You can generate a video of just about any thought in your head at all.

IP holders and politicians will not like that.

Granted, human artists have always been capable of this. It's just never been worth it to bring most ideas into fruition. Now there's minimal cost to do so.

Early Sora, Grok Imagine, and Seedance 2.0 had few filters. Disney, Nintendo, et al. eventually stopped them all from using their IP, which made the appeal fade for a lot of users.

Kling and Nano Banana can still generate IP oddly enough.

A lot of corporate ad spend is already planned, and Google can adjust the costs up as much as they like. They hold the lever.

The model was "accidentally" released.

Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know.

Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same.

The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution.

In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc.

The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.

We got destroyed by bigger players (ElevenLabs, Suno, and more recently Fish) that fundraised and had better in-house models.

It was a headache to run, I wanted to pursue a different market (video/creative), and I pivoted.

My pivot failed and was dead for over a year as I went too far into controllability. One of my changes then got a semblance of PMF and it's doing $4M annualized run rate (but it's not fundable in its current shape).

I ultimately want to build open source cloud infra and open source workflow products - more friendly than Comfy, more free than RunPod.

In any case, I can't run my current work on the GPUs. But I'm close enough to pretraining and fine tuning smaller models that I want to use them for future experiments. Not that I wouldn't do that in the cloud.

I have a stack of ten or so 3090s sitting in boxes, but it's not worth the hassle to use them. You can easily run models as cheap as water in the cloud.

Sitting around 15 minutes for local Minimax is stupid when you're trying to be productive. You can spin up parallel job instances and multitask in the cloud.

If you want freedom, build open source cloud infra.

You rent your ISP line. Why isn't renting GPU compute seen the same way? You still have compete ownership over your stack, you're just letting someone else deal with the capital outlay and headache.

Just recently, Minimax H3 released as open weights on the eve of Seedance 2.5 global availability. It's not as good, but it's good enough and it's completely open.

Flux 3, which is nowhere near as good as either, suddenly announced their release once news of these other two became public. They knew if they waited they'd be ignored. It didn't really help them much, unfortunately.

The LLM releases are even more rivalrous.

And don't forget all of the competing launches planned before Google IO or major release events.

Companies like to eat into the news and press cycle of their rivals.

Is it opinionated about which type of system to build?

Skimming this page, it looks like ATProto is a schema for the ontology, and despite saying "P2P", it looks built around federation and concerned about scaling infrastructure (rather than scaling message broadcast).

I'm interested in a p2p social network with federated supernodes (p2p first class, federation second class, relays for devices that don't want to join the swarm) for people and agents. Could you easily build that with ATProto, or is it the wrong domain?

I'm interested in true, first-class P2P. Not a bolt-on afterthought. That's the problem with all of these federated services like Bluesky and Mastodon.

A true social protocol should work like email. Any machine on the network should be able to talk it to any other machine. Of course centralization nodes will appear, but they should be optional. Used as aids for user friendliness, anonymity, and firewalling yourself off.

There are so many "smart" insects with highly evolved predator avoidance. These are not those insects.

We should make foreign companies manufacture here, just like China did. It also works as a jobs program and builds up and industrial base and skill, as we've seen with the Japanese automotive sector.

I used to catch grasshoppers, lizards, fireflies, and "June bugs" (Popillia japonica).

One summer, there was a particularly bad outbreak of June bugs and if you shook a Japanese maple tree, the entire tree would empty of thousands of them in a dense cloud.

Childhood summers were fun.

Total solar eclipses are magical.

The sun turns into a gleaming jewel and all of nature around you enters another dimension. The animals freak out, the temperature of the air around you drops dramatically, your shadows morph and multiply into weird shapes, it feels like midnight with an ethereal glow.

You see the atmosphere of the sun glow in all chromatic glory.

You'll never witness anything else like it.

Our peers in other countries can live with dirt floors, no climate control or running water, and tarp roofing. And they have no problem having kids. Until they get the smartphone (which is now starting to happen).

People have always had far less and had more children. The wealth you have now is a modern phenomenon and perhaps a bit of a flukish bubble.

Your own dopamine blindfold is a "minimum acceptable happiness threshold". It's distancing you from your underlying biology.

You don't have to live where you do. You don't have to send your kids to an expensive school. You don't have to buy expensive things, the latest fashion, the nicest car. You don't have to go to the expensive trips and festivals and restaurants. You don't have to keep up with the neighbors. You need very few things.

The dopamine loop put you there. Consumption, comparison, craving more. Algorithmically targeted.

It starts with access to tv, movies, leisure travel, and disposable income.

These things take you out of the evolutionary algorithm. Boredom, uncertainty, low dopamine, mind not preoccupied = having children.

We identified this trend already in DINKs, it just turns out biology's adversarial algorithm is far more widespread than just that one demographic pattern.

Smartphones are an accelerant.

It's not the economy. People have overwhelmingly been historically poor. Our ancestors ate rotting and festering meat and they had plenty of kids. Your great great grandparents went through some shit. HN community demographics are the exception to the rule.

The problem is every man and woman is sucked into a phone. They're never bored. There's no need to plan for long term fulfillment in another person. Always just more dopamine. Settling down isn't good because we're trained on short form gratification loops.

The spy devices enforce conformance too. Nobody takes risks and parties. Looking foolish will be shared and shamed. People get sucked into these closed off hyper critical portals where everyone sees a highlight reel, questions themselves, and adapts to the performance culture status quo.

This is worse than either Brave New World or 1984.

It's an almost fitting handoff that our species goes into decline as the robots begin to take over. Our species can't be just scaffolding right? We're kind of doing our best to prove that we are.

They're cutting AI off at the legs for everyone else, then building the new tool to sell AI enablement.

They'll probably let their customers pay to bypass their protection scheme, which will complete the loop.

It really rubs me the wrong way.

It should 100% be a different company. I don't feel safe with Cloudflare being the ones building this tech.

Bring back older cars with poor safety and high energy costs? Seriously?

Distrust medicine and agriculture?

Wtf is this doing on HN?

This is the author :

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

> John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid who writes on religious, environmentalist, and occult topics.

The fact that this blog has such high readership is an indictment on our poor education system. Though, granted, it looks like a much older audience that is commenting.

App stores should not exist in a world where only two phone operating systems exist. All apps MUST be installable via web.

Come on, EU. Help us out here. Free us from distribution tyranny. Do it before Google morphs into the same hell beast.

Soon you won't be able to read unapproved, unattested bytes. It's coming. We need as many freedoms as we can get.

Apple can be a great company without the app store monopoly. So can Google.

I flipping love AI.

This is literally what I dreamed about as a kid. I feel like we might get to witness the singularity, and that's exciting.

To live and die under cellphone incrementalism is what's depressing. I hated where we were. I love where we're going.