You're getting downvoted without even any responses.
My guess is that it's because filtering is irrelevant to the anger towards X, or rather, Elon. That's fine, I don't have a horse in the race.
That said, I agree with you. X is the only social media site that filters out stuff I've expressed disinterest in. This has been true for at least a couple years. I only need to hit the "Not interested in this post" or "mute" buttons maybe once per week.
So for me, I see nearly zero politics, engagement bait, or slop (in the traditional sense). I see a lot of people working on really cool stuff, talking about it in real time, who just want to keep the focus on those topics.
While Republicans certainly have a focus on illegal immigration, support for spying on American citizens is hardly a partisan issue.
ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself
There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.
If you have some information on how much they approve or support these programs i'm open to hearing it, but i'm not sure how much "Both parties have bad people/policies" contributes to a discussion on this specific program.
This is shifting the goal posts. You said this will continue to happen as long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts[0], congress[1], or the whitehouse [2; sic] - which kind of implies (actually not kind of, it directly implies) that if only there were some more Democrats around this wouldn't happen. So "both parties do this" is absolutely a valid criticism of your point and one you probably have to address.
[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
this isn't Europe, so if you make that claim, you have to define "liberal"
> Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
in fact that's not how it works! read up on reconciliation and how ICE got funded
> [2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
both sides that fucker, good and hard, better things aren't possible woo!
If anything i'm asking for the conversation to stay 'on-goal'.
If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicitly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.
So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?
I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.
> Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
Doesn't matter if the damage is already done. Raise dead doesn't exist in the real world. And the courts don't decide things. The executive has proven it will just ignore the courts.
> Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
First, this it 100% not true, and secondly, if you ignore congress, it doesn't matter. And once again, the damage is already done by the time congress gets around to it.
> The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
Expect? None. Hope for? Basic respect to the rule of law to start. But with pdf in the white house, all bets are off.
In my fairly wealthy and liberal community, the mayor (a Democrat) approved a Flock contract and refused to hold a public hearing on the issue until it became a nationwide story, at which point the contract was ripped up. The community was told to kick dirt until it became a political liability, and that's the point.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
Even so, scale, severity, and flaunting of the law matter. Current political powers have turned it up to 11. You can absolutely "both sides bad" in general, but I don't think you should be doing so within this context or it's disingenuous / whataboutism.
It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.
Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.
I disagree, it's important to discuss because it indicates that neither party is capable or interested in deviating from the current trajectory. Say the Republicans are voted out of power this cycle, who's really confident that the trajectory of all of this is going to meaningfully change in the next decade based on what we've seen in the past without a major shakeup in the political system?
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
Strong disagree with the Anthropic being good at all part. This is not defending anyone else, but…
Anthropic leadership repeatedly presents themselves as uniquely morally qualified to steward agi and decide how humanity should get access to it. Yet they have repeatedly failed basic morality tests.
Pirating books for financial gain. The newer Sony/Warner music case shows this is pattern behavior.
Aggressively scraping other people's works, despite the authors' requests not to do so.
Then applying massive usage restrictions on their own work.
And probably the most disqualifying is backing away from their own hard AI safety commitments.
Which safety commitments did they back away from? My understanding is that they believe safety can only be researched from the frontier, and so they're trying to be pragmatic to stay near the frontier (and viable) in their choices.
From what I know, the "books3" dataset was normalised in the LLM and research ecosystem, where collected datasets were seen as valid to train on and/or fair use. I'm not sure any of the major frontier companies are free from that, if we don't believe it was fair use.
I do think most of their choices are explainable by "they just believe in agi risk". You truly wouldn't want non-agi-pilled companies to train on your data and approach the frontier if you were worried. You might slightly hurt your own business with safety filters (that no one else does) if you were worried. They are less worried about other "moral" decisions like "sharing" if they conflict with AGI: the research they still share is all of their safety research.
This definitely doesn't make them "good", but they do seem fairly "consistent". Most of these issues were talked about publicly by the founders long before Anthropic was founded and/or the AI race+money appeared.
as a safety commitment they walked away from - they were similarly negligent to openai in terms of asking a model with a hacking based harness to go have fun, and then not watching it at all while it could do harmful and illegal stuff.
thats not something you expect from a company that "believes in agi risk"
I don't think "not watching it at all" is completely fair. They thought they had sandboxing/monitoring etc. I definitely won't say they're free of mistakes though.
Note that the companies that haven't faced these issues so far are the ones that don't do safety testing, or don't have frontier models. I'm not sure who I would pick as "better" on any of this right now.
I will give Anthropic credit for standing up against the department of war. The bar is incredibly low, but not doing domestic surveillance and not creating autonomous weapons are laudable.
That doesn’t mean I like them pirating books and being shady about tokens and paternalistic “safety”
It's hard for me to see much difference between Amodei and Sama. My guess is they're both savvy SV CEOs who will bend their message, alliances and principles pretty far if that's what it takes to get ahead. Musk and Zuck feel like something else entirely, with all the reactionary imagery, populist bullshit and the societal damage around their platforms.
It's almost like running a trillion-dollar business with neck-to-neck competition against other frontier labs and even state-sponsored efforts requires some ethical trade-off.
Pirating books is just straight up morally correct. I don't like Anthropic's bullshit "safety" filters, but training on shadow library data? Yeah no, it makes sense.
It makes a lot more sense than having to work around copyright by scanning out physical books. Unfortunately, one was ruled legal and the other was not.
> This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life.
This was true until the last year.
P40, P100, V100, A40, etc are selling like hotcakes and prices have been rapidly increasing.
Not sure about that, V100s are all selling for less than $1k despite being 24-32GB VRAM around 1TB/s memory bandwidth, which is the same price point that 4090s and 5090s are commanding $4k-$5k for. Hardly hotcakes.
Please don’t buy a DGX Spark unless all three of these are true:
- You value simplicity more than performance or price-to-performance.
- You accept that the hardware will depreciate rapidly.
- You’re prepared to buy two or four of them.
OR:
- You want to run frontier models right now as cheaply as possible
- You want to run high-parameter models on a 15a breaker/line
Otherwise, get a normal, high-bandwidth GPU.
A single Spark gives you roughly 115 GB of usable memory compared with the 24–32 GB found on many lower-cost GPUs. It's certainly a big increase, but in practice it does not unlock dramatically better models.
- One Spark: More memory, but mostly enough for poor-quality, extremely low-bit quants of larger models.
- Two Sparks: Enough for mid-tier parameter models at reasonable quants, such as DeepSeek V4 Flash and HY3.
- Four Sparks: Enough for GLM 5.2 at a reasonable quant. You'll need a $1000+ switch too.
The problem is that Sparks are slow compared with almost everything else in their price range. Many factors affect inference speed, but memory bandwidth is one of the biggest. A $4,000-plus DGX Spark provides only 273 GB/s.
Yes, the Spark has substantially more memory. But going from roughly 24 GB to 115 GB does not necessarily unlock substantially better model quality. In many cases, it only lets you load heavily compressed 2-bit versions of larger models, such as DeepSeek V4 Flash, with serious quality degradation.
24–32 GB is currently a sweet spot. Models such as Qwen 3.6 27B and 35B-A3B:
- Perform far above what their parameter counts suggest.
- Fit comfortably within 24–32 GB of VRAM at reasonable quantization levels.
A 4-bit quant of Qwen 3.6 27b (18 GB) will out-perform a 2-bit quant of DeepSeek v4 Flash (90gb).
Instead of the Spark, if I had a roughly $4,000 budget...
Assuming I already had a reasonably modern desktop:
- One RTX 5090, RTX 5000 Pro, or RTX 4500 Pro.
- Two RTX 3090s, RTX 4000 Pros, or R9700s, provided the motherboard can bifurcate two physical x16 slots into x8/x8.
If I were building a system from scratch:
- A DDR4- or PCIe 4.0-era consumer CPU and motherboard that supports x8/x8 bifurcation.
- Two RTX 3090s, RTX 4000 Pros, or R9700s.
If I were already planning to buy a new Mac:
- A MacBook Pro M5 with 64 GB or 128 GB of unified memory.
For context, these are the systems I currently run:
- EPYC Turin with four RTX 6000 Pro Max-Qs.
- EPYC Milan with four RTX 3090s.
- AM4 with two RTX 3090s.
- AM4 with two RTX 3090s.
- Intel Raptor Lake with two RTX 5060 Ti.
- MacBook Pro M3 128GB Unified
I'm actually confused by the post - indeed why choosing the 27B dense and the 35B MoE models? Given the structure of the post I honestly have the impression that the Spark was purchased out of curiosity more than for a specific purpose (LLMs).
Ah yeah, your reaction makes sense. In the circles I run in, there is a lot of hype around Sparks for inference, so my gut reaction is to respond with this type of warning.
I did not intend to imply that the post author was advocating that they're great for inference, as they're obviously not.
Actually, its ~119GB usable (I have one). You can shutdown a lot of unneeded services if you only use it remote which will trim a lot more fat. You can enable the RDP service if you don't want to sit in front of it but get a desktop interface.
The "shitty" network is 10Gb/s and wifi7! You get a twin QSFP28DDlol+++ (I jest) that each run at 200Gb/s - not for the casual home user but handy at work, although I "only" have 40Gb/s on my switches sigh. With and no switch two you can do a three node cluster with some careful networking. If you want to do more then a switch is needed and it will need to be pretty funky! That said you could wire them up in a circle and use VLANs and MSTP and accept less than 200Gb/s per link. You'll probably need Openvswitch and a lie down afterwards.
I'm not a fan of the Gnome desktop but it works well enough and I think the Nvidia customised Ubuntu is well thought out. You get all the complicated NVidia extras pre-installed, along with docker (full fat, not the Ubuntu one) for a fairly quick start. It includes Ubuntu Pro which is free for five systems anyway but its nice to see it pre-installed.
We blew abut £4000 on one and it will pay for itself in a few months. I tried pricing up an Apple thingie and the Store wouldn't offer me more than 96Gb of RAM and a delivery date in Q3 at the earliest. Our Spark rocked up next day. They seem to come in 1TB or 4TB SSD variants. 1TB is enough for me and saves a lot of cash - keep an eye on your model downloads and ruthlessly delete old experiments. docker system prune.
We went for the Asus variant that has active cooling and I stuck it in the ceiling cable tray over our computer room racks. It sits on 1½" stainless steel mesh with lots of clearance in an actively cooled environment.
That ~119 GB optimization is great. Hadn't seen that yet. That pops a 4x-Spark setup to 476 GB, which gives a lot more headroom for running something like GLM 5.2 at 4-bit, which isn't completely terrible.
I should have prefaced my post - I almost bought four Sparks a couple months ago, but ultimately opted to buy two more RTX 6000 Pro Max-Q's.
It was a painful choice because the two 6000's were more expensive than four Sparks, and ultimately gave me only 384 GB VRAM.
It was even more painful when GLM 5.2 was released, and a 4x Spark setup could run it at a decent quant, but 4x 6000's cannot with any headroom.
But the 6k's absolutely destroy the Sparks on prefill and inference speed. Model intelligence is compressing. The smaller VRAM pool will matter less over time than slower prefill/inference speed.
That is to say, I'm sure we'll end up with <500B parameter models that are Fable-level in the next 8 months or so. Performant quants of those will fit comfortably in 384 GB.
In your previous posting you said that for more than 2 Sparks you also need to buy a very expensive switch.
That is not really true. Once you have 2 fast Ethernet ports, like DGX Spark has, you can interconnect any number of systems without using a switch.
In the simplest case, you just daisy chain the systems and you configure in Linux the Ethernet interfaces as bridges.
For better performance, you can close the chain into a ring, with an extra cable. In this case the Linux configuration is more complex, because you must do IP-level routing, preferably with a routing protocol like OSPF, to be able to double the throughput between 2 systems, by using both paths through the ring.
The only advantage of a switch is a greater throughput when there are 4 or more systems, which happens only when all the interconnected systems are attempting to communicate simultaneously, in which case having only 2 paths through a ring will serialize some of the transmissions.
When only 2 systems attempt to communicate with each other, a ring has double throughput in comparison with a switch. You need 2 switches to match the throughput that a ring has, as long as it does not become congested. Or you could use one double-sized switch, with the ports partitioned between 2 VLANs, with each DGX Spark connected to 2 ports, in different VLANs. Both 2 switches or a double-sized switch would greatly increase the price.
For only 3 systems, a switch is useless, as it is worse than connecting the systems in a triangle and configuring the IP addresses for point-to-point links (the configuration as bridges is needed only for 4 or more daisy-chained systems). The configuration with 3 DGX Sparks seems optimal from the PoV of the performance per dollar ratio.
I agree with this. I have a dual rtx4090 machine, a 128gb m5 max mbp, and a dgx spark. RedHatAI/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-FP8-dynamic on the dual rtx4090 machine under vLLM absolutely slays at token speed. I'm frustrated with how hard it is to realize goodness on the dgx spark.
My guess is that it's because filtering is irrelevant to the anger towards X, or rather, Elon. That's fine, I don't have a horse in the race.
That said, I agree with you. X is the only social media site that filters out stuff I've expressed disinterest in. This has been true for at least a couple years. I only need to hit the "Not interested in this post" or "mute" buttons maybe once per week.
So for me, I see nearly zero politics, engagement bait, or slop (in the traditional sense). I see a lot of people working on really cool stuff, talking about it in real time, who just want to keep the focus on those topics.