> all i have to do is come up with a website that looks enough like your banking app, and get you to scan the uri to that website, and that'll trick you into giving me your pin.
It is not how any of this works. But sure, keep up the uninformed fear mongering.
And what did it change? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Tariffs are still here - this morning I accepted DHL package and had to pay it - and even if - Trump/Vence already said its actually good because we will use another vehicle which will allow us to continue collect the money. So it won't be called tariff - it will be called embargo fee. So yes, Trump continues to control all branches, one way or another.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.
The nature of tariffs has fundamentally changed. Imports from all countries are subject to the same 15% rate which means no more deals or wielding tariffs as a punishment.
The big AI labs are almost certainly selling inference below cost and burning mountains of money. With the insane increase in hardware prices, running models locally just doesn’t make any financial sense.
Nobody is saying it makes "financial sense", it's about control.
I have always taken plenty of care to try and avoid becoming dependent on big tech for my lifestyle. Succeeded in some areas failed in others.
But now AI is a part of so many things I do and I'm concerned about it. I'm dependent on Android but I know with a bit of focus I have a clear route to escape it. Ditto with GMail. But I don't actually know what I'd do tomorrow if Gemini stopped serving my needs.
I think for those of us that _can_ afford the hardware it is probably a good investment to start learning and exploring.
One particular thing I'm concerned about is that right now I use AI exclusively through the clients Google picked for me, coz it makes financial sense. (You don't seem to get free bubble money if you buy tokens via API billing, only consumer accounts). This makes me a bit of a sheep and it feels bad. There's so much innovation happening and basically I only benefit from it in the ways Google chooses.
(Admittedly I don't need local models to fix that particular issue, maybe I should just start paying the actual cost for tokens).
Apparently inference itself is profitable, at least according to an interview I watched with Dario. They even cover the cost of training itself, if you look at it on a model-by-model basis.
The cash burn comes from models ballooning in size - they spend (as an example, not actual numbers) 100M on training + inference for the lifetime of Sonnet 3.5, make 200M from subscriptions/api keys while it's SOTA, but then have to somehow come up with 1B to train Opus 4.0.
To run some other back of the envelope calcs:
GLM 4.7 Air (previous "good" local LLM) can generate ~70 tok/s on a Mac Mini. This equates to 2,200 million tokens per year.
Openrouter charge $0.40 per million tokens, so theoretically if you were using that Mac mini at 100% utilisation you'd be generating $880 per annum "worth" of API usage.
Assuming a power draw of something 50W, you're only looking at 440kWh per annum. At 20c per kWh that's $90 on power, plus $499 to get the hardware itself. Depreciate that $499 hardware cost over 3 years and you're looking at ~$260 to generate ~$880 in inference income.
We are not in this thread because of finances but because of safety from oppressive governments and bad big corps. It's for you to decide the price of your own safety.
RAM and storage price increases due to the AI bubble have certainly made the cost of entry more expensive, but once you have the hardware, running models locally does make financial sense, especially if you have access to home solar power that is sufficient to run the hardware. You can't get much lower running cost than free.
> stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again.
The acquisition involved a buyout which took it private. There was no period under Musk where Twitter was publically traded, let alone one that saw steadily declining stock.
> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.
If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.
It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
My point was your initial premise is wrong: “All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers”. There’s plenty of instances where the federal government takes and redistributes tax dollars, from person to person, or state to state. Calling this particular instance a fine, but not every other instance, is wrong.
They're all fines. The person receiving something while paying nothing isn't the one being fined. They're doing the thing you have to do in order to not be fined. Indeed, that's where the financial penalties being paid by everyone else are going.
Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.
The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.
You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.
And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.
The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.
Australia's 'full' name is the Commonwealth of Australia. Don't think anyone uses it outside of the region, though, much like no one calls Mexico the 'United Mexican States'.
> I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
I didn't have to do this when I received a bogus takedown notice for a YouTube video.
But I'm not in the US and I don't know if YouTube's process varies by jurisdiction.
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