You'd better have real-world evidence that these alternatives work before burning down the current system. And I do not believe there is any real-world evidence; in fact, most of the real-world evidence points to the contrary.

It's also the reason we have quite a number of average people with secure retirements. Yes, BURN DOWN CAPITALISM sounds good, and given the huge problems of unregulated capitalism in the USA, I even have some sympathy for the sentiment, but in reality, well-regulated capitalism backstopped by robust government social programs is simply the best way to generate wealth for everyone.

Burning down capitalism completely will simply make everyone poor and make life shittier than ever. We need to regulate it.

If you day trade, then yes... the stock market is gambling.

If you invest in low-cost index funds and hold them for a decent amount of time, the odds that you'll make money are almost 100%.

There's no analogously-safe way to use prediction markets.

Well, it makes traveling from where I live to certain places a bit more expensive and less convenient. But that's OK. It's worth it to avoid the USA.

Quelle surprise that Trump supports the gambing^Wgrifting sites.

The exact wording in The Guardian is as follows (my emphasis):

Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not.

In my opinion, this means that at the moment he provided the PIN, the phone had not yet been seized and was therefore not yet under the control of the government. Again, in my opinion, this means he did nothing illegal because it's the same as if he'd wiped his phone as soon as the plane took off. In either case, the phone was not under the control of the government and was his to do with as he wanted.

The agents should just have seized the phone to begin with and let forensic investigators figure out how to unlock it later on.

The duress password wouldn't help with that, because once it's used, the gov has a nice clean phone on which it can plant whatever it wants.

The fact we've all gotten used to workarounds for laptops' abysmal battery life isn't a palliating factor, it's a condemnation.

That is my policy. No going to or transiting through the USA for the foreseeable future.

"Students will be given classes in economics, banking, getting loans and registering businesses selling widgets. To graduate, students must show that their business made a profit."

WTF people?

We might be dangerously near the Kessler Syndrome according to this article.

If you need a permit from the government to criticize the government...

The limiting factor for top models is primarily hardware.

You're right that you're not going to get Kimi K3 performance, requiring roughly 600GB of VRAM to run, from a small number of 24GB consumer GPUs. You're also not going to get closed-top-model performance, because you simply don't have any way to get the weights.

If we're talking about K2.7, Deepseek R1 Distilled, Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.2 though - All of which can be run locally -The question really becomes what you expect from them. They're all strong models that know more than we (individually) do about 99% of topics. A "high-school level education" is more than enough for most humans to get by in the world. Now imagine a "high-school level" understanding across every topic. It's not doing calculus, but it can tell you what patterns to use. It's not writing Shakespeare, but it can likely recite most of his works to you from memory. It's not going to come up with a clean-room reimplementation of Windows 11, but it can check your syntax and tell you the function prototypes of every publicly-available library in every programming language without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, to the GP's point - Is a model "smart" enough to understand you're trying to abuse it necessarily better than one that just carries out your orders successfully? Case in point, lately I've found Gemini's new "watcher" blocks a good 90% of my totally legit questions before the question ever makes it to the real model. Umm... No thanks? The best AI is the one that works, not the one that gives the deepest philosophical reason for saying no.

Agreed. That would be a bummer for (eg) flights from Vancouver to Toronto, but still. I think it's best.

I had wondered how you even do a long haul trip to Canada from the southern hemisphere without doing a stop in the USA?

It's certainly doable. I flew from Johannesburg to Regina, SK without transiting the USA. The route was Johannesburg to Nairobi to London to Winnipeg to Regina. The London to Winnipeg part flew over the arctic regions of Canada.

From Australia, you can go Sydney to Tokyo to Vancouver to wherever else you want to go in Canada without transiting the USA.