CMay

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That's speculation. We were going to attack Iran regardless. My point was, the attack you are talking about was done _by_ Israel and was not part of the plan.

Iraq was never really about WMDs. WMDs were a surface political mechanism to achieve the aims, which were different. If you look at all the individual events that transpired before then it was clear something had to be done, but it wasn't a neat one liner that's easy to rally people around like WMDs.

That's a propaganda line. Iran has lost most of its capacity to make war, but it can still harass.

The money is also not as relevant as people think. The amount of money is largely political fluff, not much in the way of serious economic impact in a $32 trillion economy.

I suppose you have reliable sources for this?

Can't name any strikes Israel did that the US didn't support?

The US didn't do that, Israel did. I suspect behind closed doors, Trump thought Bibi went a little overboard there

Well, many Swiss people came to the US and got land or started businesses, so it's not like Swiss people were left out of it. :)

Looking at it again, I think you are correct.

If you already know the ID of the video and it's a link-only video then you can go there yourself.

If it's a fully private video and somehow you know the ID of it, you might be able to use this to get more information about it. I don't know what Ask Studio can access.

The example given (which may be sanitized) is if you neither know the ID nor the title of a video, you can fish for it and get lucky depending on the ratio of private/public videos on the channel. If it can be prompted to take a list of private videos on the channel and URL encode them into a link the user clicks, then that is something.

I still think the worst thing about this is that it becomes a way to launder Google's authority to trick a user to follow your instructions. It might take some luck and be a numbers game, but there could be some fruit if this was abused at scale. Then again, if it got abused at scale, YouTube might start filtering out comments that look like this.

It's largely correct, but you're missing the point. For many countries, it does not matter whether they are good or bad on a grander scale, because their power is so limited that they are largely confined. Countries that exist on the lower end of the intellectual development scale are expected to fall apart.

Not all countries are structured the same, are at the same stage of development, or resourced enough enough to arrive at a sense of responsibility.

That is why these countries are different. The US is the most different, because it is the only one of its kind. There is no other country you can compare the US to.

A lot of negative things about the US are being misrepresented or inflated by propaganda without sufficient context. It isn't all positive, but the US is a huge country and our history didn't begin 250 years ago.

One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...

I could come up with way more examples than that, but for each example you have to ask the questions. You don't simply label an event and point at a face to say "bad, they did it and this is who they are". Is it true? Why did they do it. What were they thinking. Was it an accident, intentional, what was the context? What else was going on in the world, and what was the world like then? What were they up against? Was the choice easy or hard? Was the badness mitigated, or was it unmitigated badness?

You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.

Your unbalanced schooling is not a compelling argument for why I am wrong as much as it is a piece of evidence for why you lost perspective when you got older.

In the example provided of leaking a private video, you already need access to the private video to even comment on it. That scenario is not much of an exploit.

Unless there's a better example of what can be abused, the more realistic concern is authority laundering where a command tricks YouTube into giving the user instructions that sound like they're coming from Google. Another risk is using it to get the AI to misrepresent the results of its task.

If you think those were about colonization, you would be well served to examine history closer.

Most countries have some kind of story they tell about themselves. New Zealand doesn't have any illusions that it is a superpower. It doesn't have the resources, the talent pool or any of that to even begin to dream of it. That is natural. If New Zealand was powerful, then it would find itself in a position of greater responsibility.

You cannot compare countries that barely have the option of ambition with something like the US and even begin to imagine that it is meaningful. You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US. You can rewind history to name other civilizations.

These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale. They have to answer about what the reasons were when things went wrong and whether they agree things went wrong. If people are even allowed to talk about it.

It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people. You can always find counter-examples, but how influential are they in the larger picture?

I didn't make an exceptionalist argument, but if any country's behavior and values can be measured compared to others, you will always be able to make some kind of decision about where those fall in terms of goodness or badness. Do you not believe in good and bad?

The US doesn't have black sites anymore and when it did, the interrogation techniques were chosen to avoid physical harm. The results were bad, we didn't like it here in the US even if they were extreme measures for extreme times and so we shut it down. It had a high error rate and generally didn't reflect what we thought was right.

Meanwhile the CCP regularly abducts its own citizens and executes more people than the entire world combined.

In some ways it's an offshoot of the honest benefit of search engines already crawling all this content. That has its own conflicts, like just how much of a page's content should you reproduce in the results before it's basically considered stealing their content without benefiting the site itself.

There is a balance to strike, both in search engine fair use cases and AI fair use cases. The major cloud LLMs do double as web search engines now, though they didn't originally. In many cases there's no reason left to click the links they sourced from.

That is a legitimate concern. At least within the US, I think there are nuances around fair use and contract law. A lot of companies are getting paid for having their content used in these models, but many websites had no particular rules you had to abide by and the content was simply public. I think if you're operating under an agreement, then even if there is fair use or public domain content being reproduced by the site you are still bound by that agreement.

Similar to old paintings digitized and hosted on some museum website. It's 300 years old, right? It should be public domain, yet the people who digitized it or provided a service to give you access have some say in how their reproduction can be used. These AI services are obviously very different, but there are laws that can govern how you are allowed to use a service if that service has laid out acceptable usage.

I'm not exactly comfortable with the mass scale that everything was soaked up to train these models even within the umbrella of search services, but I also admit that a lot of the usage was probably quite legal. The potential displacement caused by the resulting trained models on artists or writers is almost its own facet. In practice, whether they ONLY trained on strictly legally acquired fair use content with no errors and paid agreements to acquire even more content than they already do or not, there was enough legally accessible information for fair use that there was no escaping some kind of impact on artists, writers, etc.

With any luck, artforms and skills impacted by technology will adapt and continue to be valuable instead of complete displacement or the dilution of opportunity.

Certainly the world is full of actions and reactions, nothing is happening in a vacuum. You don't have to be from a country to take sides, but presumably you have some kind of moral compass, some kind of values around personal freedom or the worth of a human life.

There can be a very real cost, because one side comes from an ideology with a history that wants to conquer the entire Earth which caused World War 2 while the other side is trying to prune the planet like a bonsai to prevent it from descending into total chaos to preserve some sense of international order.

Europe was constantly at war, and we helped stabilize it. Middle East as been constantly at war, and if Iran can be sorted then it will be the closest to some sense of peace it's been in a long time.

We used to be in Japan, Philippines, Germany, Vietnam, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. How many are US territories? None. We aren't out there to conquer the globe and take land. We're usually fighting other people's wars for them, because they're up against better resourced opponents. Meanwhile China is over there building artificial islands, ramming other country's ships, creating ideological police stations in countries around the world to harass people and engaging in the most widespread international interference campaigns in human history.

They do not treat their people well and they do not have free speech. The internet is flooded with their propaganda now, because they have a human numbers advantage.

It's true that given time most advantages are temporary, but there's always that slim chance we could slow them down until the CCP collapses and they could become a more normal country.

The usage of the output is probably considered legal. The usage of the service for that purpose may not be, and using it at scale in a dishonest way is not, which is what China has been doing. Countless thousands of separate requests abusing the service (which is not a simple static HTML feed, but an AI service request) for every kind of query to soak up the results.

The post is about what's in the local code, but for a long time there has already been modifications made to the request outputs from the major cloud services as they work together to both curb adversarial distillation and to degrade the quality of training China can get from that distillation.

It's likely not to make the answer wrong or bad, but to make it so that any model trained on the output would not gain the benefit of the model's reasoning generalization skills as easily and also identifying markers that might even link back to request IDs.

The techniques talked about in this post are naive and simplistic, largely because they are released publicly.

It's not as much about protecting IP as much as it is about slowing China down or being able to track the effects of abuse. So many people are talking about greedy company this, greedy company that. The world is not made up of caricatured giant money pigs wearing suits with monocles and gold watches. That is a children's view of Marx's exaggeration on free markets. Bad, greedy people do exist, but if that is your only hammer for every nail then you have a problem.

The upper-bound for how good these models can be is so crazy that it is essentially dual-use military applicable to an extent most other technologies are not. It's not only cyber attacks or biological weapons. Most people are not even built to understand the possible threats.

Why does it matter if China gains those capabilities? I invite you to begin to learn about China's behavior around the world. The CCP is darkside material.

Llama.cpp implemented some rotation optimizations for quantized kv cache to improve the preservation of attention quality or similar, after everyone was talking about TurboQuant. It's not perfect and when you're talking about long form reasoning, little differences can make or break the results so it is situational.

The MoE models hold up better on old hardware, but the dense models like this post promotes are in fact better. This isn't unique to Qwen. Are the dense models better-enough to use given the performance costs? It depends on what you are doing.

If a model runs fast enough for your use case and does exactly what you need it to, then you don't need a much slower model that might be more accurate. If you do anything more complicated, the dense models become more necessary and they are much more computationally heavy by comparison.

On your hardware an Unsloth quant of Gemma 4 26BA4B QAT would likely give you better results, but because it has 4B active parameters instead of Qwen's 3B active parameters, it will probably run slower.

This is my experience too. Qwen optimizes for a lot of scenarios which masks their weaker generalization compared to US frontier models.

Never go below an fp16 kv cache unless you've already tested it in advance with your model on a verified task that you know it can successfully complete. People should also test the difference using the exact same seed value so they can see how the tokens diverge. If you have memory constraints, sometimes you can still use an fp16 kv cache and use storage for an agentic buffer to work your task with mixed abstractions rather than having everything in memory.

For 4-bit weight quants, Gemma 4 31B QAT is where people should be looking instead of Qwen 3.6.

At 24GB, Gemma 4 31B QAT will be better and give more concise answers. This post is mostly about unquantized results, so it's less relevant and I can't say much about as I haven't tested Qwen or Gemma via cloud API or unquantized locally. All I can say is locally, quantized in a 24GB scenario, Gemma 4 31B is better in my tests which are mostly reasoning or C programming related.

Gemma 4 is the only model series at this parameter scale I've seen correctly answer some of these. One of the answers even made me re-evaluate what I thought the correct answer was, which I did not expect.

When I look at the Artificial Analysis numbers, I can see that some things about Qwen 3.6 look inflated as a result of either metrics that weren't measured yet for Gemma 4 31B, or for metrics that just aren't going to be relevant in a lot of the essential tasks. In a lot of the relevant metrics, Gemma 4 is either better or on par.

Then once it's all quantized all those benchmark results will be hurt, and Gemma 4 QAT has better quantized performance. I think it's more competitive unquantized than people give it credit for and way better quantized than people give it credit for.

Qwen 3.6 clearly isn't legitimately bad and maybe it's quite nice at fp16, but it was a disaster quantized in a 24GB scenario by comparison.

Aspiration for the masses and policy reality are different things. They will say monopolies are bad, but what they mean is only if the state doesn't control them. The CCP has huge state run monopolies and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't understand their policy without understanding Marxism-Leninism. When pesky reality gets in the way of policy, it's called corruption.

In communist or post-communist countries like China and Russia, the percentage of government workers is extreme. To them, all social action is political action, and that includes economic. Since there is only one party allowed, any economic action (and thus political action) which threatens the CCP is unacceptable. They leave other private companies alone.

The CCP is bad and this conclusion is justified not only in theory as a distant observation of ideological concepts, but from their behaviors around the world which echo some of the causes of World War 2. That doesn't mean Chinese AI companies are bad, but the CCP will certainly find ways of using it for its purposes. For now, they're quite far behind on AI, but they deserve credit for optimizing for some use cases which masks poorer generalization.

This is a really bad, poorly thought out take, and historically inaccurate. Also, we're not afraid China will somehow be like us. If they were like us, that would be great. The problem is that China is already behaving like it is ready to abuse the power it has on a scale that the US never has.

Russia, China and Iran all make public statements as if they abide by international law and everyone else are the law breakers, while their measurable actions are shockingly contradictory.

It is their actions that have caused the US reactions, but many people present them as if they occur in a vacuum.

The AI race sits within this context, with a constellation of concerns that most people do not think about. Of course the AI engineers have their own motivation, the companies will share some of that motivation combined with their business trajectory and governments will get involved with it for the justifications they see.

I was around back then too and experienced the full depth of the wild west. AI dwarfs that in every way. What you're talking about is small potatoes by comparison.

Even the old internet, I'm kind of with you on that being something the market should naturally respond to which is why Google rightfully nerfed its search tools over the years, software changed and network infrastructure evolved.

This is different. The government already silently manages many things you never hear about and limits information reporting. Reasonable people generally go "ah, ok" for things that are beyond a threshold, because it seems like a sensible role for governance.

I think everyone agrees government should not simply be curating AI models that only spew public information or say something inconvenient about a political party or whatever. I also don't think people want AI models that are constantly trying to guess whether you're a child and should have certain information. That's not largely the issue.

You can list me the threats that you think AI poses, and I'll let you know if you're warm or not.

It's different, because most books don't contain the nuclear codes or have real impacts on national security.

The way I see so many comments on the internet hating any sort of AI regulation, is young juveniles cursing at the installation of stoplights as they rev their engines. The world is bigger than just you, and not only you matter. Reasons exist for doing things.

No. There is this fantasy that AI will take over and be our nanny, doling out the perfect communist bread, this time without having to wait in line!

Fortunately, that is nonsense for many reasons, but 3 important ones are: the nature of AI, the nature of humans, evolutionary biology and the international cooperation required to optimize the sharing of resources without humane stakeholders making the decisions.

So, sorry if you're of the Marxist, post-scarcity ultimate equality persuasion. It just so happens that you'll never get the entire world to want to become an amorphous gelatinous blob where all the infrastructural, interpersonal, resource distribution and many other decisions are all handled by robots so you never need to learn or do anything about how it all works.

Big companies tend to be somewhat older companies. The people who run them tend to be older. Older people have had a longer time to adjust to society, open up, get out of their shell. People who run large companies also end up adapting to social contact, which is not something we tend to define nerds by. That is all amplified by social media and youtube which help scale up interpersonal examples for people to adjust to for good or for bad.

Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible.

Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego.

There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.

For what it's worth, I think for an organization that size that needs the best talent from anywhere, It's probably much better to discourage political activism at work. It can tend to turn away the most logical and reasonable well grounded people who want no part of it. The people who _need_ work to be political can go get hired for explicitly political organizations where that is the job.

Creating a distaste in people without like minds has been an intentional goal to cause exodus after exodus on various platforms, in companies and so on. If you let that get out of control, you can poison a culture almost unrecoverably. We can't let that happen to our critical tech companies for national security reasons.

That's one of the blessings and the curses of the flexibility of web technologies. They're easy to abuse, or repurpose and see the everyday normal things from new perspectives. That can be good, or it can be bad. There are often many ways to achieve the same thing.

Decades ago there were cool ideas that I loved that simply never took off. They faded away into obscurity. The technology isn't always that important to keep, but the love is. Keep feeling excited about things even if people don't buy into them, because nurturing that feeling of excitement for possibilities is usually more important than today's thing. It's something that can pull you forward to keep trying things. You'll cover a lot of ground that other people already did decades ago, but eventually you'll hit things nobody else did and that becomes important.