The economies are currently out of whack because of underproduction of components and memory, so LLM providers have a few years of runway to entrench. Plus, the whole capex Vs opex thing that helped AWS will help here too, for sure.

At some point, though, things will change. More production will come online, and providers will have to end the current speculative subsidizing and jack up prices.

It's a bit like the dot-com era: the initial rush to land-grab web portals and e-commerce sites eventually died, once enough skills and infrastructure came online, and the bubble burst.

I guess it's the inevitable parable of anything started by '70s hippies: sooner or later, we all sell out.

Every generation is hailed as the end of all things, because it's always better than the previous one, but the core need they serve are the same.

My machine can only load one model at a time. The loading/unloading times just don't seem worth the switch. I tend to use qwen3.6 for anything and that's it. Then again, I am a simple coder.

Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.

They all do it for the same reason: to make a lot of money by selling it to companies who want to cut labor costs.

Then I realized that they have a galaxy of consultants and experts that effectively make a living by keeping on top of all issues and fixing them for a fee. So there is little incentive for them to actually be user-friendly: as long as they are "partner friendly" with timely material, that's good enough.

They are not alone in this, btw - pretty much all major platform providers do this, one way or the other.

Nobody is perfect, nobody has infinite money to burn, and nobody wants this war to continue - because nobody wanted this war to start with, except Putin; but rhis war only ends if/when Putin decides it's not worth continuing, or when the last Ukrainian soldier dies. EU states have no real say.

And I disagree that USSR and PRC were just "rival peers". Rival peers would be UK/US (at least until Suez), or UK/FR until the 90s. USSR and PRC actively fought each other and almost started a nuclear war; that's way beyond "peer rivalry", that's actual direct competition.

Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.

They can be excellent in very, very niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.

Folks like Kavinsky later (re)popularized synths and made explicit throwbacks to the game, like the album name. I don't know where the term "Synthwave" came from, but it does look like one of those throwbacks.