Personally, the place where I grew up: the geography, people, and culture are permanently etched into my identity. So, yes in a sense it is brainwashing - but driven by biology.

Unfortunately, the rulers always want to deconstruct individuals and groups into fungible mechanical parts that can be used by the machine that continues their reign and authority.

Yes, I can separate myself from my past, but it sure doesn’t feel good. Why do we continue to sacrifice the life satisfaction of the small and weak to only give greater satisfaction to the powerful? Have so many become a product of this corrupted system, that their homelands no longer matter to them?

Hundreds of thousand of years before this people were loyal to their family (not always) and their community (village, city, craftsmanship, etc.).

If you ever travel to 18th century and ask any ordinary European are they proud to be, say, French or British, they will not get you.

Either way, I don't care about the 'nation' all that much (although constitutional free speech rights are very important - arguably a major factor of what's holding the world together at this point). But, I definitely care about where I grew up, the region, the homeland.

One surprising thing is that immediately after the first two US-gulf wars began, professionals came in a dug down 10 meters at archeological sites, and reportedly over 100k artifacts were looted. However, I just checked Google's AI and it initially refuses to agree with this even though those numbers were reported by the scholars in their reports. If you challenge Google's AI (I haven't tried the others), it will eventually agree but will still be really vague about it.

The recovery of the dead sea scrolls is also interesting. They 'appeared' in caves in Qumran, but many early reports suspected they were placed there. Also interesting is the character "Kando" who ended up trading them.

Given recent current events (I won't mention names to avoid my comment being downvoted out of the search history), we know there are a lot of powerful people who are into the occult and ancient rituals. So, I suspect a lot of the artifacts end up with them. Who knows.

Superstition in pigeons: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1948-04299-001

10+ years ago you were considered a lunatic if you told people that putting internet-connected cameras and microphones everywhere is a bad idea because their TV would be used to spy on them, that their cameras would be accessed by the police without their consent for surveillance, or that car company employees would watch them walk around naked through the cameras on their car.

Any data on that? Because to me it sounds like “because they are sometimes true, we should assume they are always true”

But I’m open to data.

The only anecdata I can give is "look around you", how all major (and many smaller) companies are implementing invasive spying tech into their products, harvesting our personal information, selling it, or abusing it any way they can. They sell the products as one thing then shaft their customers and change the terms overnight at their earliest convenience.

What you call "a conspiracy theory" is just "following clear market incentives". There's a clear motive for doing everything with a clear track record of doing so in the past.

If someone made a derivative financial product that roughly equated to the prediction "Big tech will use any means to expand their access, to invade and abuse our privacy, and generally be willing to do anything in pursuit of profit" I would be willing to invest my life savings into it.

Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.

My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.

Sure you can

> You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

No

Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device.

However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons.

I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.

I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.

The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?

The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.

The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.

And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.

So what do people actually do?

[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.

Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.

I am so annoyed by that fact.

Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D

Join a community first, ask for help after that.

I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.

Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.

Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.

I follow a couple electronics repair YouTubers, and I imagine they would be interested.

Personally though I live in a city where there are a few electronic repair shops, so I’d just take it there.

All I needed was to swap two large pieces of furniture. I had a 4-drawer file cabinet and a full-size folding bed. All I wanted was to put the bed in the other room and the file cabinet where the bed used to be.

So I wrote up the job on Thumbtack and connected with a seemingly professional service who could send a guy out. The guy appeared at my door and immediately launched into a sob story: he had a flat tire and his truck needed repair and oh god things were just terrible, and he had a slovenly, unkempt appearance, no uniform or livery, and he was toting a home-made furniture dolly with casters on it.

Okay, so he got inside and he was perfectly competent to move the furniture around as requested, and when he finished the job, I told him that his company would be paid in the Thumbtack app. And he cast his eyes about the room, saying "well people usually pay me in cash..." and I could smell the scam powerfully by then. So I opened the app before his eyes and showed him how I sent payment in full, so he would not be leaving without proof. And later, I sent another $25 and I contacted the company to say he did a good job and please make sure he receives this gratuity.

So Taskrabbit or Thumbtack may work for you, depending on your negotiation skills. But I was put off, by the way they sent a lone dude trying to collect cash off me at home.

My church bulletin often has handyman listings in the advertisements. I don't know if they are well-vetted either, but it is something worth checking in your local rags and craigslist.

So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.

After that:

- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).

- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).

- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).

- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).

None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.

I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.

FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.

I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.

LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.

I think this sounds much worse than it is. LLMs reason. They don't have an "opinion" about the truth. Meaning that the harness/prompt/tooling/data, determines the quality of the output. Using an LLM to navigate the truth is surprisingly effective right now with the right inputs and constraints.

In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.

Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.

Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.

So a chain of trust naturally accumulates over a lifespan- and by the time you will be as old as your dad was at point of reference, you actually would have a chain. Depending of course on the quality of acquaintances. As kid, all you have is your parents and relatives. Some with wild swings. We all had that story telling grandpa whose tall tales we proudly propagated.

That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.

So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.

Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.

A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.

When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.

Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.

And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.

And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.

For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.

Related issue

Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.

The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.

1. Those who have so much money they pay whatever is needed, getting screwed by countless middlemen.

2. Those who do everything by themselves full time and overtime.

3. Those who have lots of broken equipment, unfinished projects, and house or apartment waiting to be refurbished.

2.5, somewhere between 2 and 3.

Isn’t the hard drive of the average software engineer full of half finished projects?

I think for specific specialty work the focus might need to shift to a 'craftsmanship' approach, finding someone who doesn't actually advertise or propose to perform the work for hire, but who is similarly semi to fully retired and does the tasks you are needing as a hobby or one project at a time casual contractor.

There's not likely to be a shop 'fixing gadgets' in the retail mall anymore that has the actual skills necessary to satisfy your requirements, nor is there likely to be a 'mail us a gadget' and we'll fix it service that you can count on. But for the case of some gadgets, there might be a STEM club or class at one of your local schools with an instructor who is: 1 underpaid and underappreciated, 2 more likely to have some individual competency with a soldering iron AND flashing firmware, 3 in a proven position of trustworthiness having the public facing position of a classroom instructor ~ less likely to just rip you off and disappear.

Once upon a time I was a local PC repair store - there was me, a returns clerk and a series of part-time student interns - for about half of the Big Island, Hawai'i. I fielded gadget repair for a great number of strange things from digital projectors to hydrophones. The most satisfying of which was when a customer who was a retired biochemistry researcher asked me: "You don't happen to know how to repair the control circuitry for an electric kiln?" and my immediate response was, "If it's a Kress then sure." The look on her face, the smile as she practically hopped because it was a Kress was just a real kick. I guess the point im getting at is somehow find a way to make connections with people who are skilled in a variety of related and unrelated fields, and then ask what they can do that no-one might guess that they know. I have traded PC and other gadget repair for training towards a Coast Guard certification, for a sizeable amount of raw honey and later for beehive nucleus, and for a coolers full of fresh caught icy tuna. Sometimes the best work you might ever get could come in a trade for something that's more important and less impersonal than plain old cash.

As for how to find both ethical and effective niche skilled services in the continental US, today? Wow. I don't think that is in plentiful supply anymore.

I wonder how much it's worth to Nvidia just to obtain a list of who's downloading which models and for what purpose. Similarly with the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. In the past, it would have been valuable to obtain an audience or market share or even a productive team. However, in this new age of the surveillance state ...

telemetry, orchestration, and financial

2. I think it will happen much sooner than 2245 given how easily capital and the rich are able to move around the globe in 2026 (compared to 1945)

If a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, cutting staffing, and outsourcing; all of it stops. That was the secret of affordability. Don't let a thousand rich people own everythjng. Tax them so we can have millions of working millionaires instead of 900 non-working billionaire elites.

As those 1950s taxes and post 1929 financial regulations were cut in the following decades, the wealth inequality that led to the great depression has returned.

If you want to judge the net effect of tax policy over time, look at the percentage of GDP captured by federal receipts (the vast majority of which are taxes). In the U.S., it's averaged ~16.5%-~17.5% with occasional spikes and dips. Currently, it's very close to what it was in those 90%-marginal-rates 1950s.

Only natural persons should be able to contribute to political candidates.

Corporations can lobby, as a corporate person, just like a union or other organization, but not contribute.

They can run ads themselves, but there needs to be a much greater wall between PACs and candidate campaigns, with the previous restrictions now null and void due to lack of enforcement.

If it's okay for Corporations can run ads themselves, then your objection isn't to wealthy people supporting candidates or even them doing so secretly, but... only when the little guy pools donations and they happen to be pool donations via a corporation?

Candidates should only accept funds from natural persons, that amount should be limited per person.

PACs and other candidate-adjacent activities should require 100% transparency on the source of funds and not be allowed to co-operate/co-ordinate with any candidate's campaigns. Companies can fund PACs, but they should be required to receive shareholder endorsement and not co-ordinate with their employees.

Laws impacting on the 1st amendment require strict limitation on how the government legislates and for an explicit need.

In this case, it is to ensure the integrity of the political process of selecting candidates and electing members of Congress.

Corporations only have the powers granted to them by the state. Contributing to politics need not be one of them.

Speech is speech, and what people forget about the First Amendment is that it prevents the government censoring their speech.

To say that repealing CU is the solution is to allow the critique to go unresolved, while arguing ~"People shouldn't be free to support political candidates."

> People have a right to support candidates > they can print a sign and stand on a street corner > printing signs costs money > people have a right to spend money supporting candidates.

Individuals printing signage is not where most of the funding is going though, is it?

> People have a right to assemble > they can stand on a street corner with their friends > they can hold a big sign together > they can have lots of friends and form a group and print a really big sign.

This isn't how most of the money is being spent either, is it?

I don't know how you seem to either believe the point of the right to free assembly was to give richer corporations more sway, or be completely oblivious to the fact that that is what's actually getting people angry, not the fact that citizens want to stand with signs by the street corner. Assuming you don't have a conflict of interest leading you to that conclusion, I... don't know what to tell you.

Fundamentally it sounds like your complaint is that wealthy people are presumably more able to be effective with their efforts than folks who, e.g. can't afford as big of a bullhorn.

Citizens United wasn't about that. There wasn't a law saying no person shall spend more than $1k/yr supporting a candidate.

Corporations no.

Democracy is built on the idea that people are equal and have equal rights. This is only sustainable if the power differential between people isn't too large.

Corporations consist of people, yes, but the power to control where the efforts of these people are directed is concentrated on very few people, giving those people a large amount of power -- so large that without any checks on their influence on government, it undermines democracy.

It's the same argument for why super-wealthy individuals are so problematic. They're literally destroying the fabric of democracy through the power imbalance afforded by their wealth.

A railroad company also has a huge amount of steel roads with cross country right of ways. You could fire everyone, and it'd still be extremely valuable. It might even be more valuable.

Even in asset-lite software land, "Atari" the name still has a lot of value, even though none of the people are there anymore. They own the right to control the things that the neurons in millions or billions of people's brains are tied to, that their habits tie them to.

Twitter, you can fire almost everyone, make the online square less pleasant for a lot of the people, the network effects truck on. People continue to use it even as they hate using it, because most everyone else is.

A corporation having contribution rights multiplies the otherwise imposed contribution limits on the underlying humans.

A corporation allows tax planning opportunities not afforded to the bottom 90-ish percent of the country (such as shifting income to alternate years to avoid progressive taxation, and utilizing expenses to lower that income in ways a W2 cannot)

Corporations are granted benefits that people do not get, and CU disturbs the balance of power.

So either way they win.

I was puzzled by the comments on the openrouter acquisition saying "they're just a proxy" - they're an open marketplace where models compete head-to-head, they're quite a bit more than just a proxy.

Hugging Face has essentially become github for model repositories and I think nvidia wanted to snag that before microsoft does.

They run a proxy for LLM providers, which inevitably creates a marketplace. They’re amazon.com for tokens.

The flip side that others are pointing out is that Amazon is sticky because there’s a sprawling, physical logistics apparatus underneath. You can’t replicate amazon.com’s business without billions of dollars and a decade of building warehouses.

I don’t see where OpenRouter has that. As far as software goes, theirs doesn’t seem particularly tricky. LiteLLM does vaguely similar things, at least for organizations where managing accounts isn’t absurd overhead.

They were first, and there’s money to be made there, but what’s stopping someone else from building LibreRouter that charges a 3% or 4% fee instead of 5%? That’s where I get dubious of their valuation.

Given that most of the weights are from Chinese labs and teams, I'm surprised China's own ModelScope hasn't leapfrogged HuggingFace.

They have network effects and strong brand recognition, both of which are hard to replicate.

NVidia have been making lots of moves recently towards supporting open weight models and local AI, and it makes sense for them to buy HF who support the same, if for no other reason than to prevent someone else like Musk buying them just to shut them down, although I assume they have plans to do a lot more than just keep HF alive.

I'm ready to be wrong but doesn't this describe basically every tech acquisition for the last 25 years or longer?

Pull requests, CI platform, authentication that is not PAM etc.

A lot of work maybe, and required a vision to do so initially. But straightforward work that MS could easily do it, and of course other small companies have replicated it too.

Nvidia is heavily invested in OpenAI, recently guaranteeing a datacenter buildout up to $105 billion dollars.

Any reasonable criminal investigation into OpenAI's actions or negligence into this incident would hurt their reputation, their ability to raise money, and therefore Nvidia, who is invested in them.

If I was a founder of HuggingFace, I am immediately getting in contact with Elon Musk and SpaceXAI, and letting him know how that he can purchase them and sue OpenAI, this time with solid claims.

If I was particularly amoral about if I think OpenAI or Anthropic should get to AGI first, I would take this bid to Nvidia, whose entire stock price is propped up by OpenAI's over-purchasing of compute.