Yeah I'm kind of done feeding Google every scrap of information about me for advertising purposes. I switched to private search and email last year for about $100/year and don't miss them at all.

output is about 6 tokens/s with 16k context window i'm not having any issues since it went live this afternoon. it's not sparkling like opus 4.5/6 but gets the job done

i generally send it a voice note via telegram while driving and then check back in like 1-2 min, or it is sending me a reminder about something on our shared calendar. it's still faster than texting my buddy about making plans for this weekend or whatever.

I'm using a $200 used ~5 year old (from the ebay listing) HP EliteDesk 805 G6 DM Desktop Ryzen 5 PRO 4650GE 3.3GHz 32GB RAM 512GB SSD WiFi in cpu mode... you don't need a gpu to run single user local LLM... just a bunch of ram. This isn't 2022 anymore

It's about 5 tokens/second which is totally fine for an async assistant. 20 tokens/second is about the lower limit for usable in realtime. You can also set it up to use a smaller model for quick questions (what are the next 6 items on my calendar/to-do list?) and drop through to the bigger slower model for harder questions (can you add this feature to my internal ticketing system and redeploy?)

I ordered 64gb of ram about an hour ago and i'm planning on running either qwen 35B-A3B 8 bit or 122B-A10B 3 bit in fully offline mode.
 
  >the actual cost of 'running the AI.'
 
is a fixed $200 cost (ram upgrade) + electricity

I cancelled my subscription overnight, and I'm using the free credits they gave me to wrap up some things and transition away. I am not going to be locked into someone's walled garden again.

I don't like ads either, but I do like that they (at least for now) have a paid tier with no ads. If there was an option to use google services at some paid tier, without being part of their ad network, I'd probably pay it. But there isn't and llm is as good as search these days (in many cases anyways) so I'm happy to jump ship. Piss off, google.

Trump in his first term was willing to go all-in on human spaceflight to mars...until he realized he couldn't get it done before the end of his term. Trump has always been interested in space stuff...but only if it's achievable within his term. This seems like a play to keep contractors employed and skills sharp until the next administration is seated, which will hopefully be willing to invest in goals longer than 4 years.

Unfortunately everyone picked an opinion two years ago, when AI was genuinely garbage beyond some basic bash scripts or a top 1000 bug/question on stack exchange (which mostly overlap). AI started getting really good in Dec '24, particularly spring '25 and by August 2025 even the $20/mo tier of chatgpt was starting to get legit as OpenAI started to try catching up with (now market leader) Anthropic and their blessed claude code. The 4.5/4.6 models released this year are nothing short of incredible, and the Qwen 3.5 series of models are right behind the state of the art models. Google is doing some stuff too but I'm kind of done giving them my money.
 
In 2-3 years we'll have found all 20,000 top reasons LLMs hallucinate things and solved for 95% of them
 
Creatives rallied against LLMs but as has been proven, nobody actually cares about making funny pictures of , they just want to know that they can.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

>What's a better solution, if any?
 
Open source firmware

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.