Hazzard

Definitely on my list of suspicions, with this article coming out so soon after Claude had to drop their prices for Fable dramatically, with models like Kimi's latest competing with it for much cheaper. Not to mention this coincides with the push to ban "Chinese models", it feels like this could be part of a broader wave to block the competitive open source models from US markets by any means available.

Hugging Face is the place where you go to download models you can host yourself.

Honestly... I have no idea how they expect hugging face to address this, once you're hosting the model yourself, they can't control your system prompt or scan what it's outputting or anything of the sort. It'd also be pretty impractical to scan all of these models to prevent anything, some of these models are terabytes in size, and I think just about anything that can output an image can output a "sexualized" image to some degree.

Seems like a nothingburger headline, really, a bit like saying "VLC does nothing to prevent users from watching child porn". It doesn't, but I don't know how you'd expect it to when it just serves a basic function that doesn't really have anything to do with the illegal part.

Apparently this 4Gb version is not actually for sale, and will only be available to system integrators..... so that some unsuspecting customer can be scammed into a budget "9050 PC" that only has 4Gb of VRAM and half the memory bus. Very cool AMD. Neat.

It is the world's first open 3T-class model

Good lord that's a lot of VRAM. Hopefully soon there's another phase of finding good ways to distill this recent progress into smaller models I can actually run locally.

The humour is just in the way their tune has changed as the open source models have caught up. From "this is super exclusive, only for our favourites with the most money, and even then we're limiting you" to "have some free credits! Please, try it!". It's always enjoyable to see a big company panicking a little in the face of open source alternatives.

I'll give my own nerdy answer, besides the "good for amateurs" one.

Personally, I'm pretty techy, but I use my PC primarily as a living room gaming PC. As such, keeping it working is paramount, although I can't resist tinkering with it anyway. I was afraid an immutable OS would limit my tinker projects, but I've found it to be a total non-issue. Even for complex tasks like self-hosting AI to play around with, podman has served admirably. Honestly, it gives me confidence to try more ballsy things than I would otherwise, rather than limiting me.

Additionally, I like the feeling that my core system is essentially unbreakable. Even if I ran sudo rm -rf, I don't even have the ability to truly pooch things. Similar deal for any virus or hacker that might access my hardware, you can't hide weird behaviour deep in my system, it's immutable. I've also crashed my computer a few times by blowing through my VRAM budget while tinkering with self-hosting AI, and such crashes don't scare me, I've got easy rollbacks if I crashed my PC while it was doing something delicate.

I'm even running the testing branch right now (I want earlier access to the latest Mesa, as it has bugfixes for the DOOM DLC), and I don't have to fear anything from an unstable branch. If it breaks, I can trivially rollback and switch branches to the latest stable in a few minutes, with immense confidence.

I love the assurance it gives, and the only thing it's ever blocked me from doing was installing my VPN client, but an OpenVPN config has done that job just fine. I'd consider switching to CachyOS, but the main reason I haven't is that I'd miss the comfort of my OS being immutable.

This is a reference to Full Metal Alchemist. It's a fairly common reference, if you've ever seen "Ed... ward" or something like it, this is the same reference.

(Spoilers ahead) In the anime/manga, he's studying how to create chimeras, and secretly, it's going very poorly. In a desperate attempt to get his research to work, he fuses his adorable daughter and her dog, believing only humans can make intelligent chimeras. It's also revealed he has prestige in the field only because his last successful chimera was made with his wife. It's a tragic gut punch, and a rather infamous scene.

I'll just reiterate what I said when Kamala Harris said it:

I understand that it would clearly be unwise politically to be seen celebrating someone's death... but I don't understand why politicians don't simply choose to say nothing more often. I highly doubt anyone on the fence is swayed by her message, or would notice its absence.

Meanwhile, celebrating his life is really off putting to a lot of people who would've voted for Kamala in the last election. How is this a good idea for her?

This seems even dumber.... nobody expects a Canadian politician to jump in here, and frankly, it's an even worse look.

I understand that it would clearly be unwise politically to be seen celebrating someone's death... but I don't understand why politicians don't simply choose to say nothing more often. I highly doubt anyone on the fence is swayed by her message, or would notice its absence.

Meanwhile, celebrating his life is really off putting to a lot of people who would've voted for Kamala in the last election. How is this a good idea for her?

Thank goodness, this just prevents them from acquiring additional housing.

Be exceptionally cautious of legislation like this, the housing market is becoming a more and more obvious bubble, companies like BlackRock are going to try to twist every legislation like this into a bailout. They'll want government to take the houses from them, by buying them all "at market rate", despite the reality that these firms would never be able to offload all those houses into the market without cratering the market rate.

Good to know! That'll extend my copium another 24 hours nicely, if need be. If it doesn't come out then, I'll really be back to having no idea when it might drop.

Honestly, I might be huffing hopium, but I'm holding out some hope for Monday. There's been a lot of movement for weeks now, shipments to warehouses, drivers being marked as released in SteamDB, games getting marked as Steam Frame Compatible, stuff like this.

Honestly, I expected it to become available right after the Steam Machine reservation process finished, but that was interrupted by the Summer Sale, which wrapped up on Thursday. They say never to release anything on a Friday, so... I'm hoping they're just waiting until Monday to announce the price and open reservations.