• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 30th, 2026

help-circle



  • I’m not here to argue that point. But my crappy NUC based LLM can answer the Beatles question. What it can’t answer is “what was the name of the guy who famously rolled his eyes while Yoko Ono screwed up his performance?” Right off the top of my head, neither can I. But OpenAI’s model would have no problem with that question.

    So when I say “smarter than you or I” I don’t mean AGI and I’m not trying to get into an AGI conversation. I mean something that runs locally, doesn’t rely on the Internet and can answer almost any general trivia question accurately. And LLMs are already there, but not yet on your phone. When they are on your phone, people won’t need OpenAI or Sam Altman’s models anymore. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m refuting Altman’s claim that we will pay for intelligence like a utility.


  • I don’t make a lot of predictions about artificial intelligence, but I will go out on a limb on this one and make one: this will never happen.

    The human brain runs on 20 watts of power. Right now I have an AI running on an Intel NUC (Qwen 2.5 9B) that can do most home automation tasks I run through it (setting timers, setting reminders, making to-do lists, turning things off and on), as well as answer general questions (“who were the members of The Beatles?”) and be (mostly) correct. It uses about 65 watts of power to do so.

    It’s nowhere near as smart as I am and it uses 3x the electricity I do. But I couldn’t do this even last year. Efficiency gains to this technology have a ceiling so high that I don’t think most people believe it because they see all these data centers being built and people like Sam Altman talking dumb shit like this. The future of AI will be local. It will run on your phone and be smarter than you, and in fairly short order.

    We are already able to run models locally (Qwen 3.8 27B) that blow last-gen frontier models away (and give current frontier models a run for their money), but you need a high-end setup like an RTX 5090 24G and 64G system RAM.



  • This was what came to my mind as well, however Google does let you turn off your history for YouTube and when you do that (as I do) it just shows a blank page when you go there, so that’s one way it can be done.

    Nobody does it because everybody likes to pretend they don’t like the crack until they have to go without. I do it on principle because YouTube has single-handedly changed a particular member of my family, one of the most innocuous people in the world, to someone who has loathsome opinions. I hate it a lot and don’t want that for myself. I am on no social media that serves up anything based on your previous clicking behavior.



  • Things I know I signed up for, on purpose or inadvertently, get one attempt at unsubscribing. If it fails, they’re spam and get treated as such. I never actually sign up for these things, but I accept that they put me on these lists when I make purchases or engage with them in some other way. I accept it, but I don’t like it - and my patience with them when I try to unsubscribe is extremely limited.

    But things I “signed up” for and things Gmail asks me if I want to unsubscribe from - are two very different things. Gmail asks me that question several times a week. I “sign up” for things at a rate more like several times a year. Things that I didn’t subscribe to that want me to unsubscribe are just scammers trying to polish their lists up and I’m not gonna help them.








  • I think these guys envision remaking Earth into something like Solaria, from Asimov’s novels, a planet where something like 20,000 people live on vast estates tended to by their robotic armies. Since this means they will have to somehow conveniently get rid of 8 billion people, it’s safe to say that they have less than zero concern for whether any of their current policies have any human cost.

    Their vision is really stupid because it assumes that AGI (or more appropriately, ASI) will value them as much as they value themselves and HAHAHAHAHAHA wipes tears - I have no idea what ASI would do, but it sure as fuck wouldn’t be that.




  • It would only happen because of their sense of self-preservation. They can build all the bunkers they want but there is no way to be completely independent of the giant external machine that keeps us all alive. Even if you were a nihilist like your average billionaire, you can’t just say fuck everybody else, I got mine. You depend on food being grown and delivered, you depend on drugs being made and doctors and dentists to fix you up. You depend on a billion people not actively seeking your death. You depend, most of all, on money not being worthless. If nobody has money but you, then you also have no money.