For a major economic downturn. We are already deeply deeply in the major economic downturn due to the Republicans.

Just hoping we don't have a total complete collapse. You can't keep putting pedophiles in charge of everything and expect things to hold together.

On some level you have to know that.

As for why Democrats are the solution you're not Americans so you wouldn't understand this but we have winner-take-all first past the post voting and we don't have any kind of parliamentary system.

This means we inevitably get two parties because any attempt of the third party just pulls votes away from one of the other two and results in single party rule.

To fix this we would have to overhaul our entire voting and political system but that's easier said than done.

So we have a choice between the Republican party who are openly fascists and getting real comfy with actual Nazis not just the dog whistle kind or our conservative party which is the Democrats.

Remember fascists aren't conservative and the Republican party in America is not a conservative party. They are radical extremists because they will do whatever it takes to get what they want. That leaves the Democrat party as the de facto conservative party in America

It's the only thing holding up the stock market. Frankly I don't want it to burst because when the stock market collapses they're going to take it out of my hide and yours like they always do. If we want to survive that we need a democrat in the White House and Democrats in charge of Congress when it happens and frankly I think we all know that but we'll be damned if we're going to let those highfalutin Washington insiders tell us what to do right?

Also the AI bubble in America is being used to loot our 401ks so we've got a ways to go before it pops. There is 10 trillion dollars there ripe for the taking and the Epstein class will be damned if they let you have it just because it's yours.

Maybe putting an orange pedophile famous for bankrupting businesses and ties to the Russian mafia in charge of your financial future was a bad idea but I'm not an expert.

Modern factories have a little or no jobs once they're built and they don't take all that long to build.

So this is completely irrelevant.

No one, not even people in China, trust the Chinese stock markets. The companies aren't required to be as transparent, and most of their financing is more likely to come from a State-Owned bank and debt, not the stock market. Because of that, this market tends to be a bit more like a casino than how we in the Western world might view the NYSE or the NASDAQ or the London Stock Exchange. That also means that it's highly prone to overspeculation. As someone posted above, the NASDAQ on average is priced at around 30X earnings; by comparison the STAR50 index was trading at 250X the average earnings of its' companies. Many of the companies were domestic hardware suppliers, but as more and more barriers are starting to rise against Chinese hardware going into AI Infrastructure, investors spooked, got out and the index fell.

For perspective:

The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 72.8% during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. For comparison US stock markets fell around 53%, and began recovering quickly.

The Shanghai Composite again crashed 49% in 2016, when State media was encouraing people to invest in their stock market to try and grow it to become competitive to Western stock markets. Novice retail investors jumped in, and through that encouragement heavily invested with margin loans. That spooked the government, who started putting regulations on those loans; everyone panicked and the market crashed within a few weeks as everyone tried to get out to cover their margin loans.

Afterwards, the government put in these circuit breaker regulations, to stop trading if the market dropped more than a certain percentage to mitigate those steep drops, again in 2016. The first day those regulations went into place, everyone panicked, triggered a big sell off, and trading halted within minutes. Investors saw the market freeze, panicked even more, and the next day everyone rushed to get their money out, erasing roughly US $1 trillion in value and forcing Beijing to remove the circuit breaker regulations.

This market is very prone to hype, panic attacks, reactionary regulations, over confidence and underperforming. So you have to take these kinds of stories from this market with a bit of skepticism; this just appears to be a feature of the Chinese stock markets.

I see where you're coming from, but given that I fundamentally disagree with you tells me that today we're all just simply speculating.

Again, this is where I come from, but I think that a cheaper python coding assistant trained on python code sounds good, but is it polluting the statistics if it's also trained on Shakespeare, children's stories, poorly written peer-reviewed science papers and reddit posts? Language is used in certain ways for certain purposes; in my opinion you could skew the statistics by incorporating every use case of language into every general purpose use case.

Anyways, I guess we'll find out eventually which conclusion is correct.

That's some cyberpunk style concept there, but I would argue the answer is never. The reason is simple: that wouldn't do anything. These hijackings are not like a Fast and Furious movie, done at high speed on the highway. It's GPS spoofing, or inserting false drivers with fake IDs, who send the truck to some wrong destination, the goods are stolen and the truck dumped or sent on it's way. What is a drone going to do? There's no world where a drone-based law enforcement is going to be allowed, so they're not going to shoot the hijackers like it's some Robocop style situation.

To be perfectly frank, this is priced in. GPS trackers, RFID tags in the shipments, and insurance coverage covers it sufficiently. But I don't think there's a world where the cost of adding some sort of drone to stop some sort of hijacking ends up being justified by the overall financial loss or gain, particularly when modern hijackers are already good enough to spoof GPS systems or use AI to create false licenses. They could hack the drone, or bring their own to defeat it.

So as cool (dystopian) as that sounds, there's really no reason for it so I doubt it would happen.

And we all know that although it's true that babies born to smoking mothers are on average smaller some women might prefer smaller babies.

Seriously it doesn't take five phds to figure out that having your body full of microplastics isn't a good thing. The only reason the research is preliminary is because they keep cutting funding to science research for exactly this reason.

It's not that we don't know it's bad to have your balls stuffed with microplastics. It's that we don't know exactly how bad. And it's in that little Gap that they're going to keep you for several decades maybe forever of our democracy collapses.

In the ever collapsing economy brought on by monopolies and the Epstein class that's the only way to do it. Nobody's going to spend the money to do it right.

You have to just force people to use shit software for a while. Microsoft did the same thing. Anyone who remembers how bad word was compared to word perfect should remember being forced to use crap software for no good reason.

The problem is that again our economy is perpetually collapsing because we are fighting among ourselves to see who can make the second trillionaire, and because of that the slightest reduction in productivity can't be allowed. So you can't have people fighting with software hours every day when they could be shuffling money up to the top to see who's going to be that second trillionaire

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

I don't know about multiplan but word was terrible up through around 97 when it became just barely usable. It wasn't anything I would actually want to use until sometime around 2004 or 2006...

America is in a deep deep recession and we drag the rest of the world down with us. I mentioned it on another comment but Microsoft CEO admitted that they are only expecting 3 to 5% to take the buy out which is about 2 to 3,000 employees. This is cover for firing those 3,000 employees who will be exclusively older employees. In other words it's run of the middle age discrimination. There might be some H1B swaps in there too.

We put in Orange pedophile in charge of the country. Bad things are going to happen and we've got at least two more years of it. After that we need 12 to 16 years of blue rule to clean up this mess and we aren't going to get it...

I found some articles where the CEO talks about the percentage of people he expects to take the deal and it's only 3 to 5%. With 60,000 people even at the top of the range that's only 3000.

That is still significant layoffs clearly indicating we are in a recession. But it's not the insanity of laying off a quarter of your staff.

So what they're doing is they are targeting older employees but they know they're going to get sued and they've been sued several times for targeting older employees and lost. They are hoping the triple whammy of announcing 60,000 offers combined with AI combined with the fact that frankly we are in a recession and you can prove that in court provided you take out the AI spending and that those three things combined will prevent them from getting hit with another judgment for age discrimination.

There is probably also some insourcing and outsourcing going on. Microsoft has been caught multiple times firing American employees and hiring h-1bs.

One of the problems that's stuck out for me when I read the article was that they use layers and layers of contractors before somebody is actually driving a truck.

The reason for that is to avoid legal liability and paying benefits. I think especially the legal liability although it does help that they can underpay the driver's massively. There are examples of drivers making pennies a week because of the scams they run them through.

And God help you if you get hit by a semi.

Every single company involved in it will play a game of not if to avoid paying for your injuries and the shell company that the driver actually is legally working for gets folded immediately. If you get any money out of it it will be much less than you are due, you will settle and you will settle with a company that is a little worried about bad press but not much else.

Is probably already on Firefox. You get the same problem with left-wing politics where they are always preaching to the converted. You do need a little bit of that but it doesn't get you new converts.

I think you're coming at the critique of self-hosted models from the wrong direction. You're talking from the bottom-up approach, not the top-down approach.

if you start with end applications, SLM's start making more sense. if i want an app that can make decent legal documents, I want it trained on legal documents to write good legal documents. Conversely if I want an app that can write children's stories, I want it trained on children's stories. Both of those would be Language models scoped to an appropriate size for the end-use, but what isn't useful is a general purpose AI that can "do everything", because we've already seen that none of the frontier models can do everything well, they can simply do everything moderately well to poorly.

Each of those applications would be small enough to run locally, not needing a big data center, and would likely be better at those applications because they're trained on what they need specifically, not generally. Meanwhile the generalist frontier models have yet to prove a use case where they can deliver meaningful value, but they absolutely require the high-cost data centers to be baked in to the price.

As a result, self-hosted becomes very straightforward and easy. If the entire SLM can deliver what I need from my phone or desktop, then the cost of that particular application comes way down as you don't have the data center costs baked into the pricing, plus you've got far more opportunities where your data and queries can remain yours if hosted. Regardless of the privacy issues, the fact that in the recent Subnautica 2 lawsuit showing that AI queries are not private and subject to subpoena, a locally hosted SLM would be far more likely to skirt that issue.

So I see just from a practical application perspective as well as all the privacy and legal aspects surrounding this that SLMs start making real sense really quick.