Sure. Lots of things can be done in the name of freedom that aren't sensible.

You're free to go put on a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops and go for an all day hike in Death Valley

You're free to pick up a rattlesnake in the SD badlands and give it a kiss

Freedom in the legal sense sometimes bumps up against those other pesky laws of nature and physics, and when you do, those freedoms you're trying out suddeny aren't very free.

How's that? LLM image matching makes Flock useful. That's how they can track someone from start to finish with a single query.

I'm just pointing out that the useful tools can very easily be turned into very bad things. Pretending otherwise isn't productive.

"and that's what they're counting on."

And yet again they're disconnected from reality. The AI Bros aren't making the appliances, the appliance companies are. And they're already seeing backlash from smart devices, and the carmakers are seeing near open rebellion on a normal function requiring a subscription (BMW heated seats). They won't be adding subscription based AI to appliances for a looooong time if ever, especially with some brands pushing non-smart appliances as a feature.

Unlike the AI Bros who need AI sales to stay solvent, appliance companies need regular customers buying their stuff to stay solvent, and part of that buy cycle is not introducing a new cost that will tarnish their reputation and tank sales. Two two groups' goals are in diametric opposition.

" Ask the doomers and we'll live in a hellscape soon because of AI."

And by the doomers you mean realists right? One shit sandwich that AI has brought to existence is the whole Flock thing. Flock cameras + AI pattern recognition = surveillance state that just showed up without anyone really noticing until it was too late:

https://oecd.ai/en/incidents/2026-08-19-472a
https://gizmodo.com/flocks-new-ai-tool-does-much-more-than-track-license-plates-2000800372

Cops are already using this to track people for hours and you'll never guess what specific 'crime' they targeted:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/texas-deputy-searched-83-000-152212195.html

""had an abortion, search for female." That single query swept across 83,000 cameras in 6,809 law enforcement networks — including cameras in Washington and Illinois, states where abortion is legal and protected. A small-county Texas deputy, hunting for a woman suspected of self-administering an abortion, had just searched a surveillance apparatus stretching from Spokane to Springfield. No warrant was required for the search."

So yeah... hellscape incoming. This kind of thing is something many dystopian scifi books from a decade ago would have thought was a bit too far fetched. And yet here it now is.

Sam Altman and the rest of the AI Bros are desperate to have everyone think these tools are incredible and will transform society. Dean Kamen thought that about 'It/Ginger' as well, as did a lot of the early viewers of it, and yet no transformation has happened other than now the Segway is a weird novelty and cheap Chinese 'hoverboards' have eaten what little market it actually had.

AI is going to be somewhere in the middle as there are uses for the tool, but nowhere near the adoption they need. I've noticed a lot of people are now using ChatGPT and Gemini and others instead of doing traditional search engine searches, so that is driving use for now but as time passes the AI rot will make those results less useful. And the real elephant in the room - cost. 99.9% of the people using it now for free will never pay for it if it becomes a paid service only, so many of the revenue projections are completely out to lunch.

This is why the Bros are desperate to push it into every crevice, so that some of it sticks and will have to be paid for. But they overestimate how willing everyone is to pay.

> We also have a small cluster of 7900xtx for local inference when you go over your allowance

That's actually one of the conversations I've been hearing at work is that 'free' LLMs we can self host at one of our datacenters is the long term plan once they're Good Enough(tm). I think a lot of companies are planning the same. Medium to big corporations with large tech departments remember vividly how Broadcom screwed them on VMWare pricing and they're not going to get caught in the same bear trap with AI. They're already planning to be mostly to fully self sufficient - which again is going to cause a lot of those "AI will be worth XXXXXXXX" predictions to be completely and utterly wrong and kill a lot of those companies.

You'd be astonished at how many companies will be absolutely fine with you driving that Yugo as long as it's cheaper.

The company I work at has top down shifted which model is tied into all the devs IDEs 4 times in 6 weeks, always seeking cheaper usage even at the cost of suitability. And the company is a multinational with 25K employees worldwide, not some little shop... If my company's doing it, others are doing it too.

Be interesting to see how many of these companies bite the dust if the bigger players with deeper pockets like Google keep access pricing down longer to drive adoption and build their market share. I know many companies are already freaking out about some of the jumps in pricing that still don't pay the 'real' cost of using AI and have already aggressively cut back so the industry as a whole is in for a rough time not properly factoring in exactly how miserly their potential customer base is, but this wrinkle is going to make it way worse for some.

Dear Leader doesn't care about domestic laws/conventions, why would he care about some foreign ones?

I heard about this a couple of years ago when the court case was still going on, the podcast Behind the Bastards did a 2 parter on it, and it's just absolutely *weird* that anyone at eBay gave two shits about this newsletter. 99.9999% of eBay users on both sides of the transaction would have never heard of the newsletter, much less read it, so who cares? And the CEO involved here, he's not eBay's founder, he's like hired gun #12 or whatever for the slot so it's not like they're slagging his lovingly handcrafted lifelong labor of love or anything.

The BtB podcast eps on it are worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing, provides a lot of detail.

MORE socialism? Where's ANY socialism in the US worth the label?

Also, that capitalism is working out so well. For the thousand or so people at the pinnacle. The average people not so much, but who cares about them, they're poors, right?

"That is not how it works.
LLMs are not trained on thousands of projector models, how do you come to that idea?"

Where in the hell did I say it was 'trained on thousands of projector models'? I implied it was trained on the ARTICLES at Projector Central. You know, the ones have relevant review data in them that the search engines also scrape that your LLM also relies on? The ones that are no longer being written at the same rate because their views and ad revenue are down, the ones that will eventually stop when the site dies?

And it's going to get worse. Much of what they've trained their models on is user created information from a lot of sites that are now seeing sharp dropoffs in traffic because people aren't going there for info/answers any more, so there's less incentive to post new information and many of those sites will just go completely stale.

A perfect example is projectors. 5 years ago if you wanted a projector for a price range, you'd go to projectorcentral.com and a few other sites for detailed information. Now most people say to an LLM "I have $1000 to spend on a projector, what should I get?" And the LLM uses the information it trained on from projectorcentral and other sites to answer. Projectorcentral's traffic is dropping and so are their posts so the LLMs are training less and less from actual informed data and more from marketing crap. And it all enshittifies.

Let's not mistake anything Elmo is doing with Twitter to be part of any 'plan'. He was forced into a choice to either complete the purchase that he didn't want to do and was just playing games with - or going to court and having something come out during discovery that was apparently to his mind awful enough that throwing away 44B on a company he can't run was the better choice. It's no coincidence he did a 180 and rushed the acquisition a week before discovery was supposed to start - one of his legal team undoubtedly pointed something out to him that made him shit a Falcon Heavy sized brick.

Tesla and SpaceX were both innovators in their field so their staff was willing to put up with more horseshit (i.e. Musk) to work in those spaces, and had time to build a "Elmo" management team to keep him away from the sharp bits that might affect the companies, mainly funneling him into PR-style work to leverage his name back when the masses thought he was Tony Stark. Twitter was just a bogstandard FAANG tier tech company and expected to not have a toddler at the helm so none of those protective teams existed, and the staff had no incentive to put up with a moron as other companies would hire them easily, and so it goes. The only people left at Twitter ( X ) are largely the dregs who aren't able to find jobs elsewhere easily. There's no 'plan' to kill the company here, it's just an inevitable outcome of someone taking over a company that requires skill and experience to run it properly, and Musk has neither in any useful quantity.

Twitter will die, and something else will take its place. Or several somethings. Twitter created a need for a something like that and nature abhors a vacuum, so when it goes away for good, that space will get filled somehow. And for The Sauds and anyone else looking to silence that sort of voice, that's bad news because before they just had to block Twitter during bad things. Now there's a hundred different social medias that people will scatter to, and some of those will be under the radar for too long for those looking to censor it.

> I think that a lot of panels that are "used up" for commercial payback, might still be good enough for off-grid buyers.

They very much are. "Used up" in that context means their rated power has dropped 25-30%. Which means they still produce 70-75% of the power they did when they were new - and that drops by ~1% per year on average for most panels, meaning these 'used up' panels can still produce worthwhile amounts of power if deployed in sufficient numbers for a few decades yet. There's definitely secondary market demand for them in places where space to mount them isn't a concern. Obviously you want to deploy the most efficient panels for the money if you only have a few hundred square feet of area to place them or if you're boat/vehicle mounting them, but if you've got thousands of square feet of land to put up cheap as chips used panels and build a few kilowatts of power gathering, why not?