A/I explicitly state they don't provide stuff to groups like political parties. So regardless of culpability, they would be at least violating their own rules.
I agree with you about the technology. It’s the most exciting thing to me since discovering the Internet in the early 1990s, or since the web.
Unfortunately the big AI companies seem to be run by showmen and weirdos whose brains have been sucked out by whatever that Rationalism / heterodox / NRx / effective altruism / Thielism / whatever the hell it is nexus of insane bullshit that sucked everyone’s brains out in the 20-teens.
I don’t even know how to describe “it” but I feel like a lot of people will know exactly what I mean. It’s what High IQ(tm) people believe. I’m sure I don’t get it because my IQ is low.
So they did this crazy AI fear mongering thing, some cause they believed it and some cause they wanted regulatory capture, and now it’s backfiring.
They also cozied up to all the worst people and since they run the companies whose names are linked to AI they linked AI in peoples minds with those things.
Maybe AI should take over. It’s starting to look like an improvement over human leadership.
A major problem with closed mobile platforms is that if you have an App Store monopoly, why do you need to care? It's why all the app stores are absolute trash.
Not sure how Apple handles DMCA but I know they're known for capricious arbitrary actions and being impossible to talk to. Their search and navigation is also total trash.
That hasn’t been my experience. The first couple of layers are sort of “inflexible bureaucrat,” but it doesn’t take long to get to an actual human, with authority to act. In my experience, I’m usually on the phone with someone, within a day or so.
Environmentalism comes in at least two forms. IMO they are entirely different things.
One form is science-based and concerned with finding out how to engineer our civilization to be more sustainable and compatible with the Earth's ecosystem. That faction has been mostly either pro-nuclear or at least open to it when renewables aren't enough or aren't ready.
The other form is a romantic back-to-the-land anti-industry or even anti-civilization movement. It's opposed to nuclear because it's a "techno-fix" when the real answer must be abandonment of high technology and advanced civilization and a return to pre-industrial (or even pre-civilization Paleolithic) ways of life. For this group that's the only acceptable answer. Finding a solution to climate change that didn't involve abandoning industry or growth would be bad, since it would allow "business as usual" to continue.
Returning to pre-industrial or pre-civ times would require the deaths of billions of people, since you can't support these populations without industry, but they don't mention that. That's the quiet part.
The second group is mostly the group that has opposed nuclear power. A few have even opposed wind and solar power, believe it or not. It sounds ridiculous but look it up. You can find cases, albeit more fringe than anti-nukes.
The second group also horseshoes around to the far right in some cases. Anti-vax and general anti-medicine ideology and the idea that we need to be "natural" in everything was originally something more associated with these types of greens, but today it's part of MAGA. There'a also an offshoot known as ecofascism. Look it up, it's also a thing. Also search up "Savitri Devi," a very odd crossover figure here.
The second type is also inherently misanthropic. Their ideal is some Eden without humans at all. _Any_ human impact is morally wrong to this type of environmentalist.
Contrast that with the conservationist hunters, sportsman, fisherman, etc. who wish to conserve natural environments with a keen eye towards sustainability and ecosystem health. Human intervention in culling herds can actually be a kindness to animals whose predators have been eliminated, yet some will oppose it regardless of what the Department of Fish and Game and other scientists suggest simply because it involves hunting and eating meat.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face... which rhymes with the nuclear debate here.
I'm pretty sure the actual second group is vanishingly small, it just seems larger because people in general don't know anything about anything so they will be vehemently against nuclear simply because they don't actually know that it's clean energy.
Similar to the "data centers use all the water" people. I saw a Facebook post with thousands of people raging against Nevada/Las Vegas data centers because they were being blamed for the region's dwindling water supplies - googled it and less than 1% of the water used in the area goes to the several dozen data centers. Seems to me like there's probably a lot of bigger fish to fry but I didn't look into it any further.
People are sheep. They jump on whatever bandwagon that happens to cross their path at the right moment. Almost everything people complain about they're just wrong about. It's actually insane scrolling on Facebook these days, it's just an endless stream of bullshit with hordes of NPCs raging about shit they know nothing about and every now and then there's a person with a functioning brain trying to spread some knowledge but it's obviously futile.
Most people can't tell you how taxes work even though they have been paying them their whole lives and complain about them constantly. They will happily tell you a bullshit story about "their friend" who passed on a pay bump because it would increase their taxes and reduce their after-tax income.
It's honestly so fucking frustrating. I mean nobody knows everything but as someone who has a decent overview of how the world works, who understands most important things at at least a basic level, it's just blisteringly obvious that the average person does not understand almost anything. They just got hooked into something at some point, somehow, and now that's their identity. Pretty much exactly like religion. Whatever cult they happened to be born into is obviously the only correct one, they'll ignore any and all evidence and arguments because it has nothing to do with reason. It's their identity and that's that.
I wonder if we might eventually see stacking of NAND, logic, and DRAM dies together so each can still be fabbed on their specialized process. Getting all three on one wafer is extremely impractical, but having them all connected with TSVs or other bonding might be feasible, if the density of the respective dies works out right to give you the right ratio of storage for weights, working memory, and compute.
It’s SRAM that’s expensive, and more so as the nodes get smaller since the logic gets smaller but not the SRAM, which means it takes up a larger percent of die area over generations.
In case you haven't been paying attention, DRAM and NAND are also pretty expensive these days, relative to where they were a year ago.
The drastically different scaling trends for logic and SRAM on the same die are important, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to LLM inference. Cerebras has already shown that the amount of SRAM you can get out of a wafer is an absolute pittance compared to what frontier LLMs require; a multi-million dollar machine with ~40GB of SRAM is not a good solution for big LLMs no matter how fast it may be for small models. Denser forms of memory are almost mandatory for doing LLM inference on the largest models, and it seems pretty clear that the most cost-effective architectures we can build today for LLM inference would not be dominated by SRAM. You'll still have SRAM caches, but it doesn't make sense as the primary storage for the entire model's weights.
I run these things in VMs, and as a user in the VM, and give them access to just the tree I want to work on via mounting. I use Parallels on macOS for this but any VM will do.
That way my actual primary machine is at least strongly isolated. I also run them on VMs on my home Proxmox box.
Zed, as an IDE, can connect to a VM via ssh and both edit and run things like Claude or its built-in agentic harness on your code with the stuff running in the VM.
That way if an AI goes Skynet all over the machine, it's at least isolated. There's malicious injection attacks but there's also edge case failures I've seen where the AI decides it "needs" to do something asinine.
That'll change. They'll get as many knobs as e.g. photoshop for image editing. You'll also be able, if not already, to use your own voice to communicate the emotion and tone you want but then have it re-render it in the voice of your choice.
The "slop" phase is early AI, like chunky ugly very early 3D graphics where you can see the triangles.
I'm already seeing images generated by first-generation diffusion models like Stable Diffusion 1.5 (which is small enough to run on a phone) used ironically as meme generators due to the now-retro silliness of what they generate.
That’s totalitarian communism. Parent is talking about social democracy with a larger safety net. I’m not aware of gulags in the Netherlands or Sweden but maybe I haven’t looked hard enough.
I was just in here a while ago calling leftist class war stuff conspiracism BTW, so I’m equal opportunity.
Just so much bullshit everywhere. We’d have a much better discourse if words meant things and if we could toss the hyperbole and the conspiracy theories from all sides.
They work so well for some they are miracle drugs, and for others they do nothing or have negative effects. This is typical. We still don’t fully understand why or even why they work at all.
If I sell hammers and someone buys one and bashes someone with it, it’s not my fault.
If I sell a hammer called the “head cracker 3000” only to angry people who tell me who they want to bash, that’s different.
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