> 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?

And yet they were caught because they were too dumb to leave their portable tracking devices at home....

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-greenwood-jeremy-crahan-arrested-washington-substation-vandalism/

"Greenwood and Crahan were identified as suspects because location data showed cellphones linked to them to be in the vicinity of all four incidents, FBI Special Agent Mark Tucher wrote in the complaint."

They don't. They have a self reporting organization that "fixes" the problem by placing the person's name on a list that is checked against large wins and if their name has been self-submitted, then the casino doesn't need to award them their winnings. The idea is if they voluntarily submit to the list it disincentiveizes gambling as they cannot win big any more. In reality they play cash or chips on smaller amounts at a time that won't be subject to the list being checked for cashout.

If rsilvergun knows of any recent changes to that, I'd be interested to know, but everything I've searched still only turns up voluntary reporting, though there's a "diversion" program for treating gambling addition if it's discovered to be the root of a crime to feed it. There's nothing I can see on the books preventing someone from walking in and gambling every last nickel a person has if they want to.

> First, the libertarian ideal isn't about distrust of institutions. In particular, it's never been about distrust of corporations; it's about limiting the role of government to what is absolutely necessary, nothing more.

The problem is that is HIGHLY open to interpretation. Which explains why every "Libertarian town" experiment fails, usually in spectacular fashion.

Funnily enough I've noticed in my personal circles a direct correlation between smoking and being a salt shaker aficionado. I'd draw a presumption that the people who salt the crap out of their food do it because their smoking has killed their taste buds compared to nonsmokers, so the death rate increase probably has at least a bit to do with the cancer sticks.

> Oh please. Tell that to the people living around Fukushima or Chernobyl.

So... one plant run by cheapskates who didn't update a tired design even when warned of design problems, and the other run about as well as Russia runs anything, including their current incursion.

How about you do the other 450 reactors around the world and tell us what horrors those have spawned? What's that? They haven't? Fancy that.

Now, how about you look at the downwind cancer rates around all the coal plants - you DO know that burning coal releases radioactive particles right?

Nuclear when done even marginally well is safe.