FaceDeer

Ah yes, only approved subjects may have communities and be discussed on the Fediverse.

On the one hand that would be nice, but on the other hand it would result in basically no content on social media any more.

Actually, no, I’m on board with this.

Full flow methalox for the new Raptor engines, stainless steel for the rocket body, the whole focus on full reuse (just the first stage for Falcon 9 but driving to the full stack in Starship). These are all basic things that nobody was doing before and now are being hurriedly copied as fast as can be done by competitors.

I’m most familiar with his SpaceX work, mind you, so there may be comparable decisions over at Tesla that are part of what put electric cars into the mainstream that I’m not familiar with off the top of my head.

Pretty extreme, but okay.

Will you be factoring in the lives that get saved by various AI-assisted medical and other technological advances that are in the pipe as well? Or are you only considering negatives?

My ancient laptop is Windows 11 home edition, not enterprise or server.

Really, if it’s taking almost a minute to open the control panel then there’s something literally wrong with that install.

And the list goes on.

Yes, he’s had a few duff ideas. But then the rest of your own comment is a list of things he made good decisions on, which have vastly outperformed the bad decisions.

Also NASA couldn’t do what SpaceX rockets do, and Starlink has full regulatory approval for what they’re doing.

From what I remember he bought Tesla well after it was making money

Your memory is wildly inaccurate. Tesla was incorporated in July 2003, Musk got a controlling share in February 2004 (7 months later), and the company began production of its first car model, the Roadster sports car, in 2008.

I don’t know what decisions he made with spacex

Basically everything to do with their reusable rockets and their decision to build Starlink.

and I don’t knowb if the boring company is still around honestly.

I think you haven’t actually been paying any attention to Musk’s activities beyond what the “hive mind” has been telling you. Which is exactly my point here.

That whole paragraph of stuff where you’re complaining about how awful Musk is had nothing to do with engineering decisions.

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.

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.

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.

Just in time for Qwen 4. :) Glad to see that the de-censorship technology is advancing as fast as the censorship is.

Depends on the framework you’re using. I’m using Qwen Code Companion (via a VS Code IDE plugin) and it’s got some kind of tiered system built into it for adding tool definitions to context, it’s got a standard built-in set that’s always mentioned but other stuff only gets added to the context under certain circumstances. I can’t recall all the details, I found out about it when I was chatting with Qwen Code to ask it why it hadn’t used a particular MCP I’d given it to solve a problem despite it seeming like a useful tool for the task and we got into a discussion about to configure it. As I recall it’s something along the lines of most tools only being present in context by default as little one-liner stubs and the agent has to tell the framework “that one looks like it might be useful for what I’m doing” for the full definition to get loaded.

Most of the time I’m working on small scripts and specialized applications these days, and codebase memory is overkill for those so I haven’t actually seen it in use much.

I switched to LM Studio as my generic “run whatever GGUF I’ve come across today” platform and I quite like it. It doesn’t have the weird setup and configuration thing Ollama does, it’s got a nice built-in chat system like Kobold does, and it does dynamic model loading on demand so my various random scripts can call into it for whatever they need without me having to do any manual work.

Running stuff with straight llama would probably be more computationally efficient, but I value easy interfaces too.

Then you’ve got an account.

We’ll see how much personal verification information Reddit ends up requiring on that email, I guess.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.