alex43578

I’d imagine partly a belief, right or wrong, that protectionism and regulatory capture will reduce China’s models impacts on the US market. Just like automobiles: the big 3 should be terrified of the likes of BYD, but aren’t.

You're missing the point: those small "good enough" models aren't monetizable and haven't been for months already. All of the value in LLMs is going to come from frontier models at a high cost to businesses/governments. It'll be the difference between next day air-mail of a contract and sticking a stamp on your christmas card to Grandma - nobody's making a profit on the christmas card.

This reads like a rant by the self-proclaimed best carriage driver around the invention of the automobile.

With OpenAI having released 20 and 120B models a while back, I think they recognized that tiny models were never going to be a defensible income stream.

Any value will come from the largest models, and those largest models are unlikely to ever run on consumer hardware within their window of relevancy.

I agree with all those issues.

Just for discussion though: Economics don’t necessarily dominate these markets when providers aren’t informed - Uber drivers w/ depreciation for example. If your GPU is a sunk cost, and your electricity is cheap enough, it might be attractive (think consumers mining crypto back when).

A floating market rate or “surge pricing” could come into play. Outside of the top 10% of gamers by playtime, there’s plenty of idle compute during prime hours.

A secure environment would definitely be essential. SteamOS could be a great tool for that: dual boot SteamOS and make SteamBucks while you’re not using your computer.

You could only offer your machine for the titles you have downloaded. This again could be addressed by a market: popular titles could get more utilization, but obscure titles could command a premium.

No guarantee any of this would actually work, but it’d be an interesting model to explore if I were at Steam. They have hardware survey data, user activity, etc; to check viability.

It’s like how most people on here would want a loaded MacBook Pro or RTX 5090, but chromebooks and iGPUs do volume.

There’s absolutely a place for a lifestyle subscription to a sonnet model that you could just use everywhere all the time.

Except aren’t these Chinese models having to go big too? While they might not be Mythos/Fable sized, a trillion plus parameters is hardly a local server or even desktop to mainframe style jump

I think the gamble comes down to how many tokens need to be served on your best model, versus how many can be served in the cheapest/fastest way.

Imagine if Anthropic could give effectively unlimited access to Sonnet, for $20. Wouldn’t that be an appealing option for many users? I know I’d make a lot of use of it for agentic tasks, office work, summarization, etc; when right now I’d save quota for more important tasks.

What if steam users could offer their computers up for credit on steam? Not sure if most consumer internet connections would be up for it, but that would be an interesting model.

China encourages/prioritizes their release because it directly competes with American companies closed models.

Easy to say they break the law when it’s a law the EU just makes up and arbitrarily enforces.

I’m saying it’s stupid to equate viewing = searching for multiple reasons. 1) A lay understanding of a search would require way more than just seeing and recording the license plate of a car on a public roadway. 2) Courts have extensively and repeatedly upheld the idea that cops can examine your car, your house, your trash can, your curtilage, and more without it constituting a search. To backpedal and now claim being observed driving on a public roadway is a search creates a huge contradiction in the law that will need to be resolved by either kneecapping basic police investigation or rightfully reversing the idea that you can’t be observed on a roadway displaying a government issued license plate without a warrant.

Do you mind providing your position? Do you think being observed on a public roadway constitutes a search or seizure in the context of the 4th amendment?

The police observing your car driving down a road is not threatening, and acting as if it is is hysteria.

Furthermore, if you’re worried about that, have you considered that “they” could get even more comprehensive tracking data just by requesting it from a data-broker? There’s no divide between the online and real world if you have a phone or an online presence.

See the two paragraphs before? That lays out my position.

The courts have repeatedly upheld far more invasive searches and encroachments of vehicles, but now confusingly consider simply observing the outside of your vehicle to constitute an excessive search.

The Baltimore decision is stupid because it contradicts 50 years of case law over what constitutes a search and what degree of privacy you expect to have on a private roadway.

Details do matter: extensive case law supports a very low standard for privacy in cars and searches on the roadway. Pat downs, being ordered out of the car, free air sniffs via drug dogs, DUI or immigration checkpoints, etc.

Furthermore, just being recorded on a public roadway doesn’t constitute a search or seizure.

The strongest evidence in support of your position is that Boston aerial surveillance case, which is frankly a stupid extension of the idea of viewing = searching, and I’d like to see it or another case reach the Supreme Court for clarification.

I don’t see why you should expect any privacy in the middle of a public road. What are you doing there that is private?

I think everyone’s threat model is severely miscalibrated if they are threatened by being recorded driving somewhere via Flock, yet use a phone or social media account. There’s way more meaningful threats to actual private matters than Flock.

Can you dispute any of it with facts?

In CA: Kostas Linardos had 17 tickets — including for speeding, reckless driving and street racing — and had been in four collisions. Then, in November 2022, he gunned his Ram 2500 truck as he entered a Placer County highway and slammed into the back of a disabled sedan, killing a toddler, court records show. He’s now facing felony manslaughter charges.

In December of last year, while that case was open, the DMV renewed his driver’s license.

https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/04/license-to-kill...

Voting in CA:In most cases, a California voter is not required to show identification to a polling place worker before casting a ballot

https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/voting-cal...

3D printer regulation: A.B. 2047 goes further than any other legislation on algorithmic print-blocking by making it a misdemeanor for the owners of these devices to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms. Not only does this effectively criminalize use of any third-party, open-source 3D printer firmware, but it also enables print-blocking algorithms to parallel anti-consumer behaviors seen with DRM.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/dangers-californias-le...

Ironically in California you’ve already lost a number of your civil liberties, while having 0 security as a commoner, with or without Flock.

Which part?

Why do you think the government couldn’t collect this information themselves? ALPRs are legal, cameras covering a public roadway are legal, and the 4th amendment doesn’t extend to driving on a public roadway.

No, you don’t have an expectation of privacy on a public roadway, public parking lot, etc.

Eh, I think you’ll be able to match it close enough between upscaling and the very low bar for console graphics. If consoles are a low/medium preset at like 1080P, most computers can hit that.

Just as a quick check, this 2019 console competitor build from LTT can still match or exceed the minimum specs for Battlefield 6: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZNLCzL1WAg&ra=m

Upgrading to a 3070 is $150 to $200 depending on eBay pricing, an amount you could easily save over a few Steam discounts compared to buying games at full retail.

Do you have a phone, modern car, or social media account? If so, I have some bad news for you…

The argument is that physical media was the one benefit consoles had. If you’re just buying a locked down, non-upgradable, low performance PC disguised as a console (without access to the superior Steam storefront), why not just get a PC?

I think you’re also describing the indie/lower-budget scene that does very well on Steam. There’s plenty of games that break out via streaming, for instance.

Yes because the lag between Hellfire and target is way less than "launch Shahed and wait 20 minutes". A continuum of strike times has value, all the way up to hypersonics.

While it's clear the US is working on those types of drones too (cloning Shaheds, basically), the likely mission profile of the US requires we have that capability. Pick your potential future US conflict and it won't look like us flinging disposable drones over the border at Canada, but rather needing to project power from an aircraft carrier or forward base against an adversary, where range, payload, sensors, and more matter. Quantity has a quality all its own, but there's no world where the US doesn't need a Reaper style drone in the arsenal.

Maybe? But there's honestly not much market for this, as I'd guess less than 1% of the population cares about this. Particularly since they're already carrying a phone anyway.

For 90% of birthday greetings, are they ever genuine?

Like seriously, outside of some close friends and family, are you sitting there deliberating over a message for your coworker Steve in the Slack chat or a cousin you barely talk to outside of a birthday and Christmas card?

Hey everyone, stop progress! Wolrah has decided that November 29, 2022 is as far as things should go. Because everyone knows before that day, there were no scams, every artist lived lavishly from commissions, and software was flawless and without any extraneous features.