This is spot on.

And on the apparently contradictory “AGI” development, I’ll add the Big Tech kingpens like Altman/Zuck/Musk are hyping that while doing the exact opposite. They say that, turn around, cut fundamental research, and focus more on scaling plain transformers up or even making AI ‘products’ like Zuck is. And the models they deploy are extremely conservative, architecturally.

Going on public statements from all three, I think their technical knowledge is pretty poor and they may be drinking some of their own kool-aid. They might believe scaling up transformers infinitely will somehow birth more generalist ‘in the sky’ intelligence, when in reality it’s fundamentally a tool like you describe, no matter how big it is.

I said it in too many words, but everything’s magnified. ‘AI’ is an extremely useful tool, yet the current overhype is even more insane, and has muddied everything. It’s like a caricature of the dotcom bubble, but real.

There are ML hobbyist/tinkerers here. I’ve seen it on zip, db0, itjust.works.

But it all gets downvoted, and I think those folks (me included) tend to keep their heads down on “AI” topics.

You don’t see a lot of true AI bros here, but they honestly don’t know squat and wouldn’t give a good answer either.

Allegedly Google, early in this craze:

“We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither/

Ultimately the dotcom fantasy kind of panned out. A few tech companies have massive control over society now, with what is essentially cloud/internet business. They have a moat.

…But with the AI bubble, I think folks are underestimating how fast and low the “race to the bottom” is.

As random examples:

• Look at something like Nemotron 4B, which makes a lot of mundane ‘AI’ data processing people assumed to be big and power hungry (with these data centers) basically free: https://huggingface.co/jet-ai/Jet-Nemotron-4B

• Look at GLM 4.6. I can run it on my Ryzen/3090 desktop, for free, and for the first time, I feel like it’s beating Claude and Gemini in some stuff, at 7 tokens/sec: https://huggingface.co/Downtown-Case/GLM-4.6-128GB-RAM-IK-GGUF

These are both literally from the past day.

And all this is accelerating. Alternate attention is catching on (see: Qwen 80B, Deepseek experimental, IBM Granite, probably Gemini). bitnet is already proven and probably next, and reduces the cost of matrix multiplication by an order of magnitude or two.

In other words, AI as a “dumb tool” is rapidly approaching “so cheap, it’s basically free to run locally on your phone,” and you don’t need all these megacorp data centers for that. There’s no profit in it. It’s all fake planning, and the ML research crowd knows it. That’s much more extreme than the dotcom hype, where cloud hosting/dev cost is kind of a fundamental thing.

Jason Stanley

Who, one may note, fled from Yale to Toronto in 2025:

In an email, he writes that “the decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States.” He had had an offer from Toronto, and decided to accept it last Friday night after Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands.

https://dailynous.com/2025/03/25/stanley-from-yale-to-toronto/

And I might add, historical precedent for fleeing academics is not great.

A lot of the engagement around him was absolutely manufactured and bot driven, kinda like the Cracker Barrel thing.

Some non-Gentoo distros ship CPU-optimized builds anyway, so even that is quite questionable.

This is quite reasonable to avoid ban evasion and fight spammers, IMO.

This never happened to me, but can’t you appeal to the admins for a spam ban? This isn’t Reddit.

And to be clear I’m talking about Reddit shadowbanning me here. And it just so happened to persist through a move.

Welcome to Lemmy, lol.

Did you not get your Molotov at the door?

I dunno. I keep getting shadowbanned for posting literally nowhere but a children’s cartoon sub and a self hosting one.

At least on Lemmy, if I get banned, I know why.

…But one suspicion I have is linking Lemmy. I feel like this has permanently IP shadowbanned me or something, yet the trigger is not immediate on a new account.

Look for old games, that were released a long time ago before the “predation” was so required.

Osmos and World of Goo come to mind. Monument Valley 1 was a more popular, recent one in that vein.

Other than that, the FOSS and emulation recommendations here are great.

To be clear, VMs absolutely have overhead but Docker/Podman is the question. It might be negligible.

And this is a particularly weird scenario (since prompt processing literally has to shuffle ~112GB over the PCIe bus for each batch). Most GPGPU apps aren’t so sensitive to transfer speed/latency.

In my case it’s performance and sheer RAM need.

GLM 4.5 needs like 112GB RAM and absolutely every megabyte of VRAM from the GPU, at least without the quantization getting too compressed to use. I’m already swapping a tiny bit and simply cannot afford the overhead.

I think containers may slow down CPU<->GPU transfers slightly, but don’t quote me on that.

It’s OpenCL, so it should even run on integrated graphics.

Yeah, it’s great! Extremely fast and marginally smaller than ffmpeg, last I checked, though I have not messed with those newer ffmpeg options. And cuetools has some other nice utilities anyway.

Heh, joke’s on you; you’re using the wrong library for obsessive FLAC compression anyway:

http://cue.tools/wiki/FLACCL

0.00017x sounds like a bug though. Maybe it balloons RAM usage enough to trigger swapping?

I think you underestimate hardcore MAGA’s antisemitism, lol. And slightly overestimate the racism (which is more ‘oldschool’)

You are not wrong about Jewish mobilization.

There’s just different stories told to different people, I think. Evangelical purists get the ‘cultural contamination’ story to sympathize with (as that’s what they want in the US). Old folks get the decades-old broadcast TV version of Israel. MAGA and oldschool Republicans get the radical islam angle, hardcore MAGA gets a kind of altered reality where Trump is actually the anti-interventionists here (as they still hate Israel), he’s just working towards that, somehow.

I really think most of the branding isn’t ‘brown people.’ Even though there is a lot of islamophobia in the US, one of MAGA’s core tenants is technically non-interventionalism, and most appeals to racism aren’t so explicit.

My favorite BGS game is Oblivion.

No.

I’m not really sure what a good solution is anymore. We hold Israel severely accountable (which is apparently impossible :/), but then what?

Shrug.

Qatar has been quite the friendly mediator though. Any pretense of Trump’s ‘wins’ in the Middle East start to disappear if they simply don’t do that anymore.

There’s basically no way two-state will work anymore, right?

Maybe a few decades ago. But even if Bibi was magically removed for the most pro-Palestine government possible, Israel’s war crimes were recognized, and Palestine was rebuilt from rubble with massive aid, it feels like things are ‘written into a corner’ and there is just too much radicalization and spilled blood for two hypothetical states to leave each other alone.