AnAmericanPotato

If you're not an idiot, and you (nevertheless) use LLMs, they probably meet most of those criteria.

I don't like how the author buys into anthropomorphization. LLMs do not act on their own.

He's right that tools don't "go rogue". Neither do LLMs. That's just a lie to try to avoid accountability. ChatGPT didn't hack the Australian government; PEOPLE did, and those people belong in prison.

No problem until they make every other method more and more difficult. Which is already happening.

I only use passkeys when the alternative is an onerous song and dance.

I mean in great volume. I know AI video generation exists, but it's not very common compared to text, images, or music.

Just wait til AI video catches on.

If we're lucky it will also come with an improvement in video compression. But probably not, and new video codecs typically take 5-10 years to catch on anyway.

I've been lucky with my upgrade/build timings. Built my first PC right before the crypto madness, and did my last major upgrade right before the AI madness.

I'm going to run my current system until it crumbles to dust. With any luck, the market will have settled a bit by then.

As for projects, I have lots of old "useless" tech that I can work with. Like old laptops, phones, Raspberry Pis, even mobos and other spare PC parts. Building small is more interesting to me than building big.

You can't turn it off anymore in Golden Gate. It is a mandatory download (in countries where it is supported) now.

You can still disable some specific AI-related features, but you can't block the models entirely.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, that's a ton of disk space, and Apple is notoriously chintzy when it comes to storage. On the other hand, I do want the default to be local-only models, and giving developers easy access will make that the path of least resistance. Most of my problems with LLMs don't apply to moderately-sized local models.

I never understood the hate for semicolons, until I read Moby Dick.

You can strangle somebody with your arm.

But can you strangle someone with a dead arm? It sounds very different than using a live arm. Without any muscle activation I think you'd be putting a lot more stress on weak points in the snake's body and it might just tear apart. But I have no first-hand experience strangling people with live or dead arms (or snakes), so I'm just playing armchair murderer here.

It's more than just that. Smaller models are improving rapidly and are already "good enough" for the majority of consumer use cases. It is entirely realistic that in a few years, there will be virtually no demand for trillion-parameter LLMs. Demand for inference might not shrink in terms of functionality, but it will absolutely shrink in terms of memory and compute requirements. And then there will be a hell of a lot more server capacity available than anyone needs or wants, because they're over-investing like crazy now.

What happens when hundreds of billions of dollars spent on datacenters basically goes *poof*?

I've heard of similar techniques using masks on the back of your head to discourage tiger attacks in villages close to wild tiger populations.

As I recall, it gets less effective over time because tigers are not stupid, just risk-averse. They learn with repeated exposure.

I'm going from memory. I'll try to dig up sources when I have time.

Edit: Found it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans#Precautions

Fishermen and bushmen originally created masks made to look like faces to wear on the back of their heads because tigers always attack from behind. This worked for a short time, but the tigers quickly caught on to the ruse, and the attacks reportedly continued. One local honey gatherer, Surendra Jana, 57, summarised the general feeling of the tigers adapting to their efforts: "Before we could understand the way they attacked...We don't feel safe any more, knowing our brothers have been attacked in spite of the tricks we use."

It's like Safari in terms of performance and battery usage, with extension support that isn't pants-on-head stupid like Safari's, better customization, and some advanced features. That's all I really want.

Safari is just too basic for me to use as an everyday browser (especially on iOS).

I think the original impetus was that Safari makes it unreasonably difficult to change its search engines.

Yeah, the business model is not sustainable. They're playing with funny money for now. There are only a few ways for them to make real money: raise prices a ton, scale back model sizes, and focus on government/military contracts (i.e. steal from taxpayers).

Oh, and enshittify. Enshittify like no one's ever enshittified before.

They're already starting, on all fronts.

OpenAI is raising prices like mad this year, and imposing stricter usage limits. They just basically cut the value of their $200/month plan in half while introducing a new $500/month plan. API costs also doubled for some models back in May.

Recently there was an article saying how AI costs are falling by 13x per year: https://archive.is/U0Fju . So as time goes on, they'll likely be able to offer "similar" levels of performance for drastically lower costs, and just pocket the difference.

Today's smaller models compare favorably with the biggest models from 2-3 years ago. ChatGPT 3.5 was a "big deal" in 2024, and now you can run a model that performs better on a decent laptop or even a high-end smartphone, basically for free. Small open models keep improving at a steady rate.

They're indirectly jacking up prices of electronics so much that consumer-level hardware is basically frozen in time, and in some cases even regressing. Look at Microsoft re-introducing 8GB Surface laptops after spending so much marketing money telling people they had to go up to a minimum of 16GB. If I re-built my PC today with the same specs, it would cost about double what I paid a few years ago. So maybe people actually won't be able to run anything on their own hardware in the near future. Like Uber and AirBNB and Amazon before them, they could start to look comparatively better than the alternatives by destroying the entire fucking market around them. I don't know how long that will hold though. It can't stay like this forever.....right? Right?!?