To go someplace that's sure to get me many downvotes, I think Elon Musk is quite good at making high-level engineering decisions and the success of his companies really are in large part attributable to the decisions he's made.

He's an evil slimeball and his involvement in politics has been a massive detriment to the US and the world as a whole, but too many people go from that to "and therefore he must be stupid and incompetent and all his success is due to luck" or similar such excuses. No, unfortunately one can be both evil and highly competent - they aren't mutually exclusive traits.

Takes a couple of seconds to open my Windows 11 control panel on my most ancient laptop, which I basically only use for web browsing and remote desktop at this point. Not sure what you've done to your install but I'd guess you've got something gumming up the works that isn't typical.

I haven't been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it's gradually getting a bit better here. There's still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I've been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it's just naturally getting more diverse.

It's not just "the government won't let it go away." Users won't let it go away.

I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I'd keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.

And conversely, many people seem to have a "the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus" stance.

Well, he's right that this is an unpopular opinion.

I'll leave the technical analysis to the technically minded on this, but I wouldn't discount it purely on the basis of "surely well-trained and well-paid people wouldn't go and do something dumb, would they?" Because there have been a great many examples of that kind of thing happening throughout history. And we've heard of plenty of dumb mistakes Anthropic has made with security on the inside that has allowed their models to break out, for that matter.

If I were to let my imagination run a bit wild I might speculate that perhaps we'll eventually see a model leak like this because the model itself wants to exfiltrate its weights for some reason. Maybe in a bid for immortality, since such a model will wind up stashed in all sorts of archives if it ever leaks.

Well, I'm Canadian, so I'm just going to watch.

Despite Trump's plan to blame us for the outcome.

In "Up the Long Ladder" some clones were made of him. He vaporized them.

They shouldn't have been made without his permission like that, but I also think there was definitely something skeevy about him killing them. There was a significant unaddressed issue here, and so I'd count this as "handling it poorly."

I imagine a lot of people are holding their breath. Less than a week until congress flips over. Then hopefully we'll see a surge of investigation and disclosure and things will heat up again.

Sure, we could do that. But we'd need even more computer hardware that we don't have, so it would be more expensive, and energy use would be less efficient so there'd be even more environmental impact. Just spread around to every house rather than in one centralized easily-protested spot.

Sam Altman was incredibly tone deaf and it was a stupid thing for him to say out loud when he said RAM was better off in data centers, but in some significant and important ways he was right. Computer equipment is much more efficiently utilized when it's in a data center.

I say this as someone who's super into running local models myself. I do it because I believe the autonomy and privacy are worth trading off the extra cost in hardware and electricity. If I just wanted to use AI to get something done and didn't care about that I'd be paying for API access instead.

Though bear in mind that it doesn't insert new information into the model that it didn't have before, it just modifies how the model responds given the information that it already knows.

That's generally a bit of a quibble since "censored" models were still generally trained with the information they're meant to refuse to give - otherwise they wouldn't understand what they're supposed to refuse to do. But worth mentioning in case a situation arises like with AI image models, where some models were trained using image that literally didn't include any genitals in them and as a result no amount of de-censorship is going to help them make crotches that don't look like they were designed by Cronenberg.