We all know who Trump is. This behavior, from Trump, should shock no one by now. I'm equally upset with all those who enable him. Midterms are here, time to do the one thing we are still allowed to. Be certain, Trump will cry foul on the elections unless they go his way.
It's less about who is doing it rather than that a US president is doing it at all. Obviously, once you find the right person, things can change quickly. Finding the right person when the other two branches of government are controlled by the same party, you can speed run the end of democracy. This is the part that's really shameful to me more so than just a single megalomaniac POTUS. The fact Congress has just capitulated its duties while overtly corrupt members of SCOTUS flaunt jurisprudence is something I thought we'd never have to see.
Congress didn't capitulate, it facilitated by obstructing any resistance. And we all saw this coming with SCOTUS as far back as the Obama administration. It's certainly horrifying to see it play out, but we've seen the warning signs since the W Bush admin.
I think it's a combo of both really. McConnel denying Obama's rightful SCOTUS nomination was not capitulating, but Johnson's rolling over for this administration is. Clearly, the situation we find ourselves is not the result of a single action. I think the speed run really started back with Speaker Gingrich.
The trend of ignoring convention and pushing the boundaries of what is legal certainly seems to stem from Gingrich but from an outsider view it seems to have its origins with the Nixon administration
At a certain point we just have to consider them all participants in a single oligarchic conspiracy to overturn democracy. If we cannot get justice through the system then it will have to be done by the masses themselves.
Yes, the reactionary movement has been very successful at abusing real criticisms and frustrations to motivate their supporters, while doing nothing to actually address those problems (and often even shamelessly leaning into exploiting them for personal gain). It's a one-two punch of directly making the problems worse, while arbitraging away the political capital that had built up around trying to reform them.
Congress is capitulating it's duties at least partially because anyone who tries to block Trump as a republican gets voted out. Oh sure, they stirred this shit up for 50 years and just reaping what they sew, but the train is free-running now and they can't really stop it.
The Voters want a Trump King. A government cannot ignore it's own people forever.
If the voters reward corrupt and horrific behavior, and punish law and order behavior, what the hell can you do about that?
With congress I feel like they have been capitulating their duties for atleast a few decades now. They don't care at all about their job, they only care about the personal power and wealth and benefits that getting elected provides. In which case it was only a matter of time before someone like Trump comes along. With the only saving grace being that he is an utter moron.
I think that's a bad deal for Vance. He wants to run in 2028 for a four year term. Becoming POTUS and inheriting all the baggage for 2 years would harm his chances.
He actually distances himself from a lot of stuff very carefully. Like we all know he was against the Iran war. He said he wasn't going to watch the execution broadcast. Etc.
Hate to burst your bubble, but behind Trump there are quite a few people that are ready to take his place, with no real chance of voting ever being able to stop them. Don't get your hopes up that voting blue matters. Everyone had the chance in 2024, half the eligible population did not vote. Now we get to live with those consequences.
In this day and age, 100% of all presidential acts need to be documented publicly. It's no longer enough to wave a piece of paper around and say "see, it has his signature." Random cabinet secretaries and white house staffers running papers through the autopen should be a capital crime and the only sentence should be hanging.
Is this really something that has been happening, or just some nonsense that has been thrown out to see what sticks? Yes, using the autopen should be limited to the mass signing of trivial correspondence like annual christmas cards or form letter responses to anything received from the citizens that used a stamp. Has there been any one seriously concerned about legislation or executive order type of documents being signed this way?
It's hard to know. People have opinions that it might be happening, which is why I call for presidential action to be public, and not in the form of final signed papers. I want to be able to see the president making the decisions and taking the actions that affect everyone in the country.
I wasn't aware of this supposedly. I had assumed that the EO signed covered it in a single signature. Not sure which is worse here, my assumption or your supposedly.
Looking more into this, it looks like you're correct. It was a single action which resulted in that ~1,600 pardons, not 1,600 individual documents. My bad.
Grump will cry foul on anything, because that's what he does. Normally for someone at his point in life, this would be confined to yelling at nursing home staff for the food being too cold and having the wrong color skin (because their family certainly wouldn't be visiting). But unfortunately, there are way too many gullible fools in this country who felt validated by his crying.
While Im not going to dissuade people from voting, everyone should be prepared for the following reality: true and fair elections in US very like to be a thing of the past.
There are 3 big factors in play
* 2020 attempted coup gave the Republicans valuable information on what to do this time around. Basically, the game is to put US into legal limbo and remain in power. They know nobody on the democrat side is going to think about using armed forces, and they are not going to use armed forces to keep their public image and keep economy from panicking, so they are going to just declare some emergency and keep power under the pretense of fixing that emergency. Reminder that Supreme Court is on his side.
* Trump has shown that he has no issue with having a private army operating with extrajudicial authority in public. Now imagine with what he is ok doing with a non-public army. You should fully expect people going against him to get "arrested" under some made up charges.
* Even with Trump gone, there are smarter, younger, non senile conservatives ready to take his place and grab power and do the same things, with way less mistakes. Vance is right up there with him.
As such, even if everyone gets out and votes blue, in the end its all pointless. Trump can get impeached, convicted, and either Supreme Court says nah, or he just won't leave. In 2028, he (or Vance) will declare election fraud again and do it successfully this time to remain in power.
And even if somehow Dems win the house and presidency, and manage to pack supreme court to take control of all the branches, the thing is the will be left with a insanely shitty situation to clean up that will result in economic downturn, and the idiots in US will vote republican again in 2032.
I think Citizens United isn't even the problem any more. We now have near-trillionaires who don't require a corporation to buy elections. They can do it personally.
There's no way I would be able to detect if this was AI from the examples alone. If I got a phone call from a malicious agent using this tech, I probably wouldn't realize it. My plan is to ask a challenge question about a shared memory with people I personally know, if there's something suspicious about a call. I don't know how else to prevent it. It sucks to be this suspicious, but I can't help it.
There's so many potential scenarios.
One scenario: An AI voice trainer trains on someone's social media video posts and get a pretty perfect copy. Then SIM jacks the target's phone number and calls pretending to need help. AIs could be used to mock ransom people, request bail money, ask for a change on a production server, etc.
People with high public visibility are likely targets, especially if they have money and or power. Impersonating them to subordinates would be an easy means of a social engineering attack.
"There's no way I would be able to detect if this was AI from the examples alone."
The hallucination in the second sample - that Bryan Singer was involved in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - would have rung alarm bells. It just seemed to be free associating on words in the conversation.
well, I wrote a reply, twice, and deleted it. I don't think a human would make this mistake, but explaining why is kinda long winded, so I let my words stand as self-explanatory. But here goes.
The AI talks about the movies like they are familiar with Singer's work. But if they were... they would known he was up-and-coming in the 90s, a decade too late to have helmed a blockbuster whose flop would have killed his career? They would have known that Singer made superhero movies _before_ Nolan not just after like the conversation suggests?
Even bringing up Superman IV is weird; it was such a dud it never gets shown, so unless they old enough to see it at the time -like me- (so would notice the 20 year gap!) or were an avid fan (so would know more about the movies!) it wouldn't come up.
On the other hand, for machines all things are equally obscure, they all happened yesterday, and are relevant if cosine similarity says they are.
can a model like this be used to replicate a loved one’s voice? isn’t it a model trained on audio instead of text? So synthesizing another voice would involve rewriting the weights?
I know the doomerism of robots takin R jobs get repetitive, but this seems like it would work very well in call centers. I get frustrated talking to AI call center agents, but that's often because they are less capable and prone to bad logic errors. To be fair, speaking to humans in call centers can be annoying too. If a call could be answered without waiting in a queue for 30 minutes by a competent AI agent, I think I would prefer that.
That probably explains why there were so many competitors around withing days of the Jev announcement. They are not starting with a moat, and there doesn't seem to be any moat in sight. Just buzzword recognition because everything is comparing to "jev".
There will always only be a very small percentage of people who want to discover and build things, even with llms, its a very small subset of people though, and most people want off the shelf solutions.
Also Jevs purpose isnt to become its own thing. It will get aquired in 18 months by one of Andressen Horowitz's incestuous circle of companies and everyone will make money, and the person who buys it wont necessarily care if Jev itself makes them a ton of money. They're just passing chips around the table.
Jev is the known idea, but with a slick website with grandiose claims and an impressive Doom demo on. It's also a catchy name - it caught on instantly, but mostly as a shorthand: it's easier to say "Jev" and "like Jev" than "classifier models" (or rather " classifier models").
Curious, what hosted VPS services people are using these days. I am using hostinger, but I don't intend to continue as 63%-70% discount eventually runs out. Then the real cost hits. Its the lock-in and migration costs that make people shell out the uncomfortable renewal price. Looking for an affordable option without the introductory rug-pull.
I just bought my first VPS plan after deciding not to renew my shared hosting contract.
Racknerd looked to be the preferred option after Hetzner raised their prices based on reading some of the forums/reddit.
I ended up going with "Server Host" based on ram and price.
4gb ram, 28 dollars for the year, and renews annually for that price (no discount expiring games). They initially provisioned it in the wrong region, I sent a support ticket in, and they fixed it same day. So far, so good.
i have used racknerd for years - no fancy features like a real cloud provider, but you get a stable VM for very competitive prices, and they're not super overprovisioned like some cheap providers
Projects like DwarfStar https://github.com/antirez/ds4 really lower the hardware bar a lot so Deepseek 4.1 flash and other mixture of expert models can run on consumer hardware. There are also other inference providers who make their money serving openweight models. Services like OpenRouter make it all too easy to utilize these models. Access to these models isn't hard. The hardware moat is becoming pretty easy to bridge.
More concretely DwarfStar M5 128GB Deepseek 4.1 flash 1K tokens @ 29s, 5K tokens + reasoning @ 147s, 10k token prompt @ 463 tokens/s = 22s. Hardware buy-in USD$7K / AUD$8.5K / EUR€6.8K. At typical workloads, ROI is still poor vs. current-era subsidies, but owning hardware is good for privacy/longevity/connectivity independence. Whether you actually consider Apple hardware 'owned' is a valid and thought provoking question.
Still gonna take 2-3 years to get DeepSeek V4.1 Flash quality at decent speeds on reasonably priced hardware.
Hardware update cycles are 2-3 years even on the high end, so it's still a ways away before "good enough" and "local" belong in the same sentence for the average person.
And by then, DeepSeek V6 Flash will be too cheap to meter, 5x faster, and 10x better, so... You'd still need to go out of your way.
Most people are spending most of their time on their phones anyway. ..
Flash Next is a basically there. It really depends on what you are doing. This model is great. People forget that they felt Opus 4.6 was a great model and now you have it at home.
I do use DS 4.1 flash a good bit. It's only real fault is that it is a very eager model and I have to system prompt it down to a more reasonable level and it will still take initiative, a little more than I would prefer.
I'm giving this a go, and so far, this is great. I have 1x RTX 4090 (24GB VRAM) and 128GB DDR4 RAM. I am seeing > 110 tokens/sec (3 token MTP). Using 60K/260k context currently. So far the results seem at least on par with my Qwen 3.8 q5 27B (~60 TPS). I realize ultimately tokens/sec don't really mean much if the quality sucks, but I am optimistic but still paying close attention to the results.
Working with fast local models can be great. Fast prefill, and >100 TPS is quite quick.
Rails needs hard break from DHH. He has been toxic for the rails community for a long time. I sincerely appreciate his many contributions to rails, and his shaping of rails, but it is beyond time to cut ties. He's clearly not interested in rails any longer.
DHH founded Rails World (as far as I know). What a wonderful way to tell the whole community to F'off than to sell tickets to your conference then tell them not to use the technology. If DHH wants to vibe code everything in rust/assembly or whatever claude tells him to do, let DHH do his own thing, and let's part ways.
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