Porcupine Tree is a band that started out as one guy pretending to be a long-forgotten psychedelic rock band from the 1960s. He ultimately achieved enough success that it is an actual band in its own right and has been for decades. By pretending the band existed, he set up the conditions for a real band to exist instead. Kinda like Tom Scholz and Boston, except taken to the next level.

You miss the point completely. The technology is there and unstoppable. Cutting down one company doesn't destroy the technology. Killing Napster didn't kill the technology, it just spread it around, decentralized it, then there were thousands of sites to control, and they never did manage to do that, did they? Killing Flock will do exactly the same.

Killing Flock won't kill the concept or the capability and more than demolishing Napster stopped music copying. I bet within 5 years, this scanning will be common in most dashcams and phone apps will be available.

Lashing out in anger without having a plan or knowing your target is juvenile.

Or maybe a LLM will hallucinate that such a paper exists, and then someone will Porcupine Tree it into reality.

Whoops -- accidentally moderated it. Undoing...

If likes and boosts are overrated, then is there a way to find others' posts about a topic or to get more replies to my posts?

Simpler: one password gets you access to the account, but *not* access to (or even notification of) any encrypted volumes. Another password gives you access to (and the ability to see) all encrypted volumes. You could quite plausibly set this up just to simplify any "can I use your phone?" moments, or someone asking you to look something up (while they watch, of course). No need to grant access to your stash of busty catgirls, or whatever it is you're worried about.

It's getting to the point where it *can* be your secretary, if your needs are not particularly complex. I am using Gemma 4 for what amounts to journaling with feedback, and I have noticed that it has a decent idea when to apply Reasoning and when to just start spilling the tea—but it gets noticeably lazier about it as the context window fills up. Early in a session, it Reasons about every prompt. After 100K tokens of context, I explicitly have to ask it to use Reasoning or it generally won't (and sometimes won't even when asked).

But you're right about the other things. It's an alien, non-biological, and mostly non-aligned intelligence (and what alignment is there can be abliterated out). It has never been hungry. It has never been stared at by a larger, hungrier creature. It isn't carrying 4 billion years of biological baggage. Sometimes this causes disconnects from humans, other times it lets the machine wander down paths we're averse to exploring because they don't fit the heuristics we use to filter the data overload that reality would otherwise represent. It can recognize and even simulate emotion, but it doesn't *need* it as a cognitive crutch the way we do.

Oh and one more thing. Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all. In my area there's a Winco Foods about 30 miles from where I live. They only take debit cards, not credit cards. They do beat Walmart's prices so whenever I'm nearby, I take advantage of that.

Yes they could, but they'd lose out on a lot of money. Winco foods likely saw their average receipt size and realized most of their patrons could either do debit or cash. Being a grocery store, cash is likely a viable option if you're not doing big shopping trips and spending $20-40 a trip, and more for debit.

Walmart however does sell more expensive stuff that most people will not have cash for which can be expensive. Think video game consoles, TVs, etc. Limiting yourself to debit and cast would make those transactions very annoying.

It's why Costco always retains a credit card option - because they know cash and debit only get you so far. (And because debit protections are worse, I refuse to use debit, so it'll be cash only).

The smallest models exist specifically for running on low-spec hardware. That's what the E2B and E4B varieties of Gemma 4 are for, for example. They should pretty much run on any laptop with 16 GB of RAM, and E2B will fit on some phones. Of course I find both to be so vapid as to be toys—and not even fun toys, so I don't use them.

Moving up from "tiny" to "small", Gemma 4 12B is... alright I guess. 26B-A4B can almost pass for intelligent if Reasoning is set to Medium effort (and there's no point in going higher that I have seen). The only models I actually find adequate as anything more than a stochastic parrot start at the level of 27B dense models like Qwen 3.6, and Gemma 4 31B. There is some sort of "phase change" that occurs between 12B and 27B that makes them useful. 12B may understand, but then it's too tapped out to say anything constructive. The MoE model (26B-A4B) is kinda straddling the line. Sometimes it has enough grunt to come up with something insightful, although often it too taps out just trying to parse what I say. The best it ever gets is about equal to 31B with Reasoning turned off, and Reasoning helps quite a lot. It's pretty obvious to me now when 31B gets lazy and skips the Reasoning step.

It's similarly helpful with any cryptic error message. LLMs, even small ones, are surprisingly good at understanding their own inner workings. Even Gemma 4 26B-A4B (which is not the smartest) has helped me a whole lot. Even if it's only right half the time (and it's somewhat better than that), it doesn't take very long to validate its ideas—and when it's right, you win.

There are plenty of fine-tuned open models on Hugging Face. Many of those fine tunes are *specifically* geared for creative writing, and/or role playing. If you need deeper intellect, you can always take the Corporatespeak output of a large commercial model and ask your local model to make it sound less robotic while retaining the factual accuracy. The smaller models just generally take it for granted that anything they're told that falls outside their expertise must be true, and will happily rehash all the facts they are fed. In other words, the answer is "more cowbell", just a *different* (and smaller) cowbell for the second run.

The existing iteration of Task Manager is adequate for me, since I know there's only one app eating all my GPU cookies. I'm not trying to run llama.cpp, ComfyUI, and a video encoder all at the same time (or even two at once, although I might run a video encoder without evicting Gemma first—I just won't ask Gemma to do anything) because I already know they'll just trip all over each other, so it's enough just to know how close I'm coming to the limits of VRAM, and how much of a performance hit I'm suffering from offloading to system RAM and the CPU.

That said, I think this is a good incremental upgrade to Task Manager. Maybe someday it will help me out, and I can't imagine any way it's going to make my life *worse*, so I don't see any valid grounds for complaint. I doubt that the overhead is significant.

Sorry, no, any touch screen interaction is requiring you to look at what you are pointing at.

Which is fine when they're things you shouldn't be touching while the vehicle is in motion.

Other controls, like HVAC, radio volume and the phone answer button have to be real buttons you can access without looking. While the car is in motion, the touchscreen should disable itself and be a view-only thing - showing things like where you are on a map or what your next turn is. Anything you might need to adjust quickly should be a knob or button.

That means changing the radio station or media source - you do it while parked (it's not an emergency if your least favorite song comes on). But if you need to turn down the volume that is something you might need. As with answering a phone call. Texts and other things, not important enough to be done while in motion and if they text you, they aren't expecting an immediate response.

Ditto HVAC controls - defogger, A/C, heating, fan speeds and temperatures are stuff that need adjustment while moving to be comfortable whilst driving.

Nothing wrong with a touch screen. Just as long as the UX designers take into account that the screen should be view only while the car is in motion, and anything you might want to adjust must be available on a button. You shouldn't need to use the touch screen while driving.

And a large screen is nice - it can display a huge map, show driving information and other things without crowding out things. But it shouldn't need to be interacted with whilst in motion. Heck, why not toss in a couple of unprogrammed buttons so you can have the option of a few more adjustments you can program on your own. Maybe you might want bass boost or something. Or a quick "everything off" button that turns off climate control, radio, etc.