And yet four people deciding the put something - anything - above money is somehow a disaster.

Give me a break.

Well, this is proof the mission isn’t just MBA bullshit, clearly Ilya is actually committed to it.

This is like if Larry and Sergei never decided to progressively nerf “don’t be evil” as they kept accumulating wealth, they would have had to stage a coup as well. But they didn’t, they sacrificed the mission for the money.

Good for Ilya.

Telephone just isn’t a valid metaphor here.

Which is all to say none of this is the result of a “broken” system, it’s the result of a well designed evil system.

Technologists weren’t “trying” to build these systems, but happily devoted their lives to advertising without knowing jack shit about the industry or its effects on society.

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke

I think L70b is the mark to beat, I’m hopeful mistral will take the crown with a smaller model.

No company cares if they lose the Linux nerd market segment for consumer tech, they have never been in play. The real market is for the “it just works” crowd.

Personally despite me being entirely competent to do what you describe I have a family and a small business. I don’t have time to screw around with my phone as my time is very valuable. To the point where if something breaks I don’t even bother to figure out how to fix it anymore I just get a new one as it’s the rational time investment.

I say this as a person who has several kits of tiny smartphone screw drivers, has run a million flavors of every OS, and has taken apart tons of phones, PC, laptop and the like. At some point either you have infinite cheap time or limited expensive time. Once you cross that barrier it’s economically irrational to be screwing around with k-9 mail.

There is simply too much to master, it’s a very good skill to be able to say “this is fascinating but too far afield of what I need to do”.

Alternately, choosing when to say “after dipping my toe in the water this clicks for me, I’m going to take a risk and go further” is an even harder skill to master.

This is why many people have trouble finishing a PhD dissertation. Play is a necessary step, but play without focus is a ticket to mediocrity.

Databases in particular are something one will run across in nearly any task and 99:100 times one likely shouldn’t dwell too much on what is inside the magic box.