Not to mention that if there wasn't an existential war going on, there would have been no pressure (at least in Ukraine) to develop AI-assisted and autonomous systems, and the worldwide Cold War style race to be first at any cost would seem a little less urgent.

There's a stronger connection than you say: some of that mining hardware ended up being snapped up for training small LLMs. Most of it has become too old for support unless you want to compile llama.cpp yourself, but it's still out there and it's still cheap.

Crossing my trusses? Buses do drive over bridges.

There are five reasons I can think of to run an open model locally:
* This. I'm not sharing your prompts with anyone, so I don't have to worry about who reads them or how they might misinterpret them.
* Freedom of model choice. I often want help with writing plots that involve unethical and/or illegal activities, and any model that refuses to play along gets the boot.
* No rugpulls. If I want to run Gemma 4 31B forever, nobody is going to swap it out against my will.
* No usage limit, and no bill. As a practical matter, this is replaced by the speed of my hardware.
* No Internet required to run. My desktop computer rarely finds itself in this position, but it's still nice to know I'm not dependent on a connection.

It shouldn't matter, the people that insist on wearing these to parties either don't get invited, or it's the sort of party where everyone is wearing them.

This is why I've abandoned Reddit (for the second time), almost exactly the day after my first Cake Day with the new account. I appealed the second one-week ban and it surprisingly got overturned, but I decided I was still done with them. In my particular case, it was a comment on the video of the incident at a Cubs game where a middle-aged to elderly veteran slapped someone in the head for not standing up for the national anthem. All I said was "that guy better watch his knees, that's where I'd be targeting if he had slapped *me*." Yeah, advocating anything other than curling up in a ball and accepting damage is seen as "promoting harm". Fuck that.

I took the headline to mean the actual place called California City had been hacked.

Charles Whitman's Chocolate Company. Stand too close, and catch shit. Move further away, and catch lead.

And "selling pies" used to be a euphemism for prostitution. The English certainly have a way of using normal words in a convoluted manner.

Yeah, I was thinking "We can stick it to KSA and Jared Kushner at the same time, just by not buying EA games? Where do I sign up?"

The biggest shock of all is finding Ted Cruz on the right side. I wonder if it's just "a stopped clock is right twice a day" in action.