handfuls of these things arriving on target at once.

Once they are cheap enough and China decides they are willing to sell them to anti-western regimes, the era of the air-craft carrier as a means of force projection is over. It won't be possible to park anything that big in hostile waters, at least without total sat-nav jamming in effect.

Everyone one bitching about Iran right now, needs to realize this was the final opportunity to leverage our force projection capabilities to break the back of adversary that has thwarted our policy efforts in the Middle East for decades. Yes its a mess, but the world is going to become a much much scarier place, where the Pax Americana cannot but sustained, and taking Iran out of it as a major power before that happens makes it just a little less scary.

Of course Trump and Hegseth will never say this because it is not raw-raw USA! Its not flex, so they can't admit it. Reality is though any regime that can scrape together a few million to buy some handfuls of missiles will be able to bite their thumb to any "Super Power" they wish.. Asymmetric warfare will now be so asymmetric no military budget however out sized will over come it.

Dude this is China, not the USA or West.

You do something like that in the West you probably get some charge of obstruction, possibly held without bond instead of released a protracted ordeal in terms of hearings and trial.

Depending on what you're hiding that might indeed be a good or even great trade, should it actually destroy critical evidence against you in an innocent until proven guilty situation. You go to prison for your process crime for a bit and then get on with your life.

If you do this in China you might well disappear. This is a critical difference that really can't be understated in importance.

Generally speaking US requirements are stricter than the EU.

There is are a lot stupid corner cases where US rules lag modern tech in areas like lighting where EU rules are not exactly stricter but probably better.