I don't think it does that, it prohibits them from modifying it and then using that mod to fork users away from the original software, aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I went with this because a) the models I wanted to use are a little too big to fit comfortably in 24gb, plus I need room for a few additional small models for autocomplete and speech recognition, and b) I already had a cheap server to use and dual gpus would've required upgrading the mobo and power supply and probably the case as well.

It was definitely a little tricky to set up. The Intel line requires a driver package called "level zero" to support something called SYCL (Intel's version of CUDA basically, AFAICT) that was tricky to get working. I am running llama.cpp in a docker container, which also required some fiddling to get the container to see the card. You also need a kernel from the last few months.

Once I got it working though, the results are very impressive for a $1k investment. Qwen 3.6 35B at q4 quantization takes about 3/4 of the ram and delivers like 88 tokens/sec. So, if you want a decent-sized model for cheap, this is one way to go.

Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.

If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on!

The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration.

Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.

Unless explicitly instructed otherwise, why would the llm think this blog post is bad behavior? Righteous rants about your rights being infringed are often lauded. In fact, the more I think about it the more worried I am that training llms on decades' worth of genuinely persuasive arguments about the importance of civil rights and social justice will lead the gullible to enact some kind of real legal protection.

One could argue that the depositors didn't know SVB was unreliable, but that's kind of undercut by the fact that there was a run on the bank in the first place.

TFA says otherwise, in detail and with a lot of supporting data. If you're going to contradict it you ought to cite a source.

> The federal government responded to the 2008 crisis by limiting the ability of traditional banks to take on big, risky loans. Since then, however, private-equity firms, which aren’t subject to the same regulatory scrutiny as banks, have gotten more heavily into the lending business. As of early this year, these firms had lent about $450 billion in so-called private credit to the tech sector, including financing several of the deals discussed above. And, according to one estimate, they will lend it another $800 billion over the next two years. “If the AI bubble goes bust, they are the ones that will be left holding the bag,” Arun told me.

> A private-credit bust is almost certainly preferable to a banking bust. Unlike banks, private-equity firms don’t have ordinary depositors. In theory, if their loans fail, the groups that will be hurt the most are institutional investors, such as pension funds, university endowments, and hedge funds, limiting the damage to the broader economy. The problem is that nobody knows for certain that this is the case. Private credit is functionally a black box. Unlike banks, these entities don’t have to disclose who they are getting their money from, how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. This makes it impossible for regulators to know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.

> Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.

A lot of people lost money when YHOO tanked in 2000, but the money they lost generally hadn't been lent to them by a bank, which is why 2000 was a tech crash and not a finance crash. I generally think of private equity as a rich guy gambling with a wealthy guy's money, but to the extent that the last ten years of growth have made private equity seem safe enough for banks and pensions to invest in, a correction caused by AI companies failing seems a lot scarier.

Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.

* I use Bluesky to chat as a Twitter replacement, which gets me into the Fediverse and gets me a PDS

* I use my PDS to store my payment details, giving me a (at first client-side) way to submit stored payment details that feels similar to storing it in the browser, but stores it in my "server"

* From there, it's a natural step to giving the retailer a token that can be used to pull payment details from my PDS; early adopter retailers are incentivized to do this because it frees them from the burden of storing and updating PII/PCI

* After some subset of users and retailers do this, users see the benefit of controlling their data as a viable alternative to some of the worst user-hostile patterns, e.g. the New York Times' "we don't have a cancel subscription page, you have to call an 800 number" nonsense.

* To the extent that storing PCI/PII in a PDS is as easy as storing it in the browser but with perceived additional benefits, user demand drives wider adoption

* Once it's technically feasible for sites to maintain their business model without storing any PII/PCI, it is much more realistic to write laws that proscribe it effectively for those users who choose that