The counterargument is racism, classism, nationalism, and tribalism. These are not things people will say out loud.

A defense contractor is in the business of war. In supplying the war machine, you should be living in a fortress. Tall walls, check your drink for poison, live in paranoia. Every person in the business of war knows what they are getting in to, and how to protect their family.

How is someone that is near the face of AI this naive about such an ancient thing?

The business of war is fine. It is ancient. It is part of humanity. Making some morality plea towards family and "violence is never the answer" while in the business of violence is NOT okay.

Everyone in the defense industry knows the risks. Blood money is not free. You sacrifice a peaceful life for the wealth.

To keep your family safe you have to use a meager sum of that money to have tall walls, guards, and security. DoD contractor 101.

Alternatively, live in obscurity, don't talk about your work, and it is usually fine.

A world-wide known CEO doesn't have this luxury so again, use a small portion of unfathomable wealth to protect your family. I have a feeling this war is just starting.

When in the business of death, you no longer get to live with the rules of peace.

I am using nixos unstable pkgs. The published rocmPackages were recently updated and now include kernels for gfx1151, which I surprisingly found out this morning. Before, you would have to set a flag to use the older kernels because they were not available.

My flake modules with rocm config are a bit messy, but maybe I can find time to throw a repo up with it. It contains all necessary packages, flags, boot options, llamacpp patches, and some hacks to get pytorch working smoothly with rocm.

What this means: no, I do not need containers anymore for replicating working configs. The flake configures the system with appropriate libs. I build llamacpp with patches for rocm, and I can run comfyui for generative processes. I have generative image and video working as of today, and next I will get generative 3d modeling working. I'd like to have Trellis2 running this week.

None of this would be possible for me without NixOS, as an aside. It keeps track of configuration for me so I do not have scatter shell scripts and unpredictable deps anymore. I used to build Zed from source with scripts, for example. Now it is a module with patches. Llamacpp is the same. Very clean and requires no working memory, when something needs adjusting I just go refresh myself with the module in one place.

In addition, the these local models are very, very, very sensitive to the template used. Make sure it is correct. I was using the wrong template and it would answer but felt like it had a brain worm.

The parameters must also be what is recommended, otherwise they go off the rails.

I get great results now after messing with it for a while. I prefer the 35B model because I enjoy how fast tokens appear at 50t/s, but at around 20-25t/s with the 122B model, it is also completely usable. And that one is very smart.

The evaluation I use is having it one shot a 3d scene using threejs. After everything, the output was comparable to Claude Sonnet (Opus actually does worse on this task strangely).

For my local setup, I have settled on the qwen3.5 family after testing most of the local usable models. Here are the models I use ranked by intelligence:

1. Qwen3.5-122B Q4_K_M: ~25 t/s 2. Qwen3.5-27B Q4_K_M: ~18 t/s 3. Qwen3.5-35B Q4_K_M: ~50 t/s

The 122B model is actually very, very smart. But I have found that token speed is more important, and 35B is smart enough. At 50t/s I can get a lot more done, and I am going to build a mechanism for it to escalate intelligence if needed.

GPT-OSS119B failed at my evals.

MistralSmall4 is too buggy to use (I believe it is too new, the templating is messed up, and agentic use has too many issues). That said I evaluated it directly via copy and paste and the results were not comparable to Qwen. But it is very very fast.

I am running a patched build of llamacpp to get these results. There are a few changes that need to be made to increase prompt processing speeds (about a 30% increase) and be able to use rocm. It took a lot of setup but my flake in nixos is stable now.

Long story short, I can confirm a lot of what was shared in his blog.

*this was written at 4:30am on my phone when I wake up, apologies for typos.

Trading freedom for safety eliminates both.

Simply, when thinking hits a wall, we can now consult a machine via conversation interface lacking conventional human social biases. That is a new superpower.

Road management should be administered by federal and state agencies, including the administration of tolls when they are foolishly utilized. It should not be a for profit venture, it is a mechanism of taxation for public logistics.

It should not be possible to offload management to private orgs outside of very specific subcontracting / purchasing of components.

Instead, often times full road management is given to private orgs. They are not given a robust legal incentive to act in the interests of the road system, and how could they? They are interesting in using the road to maximize their profit, at the loss of everyone needing the road.

While what you're saying does seem like a direct solution (congestion), it is the wrong solution.

The solution to congestion is robust public transit. Full stop.

If a light rail is more comfortable and a faster experience than a car, people will use that instead. Public transit has been traditionally so atrocious, for reasoning we can attribute to many factors, that most people don't use it even if it existed.

If public transit was actually done right, people would be happy to use it. It is more energy efficient, more cost efficient, less of a mental burden, and I believe can be significantly more comfortable.

This is the fundamental issue for me. Society keeps taking these horrible shortcuts that cost all of us instead of just doing the right thing to begin with.

In order to implement tolls, you need several components involving middlemen. This includes frontend software, backend, payment processing, transponder management, all the hardware involved, support staff, sometimes toll station staff, among other things.

These toll companies are often owned by foreign companies that are in it for the long haul, offering sweet deals up front then gradually charging more and more with no end in sight, as roads diminish in quality and rest stops fall into disarray.

Toll roads are a scam, a regressive tax on the working class, and downright immoral. We should not limit the mobility of people.

Tolls are a regressive tax on the working class. The rich don't even need to use the roads as much because they have other people delivering for them. When they need the road system, the tolls are nothing to them.

The working class, which are generally required to be driving to survive, are left holding the bag for tolls. In places with bad public transit, tolls are just a forced wealth transfer from working class to private firms managing the tolls.

If you want food, products, or services, you depend on the roads. This means it should be taxed universally and equitably. We should all contribute our fair share to maintain the roads.

Tolls are a regressive tax on low-income people who do the most to make society work, and it is unfortunate that more people do not see this. What's more, they are generally administered by corrupt and inefficient private for-profit orgs. This creates even more overhead which then costs more money.

These orgs generally have slimy deals with city and state governments, while directly profiting from public works that built the road system to begin with.

There are much better ways to fund the road system. Tolls are among the worst.

They get to write the narrative.

We can analyze just one small tool in the belt of narrative control: censoring. If you've been warned or banned on Reddit, you can imagine how this works. If you've said something against the mold of what they allow, you will get censored. With so many people commenting, some subset of people will always say what you want to see. You censor or derank opinions you don't want, and boost opinions you want. This is a defensible form of writing a narrative without actually having to artificially write anything.

Of course with AI, you can now just write anything and seed ideas.

Give such sick people the reigns, and you get a false reality has little connection to what's really happening.

Just as in history we learn of emperors and kings instead of the common person, most digital content is about the modern day lords, barons, emperors, and kings. They call them billionaires, presidents, CEOs, prime ministers, etc now, but they are the exact same as they always have been.

If you turn the screen off and take a walk, start talking with real people that actually provide value to society, the world is much kinder than we've all been made to believe.

The real people are a good people, as they long have been. Their stories may not be written, but the Earth itself carries their memories.

You have to approach genai as a high-dimensional interpolation machine. It can perform extrapolation when you, the user, provide enough information to operate on. It can interpolate between what you provide and what it knows as well.

With these constraints, it is still pretty powerful, and I am generalizing of course. But in my experience, it is terrible at truly novel implementations of anything. It makes countless mistakes, because it continually attempts to fit to patterns found in existing code.

So you can really see the weaknesses at the frontier. I would encourage experimenting there to confirm what I am saying.

I was once a big proponent for people having DMT experiences but then I learned it works very differently for different people.

Now, I believe it is an acute intervention drug for the suicidal.

It behaved very differently for me in that context. Soon after repeated treatment with it, my entire state changed. I was lifted out of poverty into well compensated employment. I bought my first house. My software skills leveled up and I shifted from being fixated on game dev to more impactful fields. I can't describe the number of changes, but I attribute it all to DMT.

It flipped a switch in my mind and I know that I am alive today only because of that.

I hope that someday, we recognize it as what it was for me: a powerful spiritual medicine.

Something I always say to people who claim these things are all just hallucinations: if a hallucination teaches you how to be a better person, gives you a reason to live, and allows you to be more open and loving, was it really a hallucination? Something to think about.

Houses are not investment instruments. They are spaces where people can freely exist as they are. A domain that they have full dominion in to authentically explore who they are, who they want to become, and what they want to share with others. A place to raise a family, to rest without a mask, and to be safe as they are.

Notice how I didn't mention economics at all?

Just because you have a house / houses doesn't mean others don't. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be homeless? I dare you to try it. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be a renter under the thumb of a landlord with no hope of ever having your own home?

My "policies" originate from empathy for real people. The majority of people, actually. It does not give a single shit about economics only benefiting the rich.

But that said, if you give most people the ability to have a true home, the economy will explode in activity. Instead of spending money on rent, people would spend on goods and services. They'd be happier, so they would spend money on having fun.

Making housing affordable is a no brainer.

The nice thing is, we already know what the alternative is. The economy is collapsing right now, in no small part due to the housing crisis that has been going on for a long time.

Since my policies won't be occurring now or ever, let's both sit back and enjoy the lack of these policies, and see how wonderful a world that is.

Landlords should be an exception, not the standard.

Whether my theory on what is occurring is true or not, the proposed solution would solve it along with countless other issues, while have very little downside for anyone but a tiny group of lazy parasites.