That aside, I noticed “brain drain” in my favorite technical subs. Serious drain, as in “commenters haven’t even read documentation,” much less contributed any code.

Also, my favorite fandom subs have gotten more… echo chambery? Fanatic? Star Wars fandom-like, perhaps. They have a really shallow depth of knowledge now, but they treat it like gospel. Novels? Speculative lore/fanfics? No way, not anymore.

…Not that it matters.

I’m perma-shadowbanned on Reddit, for no discernable reason. And no recourse. So I’m certainly not contributing any expertise.

I am an outside observer, but don’t they actually want to leave and join the (conservative) US?

Even nonreligious, science-inclined family I have says, basically, “Geoengineering will fix it, so best to maximize economic output now.”

I believe this came from an WSJ opinion column.

Yes.

It’s dropping, dramatically.

Look at the history of open and closed releases, on benchmarks that aren’t totally gamed, and it’s easy to see. LLM capabilities are plateauing, and bigger models are getting more and more niche.

But inference efficiency is increasing exponentially. Tiny models are getting closer and closer to frontier ones. See: Qwen 27B, and how it can do most of what mega models did just months ago.

And there’s tons of unpicked efficiency fruit in papers. Bitnet is the big one, but I’ve seen dozens of proof of concepts, just yet to be tried in a production model, that are dramatic efficiency boosts.

And the comments… I can’t tell which are bots.

I would bet my shoes Facebook or someone lobbied for this.

It’s easy to blame Mormons, but I think that bloc was more of a mark.

It’s not just Fox. I stumbled into a “default” YouTube algorithm today, and was bombarded with all sorts of, for lack of a better word, podcast bros. Mostly conservative ragebait, though it sampled trash from the whole political spectrum.

Anyway, I just remember glimpses of videos on “what you weren’t taught about Native Americans,” cleanly presented economics, celebrity podcast talks and such basically being “Hey kids! Let’s gently introduce you to White Replacement Theory.” But it’s never explicit; it’s reasonable sounding, professionally presented content building it up by proxy.

…It’s all a machine. In a different life, I could see myself falling into those traps.

Yeah, well, science also says Twitter is an information black hole, and few that need to see this will see it.

I know it’s microblog memes, but still. It’s surprising to me how much scientist believers post about the state of the world… on Twitter. It’d be like going into a Nazi bar in Berlin to warn about the Holocaust, or to criticize Catholicism in the Vatican, and thinking you’re somehow in an open forum.

…At least it isn’t a blue checkmart Tweeter, though.

My guess: the “primitive” go-back-to-manly-cavemen manosphere stuff.

It sounds like some fantasy of what “should” happen to a pre-civilization woman.

Mix it up with ovulation, and I bet there’s a distant grain of truth there. If I were an isolated guy listening to podcast bros all day, I might even buy it.

GOG’S AI take

What happened, exactly?

All I can find is someone used an AI image for some kind of marketing.

I mean, yes.

• Steam is a scary monopoly, getting scarier.

• It’s not their fault the industry (minus GOG) comitted mass seppuku.

Both can be true. One can worry about Valve, and use them hesitantly, while laughing at everything else like it’s a cartoon.

The writing was on the wall for years. I remember memes about Altman in machine learning forums/chatrooms circa 2020, and especially 2021.

Nothing’s changed. Anyone in the space who actually looked at what he was doing, knew. Yet the bulk of the public (and investors) lapped the Tech Bro stuff up.

Partially configured some parts via LLM but please don’t crucify me for that.

Slap in a spare GPU, and self-host one!

The 30B-class models are unbelievably good now, for being so small. They’re kinda where Claude was like a year ago, if not less. And (with the right backend) they aren’t expensive to host.

Briefly, Beyond Burger burger patties were cheaper in a (U.S.) Costco than the equivalent Morton’s patties.

It got me to try their v3 forumula… and its actually really good. You have to grill the snot out of it, but it’s good.

V2 was awful. And so salty it made my skin tingle.

V3 is like night and day.

Better yet, download Qwen 3.5/3.6, with a “raw” notepad like Mikupad. Try it yourself:

https://huggingface.co/ubergarm/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF

https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad

One might observe:

• Chat formating, and how janky the “thinking” block is.

• How words are broken up into tokens, not characters.

• How particularly funky that gets with numbers.

• Precisely how sampling “randomizes” the answers by visualizing “all possible answers” with the logprobs display.

• And, thus, precisely how and why carb counting in ChatGPT fails, yet a measly local LLM on a desktop/phone could get it right with a little tooling or adjustment.

This is exactly what OpenAI/Anthropic don’t want you to do. They want users dumb and tethered, like a cloud subscription or social media platform. Not cognizant of how tools they are peddling as magic lamps actually work. And why, and how, they’re often stupid.

I think the problem is at the other end: the ads.

And platforms.

Some AI ad of Tom Hanks peddling a supplement, or a sexy ad of AI Taylor Swift, shouldn’t be distributed en masse in the first place, just because an algorithm or ad engine picked it up as engagement bait. It’s insane! There is nothing normal about it, and its about time we stop pretending the screwed up platforms profiting off this stuff are “free speech” and acceptable.

…Because scammers are always gonna scam. But they can only do this because the platforms are pourinf fuel on the fire.

Also, I was thinking of various wallet drainers, not just simple transactions or classic scams: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/what-is-a-crypto-wallet-drainer/50490/

Etherium isn’t just a currency, but a contract system. You basically have to be a digital lawyer+developer to understand it, and not accidentally click on the wrong thing to drain your account, and that is a LOT to ask of the average person.

We’re on Lemmy, which must put us in the first percentile of tech nerds, yet I don’t have the bandwidth to learn enough of that to feel secure with my savings in an Etherium wallet. How could the average person?

Anarchist types are concerned about government backed crypto coins since you lose the fungibility/anonymity of physical dollars but don’t get any of the freedom and separation from centralization that crypto supposedly represents.

Plus all the potential for oligarch corruption, like current crypto has. Yeah, it’s like the worst of everything, by design.

Were they robbed?

I bet they were.

Say what you will about cash, but some hacker isn’t taking paper bills from across the planet via some technical exploit way over my head. With Etherium, the only thing protecting your money from the entire internet is you, and your understanding of complicated intricacies… And when lost, no one is coming to help you.

They might get my credit card, yeah. But that’s either my own dumb fault, or a very rich bank’s problem.

…It’s great for scammers, though. Crypto’s like a wet dream for them. And I find it remarkable the crypto community sees that as a feature, not a bug, and somehow thinks the whole world must see it that way.