If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.

So you're right. If the $42K price tag didn't make you blink, the additional $2700 in tax, and the $2K to $3K for the work in your house are going to financial hiccups. But it means the cost to start is $50K, not just the price tag.

But you'll find most household power sockets aren't actually rated for the kind of power these things draw at peak. If you go for a dual GPU you're going to want to sustain a higher current. Think washer / drier / fridge kind of hookups for the UPS and that rig.

You spent $42K on the rig, you're also going to need to get an electrician in and have the electrical hookup seen to. The single 4090 I'm running put me right up to that edge where I could use a standard electrical hookup with a 1000w UPS.

So another $1K for the UPS, and $500 worth of electrical work (or more if they have to up the switch to 200 amps, for example).

Not for the faint of wallet.

That's a bitter pill to swallow. Most of this is the cost of the Nvidia card, and the RAM.

The outside agitators are in the news. The U.S. just happens to be a little more vulnerable to "straight to the people" propaganda campaigns.

These new AI data centers are now built with their own power generation capacity. They're too electricity hungry to be supplied by the local grid, requiring megawatts to gigawatts of generation. If they're grid-connected at all (for training / inference racks + cooling) it is secondary supplementation.

There is a concerted effort by foreign governments to slow down American progress in fielding AI capability. Attempts to generate civil unrest and propaganda against $new_thing are included in this.

And this is why the latest Claude models blather so much more. All for the sake of this "watermark."

It isn't deliberately unhinged like Steve Yegge's take: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/ In Steve's essay he starts with the assertion that agents are sentient... Whether or not that's true isn't really relevant, as his agent-flavored version of Pascal's wager actually holds water, especially for Anthropic models, as their system prompts already push the model in that direction, and it is better to work with them than try to prompt against the tide.

A well-equipped kitchen will have both... and a Dutch oven, and...

For example: every sale of a brand or a company has to go through a government committee (bribes, kickbacks, friction...). Restrictions on product changes: the new owner isn't allowed to improve the products, or stop producing older products when newer ones sell better, even if the newer ones are better. Can't shift manufacturing to China? Can't shift it out of the U.S.? How do you get such laws to apply everywhere (like Italian or French companies selling out to China)?

The least harmful solution I can see is publicizing this B.S. and then having consumers speak with their wallets and dropping those brands.

We've had to do that with so many brands. Aveeno used to make an oat and almond body wash that was amazing. It really helped the skin heal, feel soft, and still cleaned well. They got bought out. Boom... ammonium laurel sulfate... no oat, no almond, just fragrance, just like every other cheap body wash, and now it was bad for the skin. Same for their shave gel, same for dozens of other products.

I don't know how we consumers stop it short of buying the product and not the brand. I'm skeptical of government being able to do anything about this phenomenon that isn't much worse overall.

The suffering in the moment is "I want" and the damage the treatment has in satisfying the want creates "I can't ever..."

Discussing that requires the broader context, so your redefinition doesn't work.

Puberty doesn't have unhealthy effects, the dysphoria does. There is also evidence that treatment doesn't resolve the worst "effects" namely depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation or tendencies. Those often return after the initial euphoria of getting what's desired wears off. It's why there's a fair percentage of kids that later regret having done that to themselves, and it's why the suicide rate for those who receive transition treatment doesn't actually go down, and in some cohorts the rate actually went up.

If we really cared about people suffering from dysphoria we'd look at these facts and be forced to reconsider how quickly we reach for these treatments.

1. To delay extremely early-onset puberty in children as young as seven or eight who had a pituitary disorder.

2. To treat advanced prostate cancer.

3. To treat endometriosis and uterine fibroids in women.

4. As part of a treatment for breast cancers, part of fertility protocols, or treatments for endocrine disorders.

This notion of using these drugs to disrupt healthy and physiologically normal puberty, was not even a little part of their purpose. It's how they're being used now in some cases.

The fact is that administering hormone disruptors or synthetic hormones are the opposite of what should be done, as gender dysphoria often resolves itself as the process of puberty and natural maturation unfolds. Interventionism, in these cases, is extremely harmful.

Adults making these choices are a completely different case.

This statement seems to be incorrect by definition. Do you mean, not otherwise irrational?