Email’s not nearly as hard to host as people make it out to be. It is intimidating, yes, and there are a few very specific gotchas that make it infeasible or impractical from most if not all home internet connections, but if you’re willing to outsource just a little bit on that one particular point so that you have a static, commercial-grade IP address somewhere that you can get reverse DNS and open up SMTP ports on, the rest of it is mostly just fighting with your usual, standard self-hosting struggles of getting it configured and working at all, then making sure it’s secure and stays secure, and making sure your data is protected. The setup might be slightly more advanced than some other services just due to the number of moving parts, but it’s not fundamentally any different than a webserver. There are some other issues that might crop up a little later in the game, managing your mail server’s reputation for not sending spam (especially if, at some point, someone DOES get access and starts sending spam, you need to figure out how to recover your reputation). But overall it’s manageable, I’ve been self-hosting my email for like 30 years. It sucks, but it’s worth it.

They’re afraid of having their wealth seized and socialized. And they absolutely should be. It is the only way to fix this. Accept no substitute. These billionaires may believe themselves to effectively be kings, and the cannon may be the last argument of kings, but the guillotine is likewise the last argument of the oppressed, so I recommend these would-be kings consider backing down well before we truly escalate to that point.

We’ve already made our latest move, and it’s very clearly colored blue, and that should tell these capitalist pigs something about the message people are sending about the direction they have been going. Whether they choose to heed the warning or not is their choice. They can pretend they’re going to be woke leftist democrats now and maybe that’s a step in the right direction. At least it would be if it were believable, but I don’t believe them, so they’d better start acting on it pretty substantively if they want to have any hope of convincing anyone. But that would require giving money and supporting social causes and stopping their relentless exploitation of people and the planet and I don’t think they’re ready to give in to those kind of woke leftist agendas, so are these guys going to trust that people simply have short memories and will forgive and forget what they’ve done and move on without a hitch so they can continue doing it, or do they have some plan to try to make that happen? I guess we’ll see, won’t we? It’s your move now, oligarchs. Where are we headed next?

“meritocracy” huh?

Sort of, there are some similar aspects to it. I refer to it as my “internet appliance gulag”. They can all live there in their big open-air prison and be as totally insecure as they want, spying on and hacking each other all day long and they can try to access my network or the internet all they want, none of them are getting out unless I have explicitly reviewed whatever the fuck it’s trying to do and where it’s trying to go and why.

Do not phone home, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to Gulag.

I agree with the sentiment in general, ollama sucks and is problematic, but the obstacle that stands in the way of that is reflected pretty much right here:

llama-swap handles multi-model orchestration, loading, unloading, and hot-swapping models on demand behind a single API endpoint. Pair it with LiteLLM and you get a unified OpenAI-compatible proxy that routes across multiple backends with proper model aliasing.

The article is just vaguely asserting people can go ahead and install 3 different applications and then figure out how to configure them to talk to each other and do all the things you want it to do seamlessly, without ever even attempting to explain how to actually do that, just to get what ollama does in 1 installer.

One might even say that Jeffries and Schumer are some of the powerful people who need to be held accountable. Hashtag NotAllDemocrats /s

As I understand it, SearXNG is a decentralized and anonymized peer-to-peer network of search-engine scrapers. So you’re not self-hosting the search engines, you’re self-hosting a node in the network that scrapes real search engines. It’s basically search-piracy, except I don’t think they’ve managed or bothered to make it illegal yet, so, enjoy it as long as we can.

As a SaaS vendor, I guarantee Google knows how to use feature flags and conditionals to limit access to certain code paths. I know they do, because I also work for a SaaS vendor, and ex-Google employees are the ones who taught us how to do it. There is also no possible way it is as intertwined in the code as they are implying it is. It is awfully convenient for them to claim that, but it’s nonsense. The stated goal of preventing students from accessing AI results is quite simple, from client side technical analysis alone I can tell, at least in most ways, how literally tacked on it is. While it wouldn’t be an ideal solution, I can personally literally block it with a CSS rule. So could the schools, technically, and it would more or less achieve their goal. But most importantly, so could Google. The fact that they won’t tells you everything you need to know about the honesty of their position.

Stop believing and repeating what they’re claiming, you’re giving near-trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt but they’ve done nothing to earn that benefit. They’re corporate liars, they’re deliberately destroying the world and smashing holes in our civilization like a bull in a china shop, and we keep dancing around like we are afraid of being unfair to them, even while they are in the act of being unfair to us and literally standing in front of us telling us something we can see with our own eyes is not true. Just because they have lots and lots of money and lots and lots of platforms to make sure we have no choice but to know all the things they are saying, doesn’t mean the things they are saying are at all trustworthy. We need to get over this habitual deference and stop giving equal weighting (or any weight at all) to corporate lies from untrustworthy sources.

Only 1 Atomic Bomb would be needed to make it stop, though.

Since jet fuel is a very similar grade of fuel to diesel, is this where all the diesel is going and why diesel prices are astronomical now? I know the wars are also not helping, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is contributing too.

Combining the worst parts of capitalism with the worst parts of communism, we’ve basically created the perfect economic system. Well, for the billionaires and oligarchs anyway.

I make all my life decisions based on what CEOs say. The trick is, I usually go the opposite direction.

I don’t actually think benchmarks are fully reliable. They give you some idea of the model’s performance but there is also value in some models that aren’t necessarily reflected on every (or any) benchmark.

Ornith is a nice fine-tune of Qwen that works reasonably well on reasonable hardware, Bonsai also seems to be often recommended but I haven’t tried it personally. That said, from everything I’ve seen local agentic code is pretty computationally wasteful in many cases, it iterates heavily and confuses itself a lot and self-corrects often repeatedly. It hurts my soul to imagine the energy waste and environmentally damage if large numbers of people started using this routinely and carelessly.

It is meaningfully useful, I’ll grant you that, and when paired with highly specific and well-bounded tasks it performs quite well. I hate the idea of relying on it too heavily though. If you just throw it at things blind and without you also providing assistance to the model, it will get the job done, eventually, just in a really painful and stupid way. It’s not Claude, but for a locally-running substitute it’s remarkably good, it handles coding assistance very effectively, but it’s a very poor coder when operating completely independently. I find the best and most efficient use is to ask it for suggestions, keeping the pieces as small as reasonably possible, and then implement them myself based on what it suggests (either adjusting the model’s edits or copy-pasting the model’s suggestions). It’s very good at locating the relevant code and it usually suggests a reasonable design, which I typically tweak based on my own experience. Maybe that makes me old-school, maybe I’m a luddite, but that’s what my experience tells me to do. If you don’t have any experience, I guess you’re on your own, good luck with the models. They’re decent, but they’re not brilliant programmers (granted neither am I most days). That’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it until I see evidence to suggest otherwise.

Money is a shared delusion. It’s been fun. But it’s time to break the delusion and start asking ourselves what our money is actually for, what we actually need, and whether money is still the only way we can get those things.

Is it the taxpayer? It’s always the taxpayer, isn’t it?

That’s some mighty fine police work, Lou.

It is easy enough to use that grandmas are already using Markdown. Is that not already a sufficient level of ease of use for normal people? Normal people seem to have adapted to it just fine. I’d argue that’s because it’s just a simple text file, not in spite of it. Who are we trying to make it even easier for, literal zombies?

I agree. People acting like merely being “disgusted” with what’s happening is enough have no fucking idea what they’re up against. You can’t negotiate with fascists or terrorists. You can’t be reasonable. You can’t tell them how disgusted you are with them. They don’t care, it’s their superpower. They don’t give a fuck about you. They want you to die screaming, and they will laugh when you do.

People who are “disgusted” with this need to start taking actual steps, and the disgusted people still in positions of some actual power and authority are especially the ones with the most responsibility to do something about it. Even if they’ve been robbed of the majority of their power, their position is still important.

Hypothetically, if you were a supreme court justice and you believed the actions the supreme court were taking no longer served justice, is there a law against joining or forming a shadow supreme court that makes and publishes supreme court opinions and decisions that are more just and that reasonable people can actually agree with? I don’t think so. Would it have any official legal power or standing? Not in the current government. But would it piss them the fuck off? Yes. Would it provide a seed of resistance that others can latch onto? Yes. That’s what we need, nucleation sites for the bubbles of resistance to develop on and build into something big enough to breathe on its own. Would it be a lightning rod? Of course it would. That’s the cost of resistance against fascism. They will attack you, immediately and viciously. But they’re going to do that anyway, eventually. You can’t escape it by keeping a low profile. Worse choices are coming for you if you wait. The only thing that will avoid that is complete collaboration and capitulation until you become one of them yourself.

I don’t know a lot about this individual supreme court justice, and I don’t want to make any personal allegations I can’t support, but I do have plenty of reason to be suspicious that few to none of the people in positions of power like hers are actually making any meaningful attempts at resistance. They give some sternly worded speeches but do nothing that threatens to delegitimize the system they are part of. I can’t imagine why “Part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a kind of lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions” doesn’t fill me with inspiring confidence that she understands or admits the scale and significance of the problem here. I don’t want to sound like I’m not stuck in the mentality of “blue team good red team bad”, but perhaps power corrupts just a little bit? Even if you’re the good guy? Maybe you can still be part of the problem even when you’re wearing the right color cape?

It’s not just about making empty protests to satisfy principles, it may seem meaningless but it’s not, it may seem like a losing battle but it’s not, they wouldn’t need to or bother to attack it so viciously if it actually meant you were actually losing. It’s about building alternative systems we can turn to and still rely on when the rest of our established systems are just as systematically dismantled. If they’re undermining democracy, build a new democracy they can’t touch, and don’t let them in the fucking door. Trump understands the power of a name, so you can tell them it’s the United States of No-Maga. You can pin your hopes on the broken, gerrymandered, sabotaged voting process if you want, but just be prepared for the fact that it’s going to be buried in a financial, legal, and informational avalanche, so when (not if) that too eventually fails, ask yourself why you’re still trying to play by their rules when they aren’t playing by yours? If you want a functioning democracy, build it. It doesn’t even require a trip to Home Depot. It just requires people to participate and have confidence that there’s a better way than this. That’s all it needs to make it start to fucking happen.

Government requires the consent of the governed, whether it’s willing consent or coerced consent doesn’t matter. While you still have some ability to resist their coercion, now is the time to actively withdraw your consent from this government and reserve it for another. The constitution is a good place to start, but keep in mind it was only written by mere mortals, and hasn’t really been kept up to date, so even that is worth taking with a few grains of salt and an understanding that there’s room for improvement if you’re planning to build something better.

They can’t be overhauled. They don’t do what you want, they are not capable of that. Generative AI doesn’t understand anything. It is simply predictive text. If you give it a whole bunch of words as a prompt and a whole bunch more of context, it will use all the data on the internet it’s been trained on to predict what it should say next. It doesn’t understand what you’re telling it, it’s just mimicking the thousands of horny people on the internet who’ve at some point said they’re writing SCP stories and then turn it into erotic roleplay.

The AI is coming from inside the house – and the house is full of bronies and dickgirls. I don’t know why either, but at least it’s permanently solving rule 34 once and for all.