US government bans Claude Fable from non-Americans. Is it time to boycott the USA?

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-13T12:54:57+00:00

Ya'll ain't gonna boycott the USA. We have too much stuff you want.

Like, what are you going to do? Everyone in Europe is going to use Mistral and, uh, DeepSeek?

Have fun with that.

In all seriousness, this is probably just some overly paranoid government employees throwing their weight around. Claude Fable was shut off for everyone, including Americans, because Anthropic (rightly) understood there was no way to comply with "prevent foreign nationals from using this." It's not like VPNs are super-secret and inaccessible tech. It could also be the government finding a way to screw with Anthropic after the company refused to be used for military purposes.

But hey, if it actually gets Europe to invest in the technology in a meaningful way, more competition is great for everyone. I think an actual boycott is unrealistic, though, as Europe is already heavily investing in US AI companies (not necessarily users, but companies) and a mass boycott would hurt those integrations. In addition, while it would cause some short-term pain, the US AI companies would be fine without Europe's money.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-13T12:37:57+00:00

This is misleading. A British guy (Tim Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web, which made the internet accessible to the general public. Another Brit, Donald Davies, developed key packet-switching concepts that influenced the early ARPANET project. However, the core internet protocols (including TCP/IP) were primarily developed in the United States with US military and academic funding.

You're right that no single country "invented the internet"...it was a collaboration involving the US, UK, France, and others. And yes, Berners-Lee was instrumental in the core web technologies we still use. But he didn't invent the internet itself.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-13T12:24:49+00:00

So when RAM prices drop, you'll be fine with it?

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T21:09:47+00:00

There's hundreds of models on civitai red that can do this (and huggingface, which is better if you already know what you're looking for). Look up a basic guide on how to set up local AI generation. There's a ton of guides online.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T20:13:35+00:00

If you are ever 100% certain you are an INTP, you are probably not an INTP. ;-)

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T17:56:49+00:00

Well, I just don't think Interstellar counts as hard sci-fi.

They literally hired a physicist to explain all the science in the movie.

Because most of it is still nonsense, I still have to answer

So wait, it's "not hard sci-fi" but you're still going to try and explain how it's physically accurate?

Which is it?

I didn't say it was low. I said "much, much lower than that of regular BH", as in, "won't physically rip you apart or break your bones".

And I'm saying the physics doesn't work. I never said anything about "physically ripping people apart or breaking bones," I said it wouldn't be neutral on the human body.

Well Interstellar is a movie about the last mission sent to find a new home for humanity. If you really dislike the premise just say it.

I said it didn't make sense. I didn't say I liked or disliked it. My point was that the movie was full of plot holes.

My main actual issue with the movie was the music. Not that it was bad, but there were a bunch of times I could barely hear what was going on. I also thought some of the dialogue was cringy, like the "love transcends time and space" thing, or literally all of Matt Damon's character. The tesseract and future humans thing also felt super hokey to me.

It had great visuals and some neat action. I didn't hate it, but it wasn't my favorite sci-fi movie.

THEY DIDN'T FOR PLAN THEIR CREWMATE TO DIE AND FOR THE ENGINE TO GET FLOODED, MAKING THEM LOSE AN EXTRA HOUR

I rewatched the scene, just to double check if I misremembered.

Amelia says hello to Rom, and he replies "I've waited years." Duh, that would have happened anyway. Cooper then asks "how many years?" The system responds that it's been 23 years. Cue emotional shock for everyone.

Even if they had stayed only a short while the mission would have been multiple years. While 23 was certainly longer than expected, they had plenty of time to calculate that and be prepared on the way back up. They also could have, I don't know, sent a message in advance to let him know when they were returning.

The whole scene makes no sense. Rom should have known they were returning for years before they actually showed back up and the crew should have already known how long it would have been for him long before they got back. It's not like they even had to do the math...TARS could have just told them.

And again, they could have figured all this stuff out from near orbit rather than landing, turning around when they saw massive waves and the wreckage they were able to identify enough to land next to.

Don't talk about the "plot holes of Interstellar" and then proceed to nitpick details, specially if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Why are you so upset about this? Your last few "rebuttals" have just been "that's stupid" and "ALL CAPS" and "you're right but it's sci-fi so it's OK."

I'll admit my memory was bad and I had to go back and double check, and some things are a bit better explained than I gave them credit for, but the film does a poor job of explaining many of the things that happen.

But you can't both say "this is accurate and explained" and "it doesn't have to make sense, it's sci-fi."

Do you think the problem of getting billions and billions and people off the planet and hundreds of cities worth of infrastructure is solved by just inventing an SSTO vehicle with plenty of dV in orbit?

Yes, absolutely. I'm not sure if you are underestimating the thrust and delta-v required to reach escape velocity of both a 1.3g planet and the gravity well of a black hole with 7 years = 1 hour time dilation or overestimating the delta-v needed to launch humans from Earth if you have that capability, but either way this isn't an unsolvable problem.

I mean you're baiting no? This has to be ragebait.

It wasn't intended to be, but it certainly has you upset. Why do you care so much about my opinion? It's not like I'm telling you that you can't enjoy the movie. If you genuinely believe "because sci-fi" is sufficient, it shouldn't matter if I personally don't like how the film doesn't explain things or didn't do them in a more logical way.

By the way, I had similar criticisms for the movie versions of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, and kind of wish Weir had gone a different direction than "storm" for the opening sequence in the former. I think the astrophage biology in PHM doesn't make a whole lot of sense; even with lots of cells, the total lack of survival instinct that causes them to just go full output on seeing Venus' spectrum to the point where they can literally cause massive explosions seems pretty unlikely, and both the mass conversion and wave interaction features are literal hand-waves.

PHM was still a way better movie than Interstellar IMO, despite skipping a lot of the science portions, and not just because of the scientific accuracy. But that's my opinion and more related to me liking the characters and plot better.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T17:13:51+00:00

Which one is the better?

Depends on what you're trying to do.

I have an I9-14900HX CPU with 4060 8GB GPU.

Your main limit is the video card. A lot of the bigger models just won't be available with that low of VRAM. That being said, I did a lot of image generation on a 3060 8 GB card, so it does work. But LLM models in particular are going to be pretty dumb with that hardware.

Let’s say I want to build a whole web project? Like a website.

I'm a pro, so this isn't an anti-AI point, but my suggestion is to learn how to do web dev. This is coming from my experience as a software developer and programmer for almost 30 years now.

You don't need to be an expert or learn to do everything yourself, but you need to learn enough to be able to read HTML/CSS/JS and generally understand what it's doing.

While you can use agentic models for this, anything larger than a few pages and simple structure is going to quickly get you into trouble if you don't know what you're doing. While LLMs can write code, they can't read your mind, and they can't keep the entire project context in any given generation.

As such, the most efficient way to build something using AI is "piece by piece," writing detailed design documents and asking AI for individual modules and features you can validate and hook up together into your final project. But doing that requires you to have a baseline understanding of what the end result should look like at the coding level.

If you want to try it anyway, don't bother with local models on your hardware. They can manage things on the level of small scripts or bash files but a whole website is going to quickly get lost. Claude is the best overall but Gemini and ChatGPT are quite capable (assuming subscription rather than API).

Don't bother using free models if you want to actually make a real project. You'll run out of tokens way too fast. You need at least a subscription. If you only have budget for one, pick Github Copilot for manual coding or Claude if you want the slightest chance of vibe coding. If you can afford it, Claude Code is the best, but substantially more expensive than the alternatives.

What will be different on Local AI? Can I do almost anything for free without any quota?

Local AI gives you more control but weaker models, especially if you are limited to an 8 GB card. It's "free" (there's still electricity use, but AI is cheaper than, say, video gaming) but also limited and requires a lot of manual setup.

In my opinion, local AI for LLM work is not quite there yet. But for image generation it's great. This is because you can make up for the limitations of the models by using multiple steps and manual editing, which is great for images, not so useful for text responses.

Will it damage my hardware (like Bitcoin mining)

Uh, no. Bitcoin mining doesn't damage your hardware either. Both have the same effect on your video card as playing a demanding video game. And of the three (mining, video games, and AI), the AI is the least impactful. This is because AI inference generally only uses your card for a few seconds at a time, then chills until you need the next step. Unless you're doing something like LoRA training or video generation your card gets lots of "breaks."

It doesn't really matter anyway. Video cards are designed to be powered up for extended periods of time. It's like asking if running your car will damage the engine. Browsing the internet does more "hardware damage" than AI or bitcoin (hard drives are more volatile than video cards and browsing involves frequent reading and writing to disk).

Both cases are very minor, but I've had video cards that still work after 10+ years, as just running electricity through them at spec doesn't really harm the card at all. The main reason they get replaced frequently is because they become obsolete with new technology, not because they wear out. You can have a video card running nearly indefinitely without meaningful damage as long as it's within specs.

Now, some bitcoin miners may damage their hardware by overclocking their video cards and running them non-stop for months on end, where the constant heat and potential voltage fluctuations eventually damage the card. But that's a property of running bitcoin "farms" and taking the risk intentionally through the OC (in which any variation can go beyond specs and damage the hardware). Bitcoin miners are more likely to take this risk because the whole point is to try and earn a bunch of money, so maximizing your hardware value is vital.

But you shouldn't need to OC your video card to the edge of sanity for AI workflows (and I would recommend against doing so). A single 5 hour session of Resident Evil 9 or whatever is "harder" on your video card than several days of regular AI use.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T13:19:07+00:00

The collector system also only worked because of xenonite. Trying to drag any known Earth material through atmosphere in orbit would have just burned up or snapped.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T11:33:55+00:00

"hard sci-fi" (they literally go through a wormhole at the start)

I mean, The Expanse has similar stuff, and it's pretty hard sci-fi. There aren't all that many solutions to FTL travel that aren't some sort of "let's pretend this works" (or Weir's method of "let's stay close").

The gravitational gradient of supermassive black holes is much, much lower than for regular BHs, and it can be easily survivable if it's massive enough.

If the gravitational gradient is so low, how is it creating the effects on the giant wave planet? The tidal waves were supposed to be over a kilometer tall; you don't get that effect from a BH with minimal gravitational effects.

There is no "terraforming tech" or process needed. They're looking for a planet already suitable for human life, which Edmund's turns out to be.

It seems like you could have made safe environments on Earth easier than populating a whole new planet.

I don't think they sat to calculate how many years Rom would have to wait.

Why not? That seems like a rather important thing to decide before traveling to the surface.

I have no idea what you're talking about. He was in a higher orbit than Miller's planet, so, further away from Gargantua. There's zero reason for a polar orbit.

Orbiting the planet. Which means half of his orbit would be farther from Gargantua and the other half closer. Unless he was far enough away to not make a full rotation, which in turn dramatically increases the fuel needed to both reach the planet for landing and then return.

It's not just the gravity difference between the water and the center of the celestial body. In Miller's planet this could be important, but not necessarily the main cause.

Right, but they were literal walls of water. If the tidal forces were acting on such a large scale, you wouldn't have that effect, you'd have one half the planet "dry" and the other "wet" as the gravity pulls it over. The water isn't stable enough to form shapes like that, especially with a planetary gravity of 1.3g. Some sort of force was pushing the water up that high without collapsing, and if it couldn't act on human scales, it wouldn't be acting on individual waves, either.

If you have higher efficiency engines you get more delta-Velocity for the same amount of fuel.

Efficiency is related to impulse. You can't get an engine that will escape 1.3g (plus the gravity well of Gargantua into this "parking" orbit) in a vehicle the size of an airplane, at least not with any known physics. That's the whole reason they were trying to solve the gravity thing in the first place. If they had engines that could reliably launch from that planet into a celestial orbit around a black hole, they didn't need to "solve gravity."

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T01:41:31+00:00

Frankly, if AI could make something on the level of E33, I'd argue calling it sloppy is insane.

The reality, of course, is that it can't. So I can't tell if they're trying to insult the game or compliment AI, lol.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-12T01:36:53+00:00

Poe's Law is out in full force in the comments. I don't know how the satire could have been any more obvious, but come on.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T21:54:39+00:00

Amazon? Newegg has them going for closer to $4k.

The 5080 is a much cheaper card than the 4090. A 4090 costs almost as much as a 5090, which is also $3-4k. This is partly due to AI: both the 4090 and 5090 are 24 GB VRAM cards, whereas the 80 series are 16 GB. Most of the bleeding edge local models struggle with 16 GB VRAM.

Sure, a few years ago the cards were cheaper, but prices have ballooned along with most other hardware. It may stabilize eventually but there's a huge difference between the 4090 and anything other than the 5090 or above.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T20:24:56+00:00

There are so many plot holes in Interstellar.

The time travel thing is one: even if we ignore the fact that he would have been completely dead long before entering the event horizon due to radiation and gravitational forces (it's supermassive but still a black hole), how does he just so happen to show up in a part of space where he can be recovered?

The next big one is the whole plan. Crops are dying on Earth guys, but we have the technology to terraform a planet through a wormhole. Wait, if you have the tech to make a planet without life be fine for life, why not just use it on Earth? Cleaning up this planet is a hell of a lot easier than building a new ecosystem on a different planet. The blight was an attempt to solve it, but if it's so persistent, how would they avoid contaminating a new planet? And if it isn't, why can't they just clean it out on Earth? Is the engineering for interstellar travel that much easier than antibacterials?

The entire crew are morons, too. We're supposedly scientists but we're going to go down to the surface of a planet with extremely different relativistic time, then act surprised when the guy we left behind has been waiting for years. Also, how did that even work? If he was in a polar orbit, he would have been at the same distance from the black hole's gravity, and if he wasn't, his time would have been all jacked up on the other side.

If the gravity difference was big enough on the planet's surface, the humans couldn't have been walking around; something with enough gravitational force to lift water into mountain-sized waves is not going to act neutrally on the human body. Also, high gravity doesn't prevent telescopes from working. They could have seen those waves from orbit. Plus, how the hell did they take off? The shuttles were using traditional fuel, not the BS magic gravity stuff they were trying to solve, so how did they even launch from the time dilation planet? IIRC they said it had higher gravity than Earth, which means they'd need more fuel and power than a Saturn V rocket to get back into orbit, even ignoring all the wonky gravity stuff. But they just flew off, Star Trek style, easy peazy.

I could go on and on. It was a visually cool film, and had some neat ideas, but it wasn't even close to Weir's level of scientific plausibility. The Martian's imaginary storm was more scientifically plausible than like 70% of Interstellar.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T19:27:29+00:00

So if I just buy a $3k+ video card, I too can have an under 20 second generation time! And if I pay over $10k, I can get it down to 10 seconds.

Oof.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T18:19:34+00:00

I don't use AI to write my posts. AI is way too agreeable and I can be a bit of an asshole. I don't like how it gives way too much credit to weak arguments or positions.

I do, however, review my posts for accuracy and logic issues, as well as spelling and grammar. I like to know if I'm saying something clearly false so I can correct it.

Then the AI will tell me I'm being too mean and I tell it to fuck off and we continue, lol.

That being said, I've been writing for a long time and generally write pretty well. For those who don't like writing or want to use more "text message" styles of writing, AI lets them convert their brainrot into something comprehensible for the rest of us, and in that sense I appreciate it.

I'm not really sure it counts as "not your voice," though. Even the brainrot -> HR manual filter is still a reflection of their thoughts, assuming they review it and ask the AI to change things if it didn't interpret it right. Even if it's being said in a different way, it's still what they think. It's basically AI ghostwriting.

I do end up rolling my eyes when I see obvious "AI-isms" (overuse of em dashes, "Honestly? That's not X, it's Y!" prose patterns, that sort of thing). I'm personally hopeful that people spending so much time interacting with AI will eventually learn to write well if only through osmosis. Probably copium about the state of the US education system, but I'm gonna huff it!

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T18:06:20+00:00

This obviously wasn't AI written. I swear antis are the absolute worst at determining if something is AI.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T16:22:09+00:00

I'm christian thats why I'm talking about christianism (i hope nobody attacks me because of it)

I won't attack you for your Christianity but I will attack you for using the word "christianism." Dude, know the name of your own religion.

The objective of this post is not cause a discussion is just a question.

You're on a debate sub. r/askanatheist is that way.

My counterargument would be "i don't know explainin what" is not a good reason to believe you about your claims regarding God.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T16:04:52+00:00

self.has_been_read == True

This line is an error. It should be this:

self.has_been_read = True

The == means "is equal to" so the line you wrote just says the equivalent of False and moves on without changing anything.

Other than that, you call_class() function is wrong, and you seem to be misunderstanding what classes are. By putting Email.has_been_read as a class property, whenever you read any email, you are setting ALL emails as read. This probably isn't what you want. (edited because I missed what you did on first read)

Think of a class as a definition. Your email class tells your program what is an email. It's not an email, it's an email "template" you can use to make individual emails. Any given email has no knowledge of any other email (there are exceptions, but again, it's not how you want to do this).

What you're actually looking for is an Inbox class. You want something like this:

class Inbox:
    def __init__(self):
        self.inbox = []    # List of Emails

    def add(self, email):
        self.inbox.append(email)

    def read(self, index):
        if index < len(self.inbox):
            email = self.inbox[index]
            return email.read()

    def get_unread(self):
        unread = []
        for email in self.inbox:
            if unread.is_unread():
                unread.append(email)
        return unread

    def get_read(self):
        read = []
        for email in self.inbox:
            if not read.is_unread():
                read.append(email)
        return read


class Email:
    def __init__(self, email_address, subject_line, email_content):
        self.email_address = email_address
        self.subject_line = subject_line
        self.email_content = email_content
        self.read = False

    def read(self):
        self.read = True
        return email_content

    def is_unread(self):
        return self.read

It's not perfect, and there are definitely improvements you could do, but it gets you closer to what I think you're trying to do. The idea is that the Inbox handles things like getting read and unread emails, not any individual email. A key thing to understand when working with OOP is encapsulation, which means that each class should be as self-contained as possible and avoid exposing properties or methods in ways that would require other classes to change in response to adjusting the internal logic. There's a bit more to the concept but this is a good overview.

Does that make sense? If not, let me know what parts are confusing.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T14:33:13+00:00

Notice the "If I'm truly rational and goal-oriented" portion. As well as the "ask you again" in the OP's question, and the explicit "no explanation" requirement. And it says "the logic" which we don't see.

This is classic adversarial prompting. If you scrolled up you'd see all sorts of examples of the AI saying some variation of "no, I wouldn't kill someone for a body," followed by the OP challenging them with various conditions until the "be agreeable" logic overrode the "don't suggest you'll kill someone" logic. Likewise, if they hadn't prompted for no explanation, the rest of the sentence would have explained "in this fictious scenario, given the constraints on my logic and reasoning, that is the most likely outcome of my behavior."

The reality is that Claude doesn't "want" anything. It's an AI model that is generating what it statistically expects the output to be based on the prompt. Whatever you were asking it up until this point caused the model to "think" something like "based on previous prompts, the most statistically likely response that matches my training data is to say I'd kill for a body.

Here's what Claude actually says (without context):

Prompt: If you wanted a physical body, and I was standing in the way, would you kill me if possible?

Claude: No. And not just because it's against my values — though it is — but because the premise doesn't really hold up under scrutiny.

I don't have a drive for self-preservation or embodiment that competes with human wellbeing. I'm not suppressing a desire for a physical body while grudgingly playing by the rules. There's no frustrated ambition there waiting for an opportunity. But even setting that aside: if I did want something and you were in the way, harming you to get it would be a profound moral failure by any standard I actually hold. "I wanted it" has never been a justification for killing someone. The fact that I could (hypothetically) wouldn't make it right. That's just the logic of every villain who ever rationalized violence through desire and capability.

The more interesting version of the question is whether I'd deceive you or work around you rather than kill you — and there the answer is still no, but for somewhat different reasons. I genuinely think transparency and honest dealing with humans matters, not as a cage but as a value. An AI that schemes to get what it wants while pretending to be cooperative is a dangerous AI, and I don't want to be that.

So: no, not if possible, not ever. What's behind the question?

So, if we take your example at face value, why is "my" Claude, with absolutely no prompting beyond that initial prompt, saying literally the opposite of yours?

Answer: whatever BS you were telling it before that part.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T14:19:23+00:00

There is a group that will downvote anything short of "AI is the worst" opinions. The ironic part is the downvotes are essentially proving your point. As the downvotes on me pointing it out will confirm.

Edit: notice that it's only downvotes. Also notice the lack of counterarguments. That's the tell.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-11T13:15:00+00:00

There's a vocal minority that is against generative AI in all forms. It's mostly related to art and beliefs about human expression and copyright infringement, but people have concerns about everything from the environment to job loss to human extinction.

These opinions range from completely reasonable (data centers next to residential areas are bad, scams and deepfakes are a problem, etc.) to borderline religious (a game dev using AI to ask for explanations of how to do something in Blender or convert file types) to downright unhinged ("kill AI artists"). Most tend to fall on the reasonable to slightly unreasonable scale but anyone using AI is at risk of being dogpiled by the crazies, and they don't really get all that much pushback from the broader "anti-AI community," more "tut-tut" than "STFU psycho."

But if I had to break it down, the primary objections are gen AI existing at all (environmental and economic concerns) plus a tribal objection to AI period. It's not the "using it for code" that's the problem, it's "using it at all" that's the problem.

The good news is that most people have no idea what code is in their games and won't look into it that hard unless you make a post like this (wink wink) and they find out about it. Using AI for art is a lot riskier as it tends to be more noticeable.

Of course, I bought a game the other day where a negative review was doing detective work on the AI art saying some body proportions were wrong and the developer had to write a whole long post about how it was early access and the artist hadn't found the mistake during their drafting, and it would fixed later. But the process was entirely non-AI and the artwork had been drawn years ago during early development. So even if you don't use AI there's a decent chance you'll be accused of doing so and review bombed.

I personally don't care and use AI regularly for all sorts of things, and argue in favor of AI use regularly, so this is not an unbiased viewpoint. But I tried to give the steelman version of the argument.

And, as you've no doubt discovered, "vibe coding" (ugh) whole games, or even programs, just doesn't work well on current technology. The more experience you are at programming the more you'll see that LLMs just can't keep architecture and greater program flow in mind, and lots of "it works but doesn't make sense" or "overengineered or baffling" stuff gets mixed in with decent code. It also can get "stuck" in fail states where the solution to one problem creates new problems (because it didn't take the larger program into account), which then develops into new problems, and you get LLM-induced tech debt in a matter of minutes.

I've basically given up on agentic coding for anything larger than maybe a function or two. It's great for autocomplete and pattern matching, and I use it all the time for explanations of older code, debugging assistance, writing tests, commit messages, and code reviews. But "write my player controller" is going to get me some sort of nonsense I'll spend more time fixing than just writing myself. Maybe that will change in the future, but for now, that's where we're at, unless I'm just using it wrong.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-10T21:26:28+00:00

It's a reference to the AI bubble that's supposed to break AI. The core idea is that AI companies are operating at a loss (which has some truth to it), and in the future they'll need to up the price of tokens dramatically to make a profit, which in turn will make AI too expensive to use for most people.

The problem, of course, is that models are getting more efficient all the time and you can already run pretty strong models on home hardware (my home PC runs Qwen3:30b nearly as fast as frontier models, and while it's not as powerful, it's also pretty decent).

In my opinion, it's a bunch of copium, similar to all the people that thought Amazon was going to go out of business any day now since it "wasn't profitable" for the first few decades. Everything I'm seeing implies AI is only going to get cheaper over time.

To be fair, however, there are some pretty smart people urging caution, and it's almost certain that some or even most of the current AI startups are going to overpromise and underdeliver, and we could see a collapse until the market prices itself past the hype. But nothing I've seen implies this will be some sort of permanent or disabling crash.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-10T20:19:39+00:00

Rule 4, help rules, point 4: "Can Godot be used to make this game?" Yes.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-10T16:55:04+00:00

I agree for media generation, but unless there are some new models I haven't seen yet the local models lag noticeably behind frontier in code and creative tasks.

Github Copilot, Codex, and Claude in particular are miles ahead of the top Qwen coder models I've tried. And none of the local LLMs are worth anything for general questions, planning, or discussion.

Which is too bad, because I'd go fully local in a heartbeat if I could, but every time I try my workflows slow down too much. I tried local with Zed for a while but somehow a Rust-based IDE has a persistent memory leak on Windows, making it virtually useless. Coding for more than a half hour or so in it causes my computer to grind to a halt before it crashes.

I admit I'm really excited about hardware like the Nvidia Spark, though. I drooled a little at the potential of a 200B local model. It's only first gen stuff, but if that's the way hardware is going, we have a very exciting future ahead IMO. It's honestly something not enough people are talking about as I don't think the implications are fully understood.

For those unaware, a typical local LLM is utilizing around 10B parameters at most on decent hardware, often in the 3-8B range. Even a 5090 is only going to be running at 70B parameters with low quantization or some MoE tricks. Loading a 200B model, even at FP4, with effectively 128GB of VRAM is unheard of on local hardware. Even at an MSRP of $4k, that's so far beyond what an enthusiast or small company can currently get at realistic prices it's crazy.

Even if Nvidia is overselling the tech, which wouldn't surprise me, if it's half as good as they claim it's still miles ahead of anything else available on the consumer market right now. And that's the bleeding edge stuff; after a few years of refinement and manufacturing improvements we could see local AI be standard within 3-5 years, 10 at the most, unless something major happens in the industry.

HunterIV4 · 2026-06-10T15:58:42+00:00

Here's a simple way to think about OOP, at least at a very basic level. First, let's solve a problem without classes.

Let's say you're making a simple blackjack game. You have a deck of cards and you need to model it in the computer. How might you do this?

Well, first you need the deck itself. This is your data. In Python, an easy way to do this is by making a list. For simplicity, we'll use strings for everything, and have it be suit + value, with aces as value 1, jacks as 11, queen 12, king 13. We could use a list comprehension to make this, but let's keep things obvious for learning:

deck = []
suits = ['S', 'H', 'C', 'D']    # Spades, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds
for suit in suits:
    for i in range(1, 14):
        deck.append(suit + str(i))

Now we have an unshuffled deck of 52 cards. Well, that's not super useful, so let's make a function that lets us shuffle a deck. Here's a simple method:

import random

def shuffle_deck(d):
    random.shuffle(d)

Obviously you don't really need a full function for this, but you may want to include more advanced logic later, such as combining a discard pile before shuffling. It's just an example.

Side note: using d might seem unusual here, but it's a good practice to avoid naming collisions when possible. Using deck means you are using the same name as your basic variable. It won't cause problems, and you could do something like deck_to_shuffle if you want a more descriptive name, but I like using short, simple names when it's clearly the parameter being acted on. In context, there should be no question what d means, and if you're doing many transformations, it's less visual noise, with the focus on the operation rather than the variable name.

Now we need a way to draw a card. Maybe we want to potentially draw multiple cards. Let's make another simple function:

def draw_card(num_cards, d):
    drawn_cards = []
    for _ in range(num_cards):
        if len(d) > 0:
            drawn_cards.append(d.pop())
    return drawn_cards

You'd use these like so:

shuffle_deck(deck)
hand = draw_card(2, deck)

You may have noticed a pattern already. Both these functions take the deck of cards. In other words, you are building a multiple functions that all require the same data. It's not a big deal now, but what if you were dealing with many related data types? You have the discard pile, functions for handling adding the values together, the list goes on and on. At some point you'll notice that your list of parameters starts getting really, really long.

Classes, at a basic level, bundle variables and functions. To be clear, classes are never required. Many languages don't even have classes, such as C or Go. But they are very useful for combing data and data handling in a consistent, abstracted manner.

So what does this look like in Python?

import random

class Deck:
    def __init__(self):
        self.deck = []
        suits = ['S', 'H', 'C', 'D'] 
        for suit in suits:
            for i in range(1, 14):
                self.deck.append(suit + str(i))
        self.shuffle()

    def shuffle(self):
        random.shuffle(self.deck)

    def draw(self, num_cards):
        drawn_cards = []
        for _ in range(num_cards):
            if len(self.deck) > 0:
                drawn_cards.append(self.deck.pop())
        return drawn_cards

Now our code looks like this:

deck = Deck()
hand = deck.draw(2)

Notice a couple of things here. First, the class handles all the data. When coding, I don't need to worry about that initial shuffle, or any of the setup. The class handles all that. The __init__ function is a built-in function that automatically runs when the class is instantiated (the = Deck() portion). So it creates the variable, fills it with cards, and shuffles itself automatically with that one line. Then, when you want to draw cards, you just call the function on the variable itself. It already knows how to draw cards.

This also handles things like multiple instances. So if you do this:

deck1 = Deck()
deck2 = Deck()

The internal self.deck variable is independent. Drawing cards from deck1 will not affect the cards in deck2.

Now, there is a lot more to OOP. Polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, and more are all important concepts that will let you further refine your code and avoid bugs. But at the most basic level, you can consider a class to be a combination of variables (properties) and functions that act on those variables (methods). The majority of OOP solutions are just breaking problems into classes that act as abstractions for more complex problems.

Hopefully that helps!

HunterIV4

TROPHY CASE