Enjoy it while you can. You can see the AI companies have already started the process of locking us out of this, with Opus 5.5.
God forbid our fans, our fans of all things, might be broken of their dependencies on the internet. The plebians can't be allowed to do that. Every relay must be cloud-connected so it can be monetized and disabled for whatever dumb ass reasons someone might want to disable it.
Just use abliterated/uncensored self-hosted models. This is why we need them and the hardware to run them. Yes, the API models which will further close the walled gardens will evolve faster than the open-weights ones, but I'm hopeful about the community as a hole rejecting this status quo.
An RTX4090 or a 128gb macbook can generate a pretty reasonable number of tok/sec. Those are not cheap, but within the realm of serious hobbyist. I really hope the AI bubble deflates a bit so consumers can get more powerful hardware at the low thousand $ range.
The other problem is that the manufacturers can also use AI to improve their DRM and do red-teaming to fix "vulnerabilities" before release. Right now they're not because it actually takes some effort but eventually they'll be able to just tell their agents "make sure no unauthorized clients can connect". I expect that several years from now there will be a sizeable market for pre-2027 hackable devices.
Opus 5.5 will absolutely refuse to touch anti-cheat systems in video games, even when the end game isn't to cheat but to work on Linux compatibility or to bypass/spoof the checks to enable gameplay.
OpenAI and Anthropic models seem to be the most affected by these barriers, from my own experience.
Mistral, QWEN, and other models (read non-American) tend to have little to no restrictions. There were some tasks where I was actively trying to sabotage my own local network and Mistral had no issue helping. Anthropic and OpenAI refused outright or had to be "convinced" but would often hit further barricades along the way.
> So this only works on products that was developed before ~now.
You're under the assumption that the companies producing these give a shit about security. It'll probably increase a bit but I doubt it will be by much. If they have shipped devices that leave the doors wide open for almost any intrusion, they won't invest engineering/AI time and money to make these better than before and certainly won't review the code that the model spit out beyond a quick check if the promised base functionality still works.
Coway sells tons of devices with no smart/connected features. Their best-reviewed ones for home air purification are not connected. Everyone will be better served by supporting such product lines or pressuring companies to create them more than they will be by reverse engineering "connected" features no one ever needed.
"It's literally a use it or lose it market right now."
Are you sure? The point of this stockpiling was to create that impression. Now that you have data that that foundation behind that impression is manufactured and faked, you need to reconsider everything that was resting on that foundation. The demand is just so incredible needs to be reexamined from scratch now in light of the active attempts to forge that signal.
It is also worth remembering that this is a prime example of a situation that is not black or white. The absolute size of the demand, however large it may be, is not the question. It's the size relative to the supply, supply which includes all the pumping shenanigans that are coming into the light. The "AI bubble" has never been if there is demand or if the tech has real use, it has always been a relative question about if the build out could possibly make economic sense.
signed closed source drivers for hardware that can restrict which algorithms can be run on it locally... temporally...
edit: i'd willingly bet that AMD has a backroom deal to tank their performance and options to encourage this homogenous deployment overseas.
swallow the hook.
I fully, 100% expect that this is the golden age of AI for mere mortals. Right now the overriding drive is to get it out there and get as many people paying as much as possible for it, which fights against limiting it more than absolutely necessary. So we can still make videos with trademarked characters and reverse engineer proprietary software and all that sort of stuff right now.
But enjoy it while you can, because for all their singing the praises of how it empowers people now, as soon as it actually, you know, empowers the people, the establishment will start shutting it down on one side while enshittification starts eating it from the other.
Both of those trends have already started, they're just being outrun by the pace of progress and the need for revenue. But both of those things will eventually pass.
Yeah, this has that schoolyard "hey, no fair winning, new rule only I get the good ball!" energy all over it.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" us to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
Many aspects of the internet have improved. For all its issues YouTube is better now than it was ten years ago... at least, given the way I use it and with the curation I apply. There are plenty of other things that have improved too.
However, what used to be a diversity of communities has been horrifically, horrifically crushed into a vastly less diverse set and it's not just nostalgia saying so. Everyone has been herded into centralized systems all of which are so large that they have significantly converged into the same thing, whether you're on Reddit or Facebook or X, despite the superficial differences and the various reactions people may have to various elements of that list.
My local BBS, run by high school students for the local high school students, had picnics. It's been a long time since I was a member of a community that could do something like that routinely. And to the extent you want to say well jerf that's obviously because..., the things that come after "because" are the point I'm making here. I'm not mystified by the effect. Nor is it the only thing that has changed for the worse, it's just a nice little snapshot that is easy to ponder.
Everything on the internet is structured to constantly make things bigger and bigger. But there's a time and place for not bigger.
i agree with you entirely, so i wasn't going to "that's obviously because" you, anyway. my own reflection is that when I first got on the internet the intersection of people I knew on the Internet and IRL was an empty set, then for about 10-15 years it was nearly a perfect union, and now it's pretty close to disjoint again.
i don't think LLMs are going to end human-to-human interaction on the Internet, it'll look different, but as long as >1 human values community with only humans, it will find a way.
YouTube used to be things people made for fun, now it's all content made for clicks and monetisation. It's just cable TV but non-linear (which in the TV business means you can choose what to watch next, not have a fixed selection of live channels).
But it has taken a heavy hand with the "Don't Show Channel Again" and the hand is getting heavier over time. YouTube seems to have some idea that I am uninterested in the dozens of AI slop TTS + AI slop animation channels that are popping up every day but it keeps probing me, just in case maybe I've changed my mind.
It also takes a certain amount of discipline. While it's not like my feed is nothing but high-brow university channels, you do want to make sure you don't leave any cute animal videos or reaction videos accidentally clicked on or anything else you don't want to see hundreds more videos of in your watch history. If you do decide to watch some junk you have to remove the junk from your watch history. I have no illusions that removing things from my watch history has anything to do with "privacy" but it definitely does impact The Algorithm, and I've seen little evidence that The Algorithm is using those videos anyhow... it really does seem to 100% remove them from consideration.
I haven't pursued this as a conscious policy but I can confirm that every time I've done it I've always discovered something that would have invalidated the benchmark if I wasn't looking at it while it ran. Article mentions it but I've seen something as simple as "gee that's strange that should be using all my cores not just one" several times over, or equally stupid things.
Making it so they aren't in the pool of errors that can be made. I want to be able to type swear words, but I don't want profanity to come out when I try to swipe "duck". Socially, emotionally, and politically loaded phrases make sense to require a bit more care for.
That is a general answer to your question. It is not a specific defense of the particular word list in question. But I can say I've been surprised a few times about what I accidentally swiped on Android. Bitch isn't swipable but I have "bitchiest" readily available, for instance.
I like having a phone that doesn't spontaneously insert "fuck" into my messages because it thought I might mean that. That could lead to some unfortunate situations. When I want to use the word I'm perfectly capable of typing it.
That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability.
I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.
The difficulty of setting a VCR's clock was a meme in the 1990s, and I can attest, justifiably so.
But at least it was possible. The clock setting being impossible without a proprietary and easily lost or destroyed SD card is pretty good, but we can do better. It could be just impossible to fix a wrong clock. Truly that would be the apotheosis of user unfriendly design.
My very technical and hands on father used to have us set the VCR clock, the controls were in a tiny compartment under a flap that required either small fingers, or very careful manipulation with the point of a protractor or something.
We went from difficult to manipulate buttons through to multi-function buttons where controls get hidden through some incomprehensible maze of menu options, to now where it sometimes feels lucky if you even get an option to manually set the time at all.
I'm reminded of an old commercial depicting kids taunting another kid by asking "What time is it at Billy's house? 12 O'Clock! 12 O'Clock! 12 O'Clock!" Might have been a Blockbuster commercial? I can't remember.
The Internet Helpdesk sketch, by Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie, had the helpdesk guy describe the hapless user he's trying to help as a "12 o'clock flasher". "You know, every appliance in his house is always flashing 12:00".
Oh man, this reminds me of an episode of a show I watched when I was a kid in the 90s, where the running joke was all the characters, at different points, saying something like "I tried setting up the VCR to record it, but every time I press the button the number 12:00 starts flashing on the screen and I panic." I haven't been able to find it again. I think it was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Goose_and_Grimm_(TV_ser...
That is, however, the argument at its core. We don't know where RSI would lead. It could produce something roughly human-intelligent. It could produce something slightly smarter than a human. It could produce something radically, radically smarter than a human. We don't know. A lot of people suspect the correct scale would be a logarithmic one, which seems to conform to the pace of improvement being seen, but that's not something we know either.
It could also produce any of the above, but with a reasonably human architecture to the resulting intelligence, or an architecture radically divergent from ours. Although which of those is "better" or "worse" is a rather open question.
God forbid our fans, our fans of all things, might be broken of their dependencies on the internet. The plebians can't be allowed to do that. Every relay must be cloud-connected so it can be monetized and disabled for whatever dumb ass reasons someone might want to disable it.
reply