I find these style of models are great, but fail hard, and fail randomly. I'd be hesitant to use it for a daily driver, but I'm using dual 3060s, so it's not like I'm quantizing a frontier model here.

How do you find the overall experience? And do you have any special sauce or recommendations for going this route?

This license requires the holder to uphold code of professional ethics, and makes the engineer themselves be personally responsible for the safety and viability of the design itself. Losing a PE license is rare, but it does happen. The industry board (usually a regional board) can also discipline/reprimand engineers who fail to meet the professional standard - rubber stamping projects, personal misconduct, etc. Losing a license is a huge deal, but even reprimands can have a serious negative impact on someone's career.

In the industry the previous commenter works in their hypothetical would absolutely meet the bar for discipline or reprimand.

It's Chesterton's Fence[0] in action - Elon took a self-proclaimed woodchipper to the United States government without understanding what he was destroying and without concern for the repercussions to society. He used that influence to benefit himself and his companies directly. It's not sharks with laser beams, but it's far more impactful and the world will living with it for decades to come.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and have similar vibes with the similarities I see between llm training and metallurgy. I could probably put together a formal concept for these vibes at this point, but is there actually a "there" there? I have no idea. And it would take me years to actually dive in and learn everything to gain the deep understanding that would be required to know if I'm just experiencing my own brand of AI psychosis or not.

It's a brave new world, that's for sure.

What part of that last paragraph seems like acceptable human behaviour for a handful of the most powerful people in the world?

Not sure if it'll help you with gaining an intuitive understanding, but at least it'll be interesting!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_mechanics

Not sure how it'd work, but there's absolutely a niche for a privacy focused data cooperative out there.

The commonly scapegoated cities in the United States are not experiencing third world conditions. Appalachia is experiencing third world conditions. Hollowed out rust belt cities in the Midwest are experiencing third world conditions. These areas are not run by lefty politicians. The United States has a systemic problem, not a local one.

And yes, the systemic problem is that there are a tiny number of ultra wealthy people with wildly outsized influence on the government of the United States, doing everything they can to reduce the amount they need to pay in taxes while simultaneously ensuring they extract the maximum amount of profit from the US government's wildly excessive expenditures.