Honestly I think he's just... a maximalist (there's probably a better word for it). Doesn't know how to be satisfied with immense success and wealth, so he wants to be integral to whatever the next thing is.
It's like a joke I saw here the other day, about being offered 10 trillion dollars or a chance to flip a coin for 21 trillion dollars, Zuck is flipping that coin again and again. Whether it's the metaverse or AI, he's come to terms with taking Ls on the chance to hit it unbelievably rich, even though, frankly, he's already as rich and influential as could possibly affect a person's life.
Advertisers want eyeballs, and this means less of them. Reminds me of Reddit moving to a log-in only model.
Not sure if you're being rhetorical, but I'll answer anyways. The reason Reddit wants you to log in is to better track you, no duh. The reason that makes them more money is because better data means better ad targeting, and better ad targeting can be translated to results like a better click through rate. When a platform has that, they can incentivize more advertisers to spend more money on their platform.
That way, each time they sell an ad, that ad can be more expensive. It's undeniable that demanding logins will be bad for the number of ads they sell, but if they can sell higher quality ads, they'll make more money at the end of the day.
This whole thing is the core driver behind privacy being eroded at scale, because ad targeting has proven effective, and so advertisers want to advertise on the platform with the best targeting. So everyone wants to spy on their users the best and build the best targeting.
Literally how I ended up here, it's great for finding new communities whenever they pop up, like this one, for example. Also interesting to keep some tabs on Lemmy as a whole, given that's totally possible here.
Definitely on my list of suspicions, with this article coming out so soon after Claude had to drop their prices for Fable dramatically, and 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.
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.
His 2026 opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, recently told MS NOW’s Jen Psaki, “Since taking office, Ken Paxton has now become a multimillionaire, while our pay has remained stagnant for years, for decades. He now owns 11 homes, while most Texans can’t afford one.”
...
Public records reviewed by The Times show Mr. Paxton, his blind trust and another family trust now own at least 15 properties worth around $9 million.
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.
Nigel Farage started a byelection for himself, as a political maneuver to prove he still has the people's support after a recent scandal involving taking a lot of undisclosed money from some crypto billionaire, in an area his party dominates.
Seeing it as a sham, every other party has stepped out, leaving the race entirely between Nigel Farage.... and Count Binface. If every other party potentially votes for Count Binface, he'd win with 60+% of the vote, meaning there's a non-zero chance he takes the seat of the next anticipated Prime Minister, which would be unbelievably funny.
No matter how it goes though, it's taken Nigel's decent political maneuver, and turned it into an absolute farce. There's no pride in barely beating Count Binface, this is the most political coverage he's ever gotten and it's honestly pretty devastating for Nigel Farage's reputation. Here's hoping he wins, which would be even better.
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.
Fair enough, constrained to trite variations of basic dialogue, I could see it being a pretty reasonable use case in a big game with lots of NPCs, especially if you've got a good corpus of examples to give it a baseline.
Not a popular opinion, everyone wants the answer to be "never, it's terrible and useless", but I'm inclined to agree with you on almost every point. AI is a powerful tool with guidelines and testing to constrain it, and smart human review. My only real point of contention is writing.
I find writing is like coding, in that a good story needs structure, pacing, a lot of elements to work on a macro scale, although with virtually no ability to bake that into the "good approved code" that the AI can work off. Perceiving that structure and pacing requires more context than any AI can handle. Honestly I think writing is probably the #1 area AI should be kept out of. I'd be pretty concerned that AI output feels good enough, but really poisons any story you let it influence you on. And a bland story is a pretty cardinal sin for a good game. I also find AI writing and patterns are much more obvious than a lot of people think, I've certainly seen coworkers wield it with undue confidence enough times.
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.
It's wild, eh? Fascinating to see both a balanced budget, and so many good changes so quickly. Almost like it hasn't been impossible all this time. It feels almost miraculous to watch a functioning government in action after all these years of watching the opposite.
Honestly I think he's just... a maximalist (there's probably a better word for it). Doesn't know how to be satisfied with immense success and wealth, so he wants to be integral to whatever the next thing is.
It's like a joke I saw here the other day, about being offered 10 trillion dollars or a chance to flip a coin for 21 trillion dollars, Zuck is flipping that coin again and again. Whether it's the metaverse or AI, he's come to terms with taking Ls on the chance to hit it unbelievably rich, even though, frankly, he's already as rich and influential as could possibly affect a person's life.
Not sure if you're being rhetorical, but I'll answer anyways. The reason Reddit wants you to log in is to better track you, no duh. The reason that makes them more money is because better data means better ad targeting, and better ad targeting can be translated to results like a better click through rate. When a platform has that, they can incentivize more advertisers to spend more money on their platform.
That way, each time they sell an ad, that ad can be more expensive. It's undeniable that demanding logins will be bad for the number of ads they sell, but if they can sell higher quality ads, they'll make more money at the end of the day.
This whole thing is the core driver behind privacy being eroded at scale, because ad targeting has proven effective, and so advertisers want to advertise on the platform with the best targeting. So everyone wants to spy on their users the best and build the best targeting.
Literally how I ended up here, it's great for finding new communities whenever they pop up, like this one, for example. Also interesting to keep some tabs on Lemmy as a whole, given that's totally possible here.
Definitely on my list of suspicions, with this article coming out so soon after Claude had to drop their prices for Fable dramatically, and 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.
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.
Nigel Farage started a byelection for himself, as a political maneuver to prove he still has the people's support after a recent scandal involving taking a lot of undisclosed money from some crypto billionaire, in an area his party dominates.
Seeing it as a sham, every other party has stepped out, leaving the race entirely between Nigel Farage.... and Count Binface. If every other party potentially votes for Count Binface, he'd win with 60+% of the vote, meaning there's a non-zero chance he takes the seat of the next anticipated Prime Minister, which would be unbelievably funny.
No matter how it goes though, it's taken Nigel's decent political maneuver, and turned it into an absolute farce. There's no pride in barely beating Count Binface, this is the most political coverage he's ever gotten and it's honestly pretty devastating for Nigel Farage's reputation. Here's hoping he wins, which would be even better.
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:
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.
Fair enough, constrained to trite variations of basic dialogue, I could see it being a pretty reasonable use case in a big game with lots of NPCs, especially if you've got a good corpus of examples to give it a baseline.
Not a popular opinion, everyone wants the answer to be "never, it's terrible and useless", but I'm inclined to agree with you on almost every point. AI is a powerful tool with guidelines and testing to constrain it, and smart human review. My only real point of contention is writing.
I find writing is like coding, in that a good story needs structure, pacing, a lot of elements to work on a macro scale, although with virtually no ability to bake that into the "good approved code" that the AI can work off. Perceiving that structure and pacing requires more context than any AI can handle. Honestly I think writing is probably the #1 area AI should be kept out of. I'd be pretty concerned that AI output feels good enough, but really poisons any story you let it influence you on. And a bland story is a pretty cardinal sin for a good game. I also find AI writing and patterns are much more obvious than a lot of people think, I've certainly seen coworkers wield it with undue confidence enough times.
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.
It's wild, eh? Fascinating to see both a balanced budget, and so many good changes so quickly. Almost like it hasn't been impossible all this time. It feels almost miraculous to watch a functioning government in action after all these years of watching the opposite.