rglullis

It was a rhetorical question. OP is making it sound like the open weight models are fundamentally broken by being censored out of the box. This is a completely asinine take.

How much would it cost (time and resources) to take a Chinese open-weight model and remove these (admittedly) stupid guardrails?

Watch "The Social Dilemma" carefully, and you will understand it.

The problem with Big Tech is not that they "selling your data". This wouldn't be that profitable to them. The problem is that they make more money by having tons of users and being able to build really accurate consumer behavior models, which then can be used to be used as a way to change mass behavior.

The most direct way is of course by having hyper targeted advertising, but this also affects people in many other ways in ways that are not to the benefit of the user: consider how the applications are designed to maximize engagement instead of being made to help users directly achieve their goals.

When you are the one paying for the service, companies succeed when they serve you better, and the money they can get from you directly is order of magnitudes more than what they'd get by trying to monetize your attention indirectly.

It's possible to host something with no intention of making it internet-public.

But this is completely opposite of what most people hosting pages online are doing. Ask a thousand people why they are using Github pages, or Vercel, or netlify... how many of them are not looking for a cheap/free way to have something in the public internet?

It's a classic "Show, don't tell" example.

If you want to make the point that self-hosting is trivial, then show a site that you are hosting with your setup instead of just pointing to gitlab.

What a silly deflection. The point is obvious: if it is as trivial as you are saying, why aren't you self-hosting?

Perfect is enemy of the good. Like you said, the only way to be truly independent if people ran their own infrastructure, and if all the hardware was as 100% FOSS.

Of all the compromises we have to do (relying on Telco providers, equipment manufacurers, etc), using Nearlyfreespeech is the less risky one. They have no history of abusing the trust users have placed on them, and service costs virtually nothing.

Being p2p, network effects are even larger: you have to convince not only your own friends to install and use, but also rely on enough density in your area?

If you were running a startup that had at least 1 paid developer, the cost of outsourcing these services were a rounding error compared to the actual salaries. If you wanted to skimp on these other things, you'd be saving maybe 2% of your budget.

Now, these supporting services can quickly become more expensive than the cost of a subscription to a powerful coding agent. You can get a beefy server on Hetzner for less than $50/month, self-host all of that and run entirely on open source alternatives. This is on the same order of magnitude as the cost of your LLM subscription. You can (theoretically) have your whole IT operations costing you a few hundred bucks per month.

Do you pay for support for all the FOSS you use?

I was born and raised in Sâo Paulo, Brazil. Fortunate enough to not have lived through these experiences, but not affluent to the point where I was detached from people from more humble backgrounds. I can tell you that even today most orphans would rather have the life of this girl than growing up in the system.

Her life was ruined.

How so? We are talking about someone coming from a poor origin in one of the poorest states in Brazil, in the 1970's!

This is the story of a girl whose mother has been working with the family and moved in with them when she was 7 years old. For some reason, after a while the mother gets out of the picture (Passed away? Tried her luck to migrate south but couldn't take her child?), she had no place to go so she stayed with them. It's not like she had a whole range of opportunities ahead of her. What do you think her life would be had she not stayed with the family? Do you think she would be better off if she was thrown on the street?

Yes, it sucks that she grew up in an environment where she was not seen as an equal peer. Yes, it is appalling to think that no one in a seemingly wealthy family never thought of giving the same opportunity to her as they would give to their own kids. Yes, she should have been given a lot more autonomy. Yes, she deserves to get a lot more for what she has done beyond shelter/food/clothes. But all things considered, at that time her staying with the family was the best alternative in a scenario where all alternatives are shitty.

Stop applying today's standards for something that happened more than 55 years ago, specially when you clearly have no grasp on what is like to live where abject poverty is the norm.

Pathological, yes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that this fear was instilled by the family as a way to keep her trapped.

Most people in Brazil are so used with the precautions that they have to take to deal with urban violence, they don't get to realize that they are the ones living in their own prisons. I have family members in Rio de Janeiro who get panic attacks at the thought of going anywhere by themselves. I've met grown-up, educated, independent people in college who wouldn't dare to do anything outside of the home <-> campus itinerary on their own.

Maybe this is a sensitive topic for you, but try not reading more into the article than it's there. The decision was recommended by the social workers.

If it was as bad as you are claiming it to be, she wouldn't stay with the family before the investigation, yet everyone deemed better to let her stay with the family even after the sentence was given.

You are acting like the case is that the girl was kidnapped or taken from their family against their will. Barring extraordinary circumstances, this is far from the truth here. More likely than not, this is the case of some poor family that couldn't take care of the girl and gave her away.

It is a horrible arrangement, and she should be given a lot more than what she is getting (at the very least, she should be given backpay + pension equivalent to the market rate of her work for all these years), but to treat this case as some sadistic family keeping someone in captivity is overreacting.

If you ever been to or lived in Fortaleza, "being afraid of the violence outside" is not ridiculous at all.

Most of Africa and Southeast Asia has Internet connectivity that is cheaper and more ubiquitous than in North America. They are very well served by an extensive cellular network. Satellite Internet is not what is holding them back.

Orthogonal issues. Will the trash on earth be reduced if we start littering low orbit with junk?

It's already pretty cheap, global and universally available.

We don't need to have space literally transformed into junkyards to make progress, and there is nothing going wrong with going a lower pace if it means reduced impact on the rest of society.

It is not because can do something that they should.

Their argument is that all team members should use the same tools, and I guess that is a valid point.

Why?! It is a text editor for crying out loud. If you are more productive using the tools you want, don't cost anything to the company and doesn't force your colleagues to adopt your workflow, you could be working with notepad for all I care.

I think we are talking about the same thing and reaching wildly different conclusions. If "producing is just the input side" and you still need people to check if the product really solves the user's problems, then I get to conclude that the bottleneck has never been the "generating the code" part of the work, and actual productivity - i.e, delivering things that actually solves the customer's problem - is pretty much the same.

But seems like people are working more and not less with AI.

Overall productivity hasn't increased, has it? At best there are cases of increased per productivity due to layoffs, at worst it's just busywork.

Somebody needs to care enough.

Why?

Do you seriously think that "institutional knowledge" can be maintained by simply writing down a few pages on Confluence or whatever system your company uses for internal documentation?

If you think your business depends on the ability for you to outspend the competition on LLM tokens, then you should cut your losses and shut it down right now.

It doesn't take too big of a stretch to say that "Click" is this movie.

Why not both.jpg?

Just sign up to Ollama Cloud, use GLM-5.2. $20/month gives you something on par with Opus (if not better) with quotas so high I'm yet to hit.

U.S. is trying to achieve AGI at all costs

If that was true, they would be collaborating with each other and opening up all the results from their work.