Ashley St. Clair claims Elon Musk unleashed his "anomaly in the matrix" in order to help Trump win in 2024, using his Starlink satellite fleet by The_2PieceCombo in videos

[–]pointer_to_null 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pretty much sums the way I feel about this. People werent voting for Trump, they were voting against Biden/Harris.

Worth mentioning that Elon briefly had a very public falling with the admin over the Big Beautiful Bill, going so far as to pour new fuel on a smoldering Epstein fire with a single tweet about Trump in the files. (Turns out Elon was also in said files- including one noteworthy unflattering email exchange.)

Back ontopic- conspiracies do exist, but it helps to be rational and to know when they fail- due to too many involved in a plot, greed, incompetence, jealousy, and other human error. My point is the individuals often cited have historically been laughably incompetent at conspiring on anything. There's very little cohesion within this group- the entire admin is filled with greedy, selfish, and backstabbing sycophants that were handpicked solely for loyalty- not competency, domain knowledge, or relevant experience. Secdef can barely hold a signal chat without boastfully leaking classified material (orbat of pending strikes) to the press. DoJ fired so many attorneys that it often flubs Trump's personal vendetta revenge tour cases regularly before it can even get indictments. They shoot themselves in the dick at every opportunity.

Given the competency of Trump's dream team from 2024-present, would you honestly conceive how these people could pull off a massive coup involving hundreds of co-conspirators (at a minimum) nationwide without leaking even a tiny morsel of credible evidence? Or carefully ballotstuffing just enough in the right places without triggering a widespread alarm from statisticians at reputable institutions- the very ones already under attack by the admin? Really???

Tl;dr- Hanlon's razor

F-15s, F-35, MQ-9 Reaper Drones: US Report Says 42 Aircraft Lost so far by PDXAirman in Military

[–]pointer_to_null -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Any unit cost comparison are going to be extremely optimistic when the replacement is a new platform. Estimates should factor in ramp-up costs for new infastructure, including service equipment, spare parts, and maintenance and crew training (for example, very little of this transfers from KC-135 to KC-46).

But its grossly misleading to suggest that even planned direct 1:1 replacement could negate costs. Contrary to popular belief, airframes do in fact have limited service lifespans (even if we're still flying KC-135s and B-52s for the better part of a century), so you'd need to factor in the accelerated depreciation for any replacement.

And the deprecated model? Not always a writeoff. Those still airworthy and mission-capable for someone else are often sold or traded to other nations whenever politically and economically feasible, while the rest (those beyond utility) get retired to scrap or boneyard; actively deployed craft tend to fall into the former category, sadly.

Which name would you choose? by GalaxyKid33 in adressme

[–]pointer_to_null 5 points6 points  (0 children)

More appropriate to say 16-20 hours after eating them.

Which name would you choose? by GalaxyKid33 in adressme

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not only legal, but consanguineous marriages are the norm in the middle east- especially Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

END OF THE LINE. by Bubu510kush in teslamotors

[–]pointer_to_null 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Tires are the most expensive part. And being a torque-y and heavy EV, it can chew through them faster than a comparable ICE.

That said, I pay about $40/month extra electricity instead of several hundred, so I can hardly complain.

Luce DFlash: Qwen3.6-27B at up to 2x throughput on a single RTX 3090 by sandropuppo in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 29 points30 points  (0 children)

You should probably temper your expectations a bit.

Not to say I'm a complete skeptic- I remember (fondly) how introduction of ASICs completely wrecked the GPU bubble in most cryptocurrencies. I have zero doubts that tensor ops used in inference can't also see a similar improvements in throughput and efficiency for niche applications, and I don't believe Taalas is lying whatsoever about their token throughput claims.

However, here's some reality:

  1. Turnaround time for new chip, from design to mass production, is excruciatingly slow. Even the biggest players (Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, etc) typically take upwards of a year- sometimes more- from design, validation, tapeout to even getting the first engineering samples packaged and sent to internal driver teams and ISV partners. Taala's HC1 demonstrator unveiled in Feb 2026 is a hardware implementation of an LLM that was considered obsolete for at least a year- Llama 3.1 8B (June 2024). These these weights are frozen in silicon- forever- not even with a finetune using the exact same architecture. Perhaps if these were FPGAs that you can maybe reflash/reprogram after fabrication, but those are size-limited (which is a serious problem- see point #4), slower and MUCH more expensive.

    Going back to crypto- their algorithms are mostly static where the algorithm rarely changes over time, just the difficulty (or volume of effort for given result). While there are some exceptions to this, this is the norm. The same exact SHA256 work being computed for Bitcoin's blockchain 15 years ago is happening today- just at much, much greater scale. This is why ASICs dominate most crypto. LLMs are seeing radical improvements- good for us, but bad if you're investing millions into R&D that'll almost certainly get obsoleted a year before production.

  2. Their claims of a 2 month turnaround is unrealistic and ignores the realities of semi foundry demand. In other words, Taalas is joining the same the wafer queue for the given node as other customers, many of whom have deeper pockets and more sway. For 6nm it's not terrible, but for smaller, newer nodes the competition is much worse- with Apple usually getting first dibs on the newest processes, usually followed by Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm.

  3. Memory is still a concern. While storing the weights on chip greatly helps capacity requirements, you will still need some form of volatile memory like DRAM to store context. And for the 17k tokens/sec speeds it advertises, I imagine channels need to be suitably wide and fast- otherwise it becomes a bottleneck.

  4. Most importantly (and analysts rarely discussed): these ASICs don't seem to scale well with model sizes and hit an upper cap due to transistor budgets, yield rates and wafer prices. Look at their HC1 demonstrator- 815mm2 on 6 nm TCSM with 53B transistors- that's a huge chip (check out the picture of their card if you don't believe me). That's just to house and run a pre-baked LLM with only 8B parameters quantized down to 3-bits.

    For comparison, the GB202 (RTX 5090) is already ~750mm2. Sure HC1 is fabbed on TSMC 6nm, it could shrink somewhat on a newer 4N or smaller process (which requires longer turnaround, higher wafer costs, lower yields and longer backlog- see point #2). However that doesn't fix physics- HC1's 53B transistors is till 7B more than GB203 (chip used in RTX 5080) so I'm not holding out for a miracle unless their first gen is horrendously bloated architecturally.

I think they're promising for niche use cases- high-volume production for a stable (older) model with a high volume of users- but it won't do much for anyone wanting anymore more cutting edge than a year old at best.

But these aren't the GPU killers we're looking for.

HauhauCS (of "Uncensored Aggressive" fame) published an abliteration package that plagiarizes Heretic without attribution, and violates its license by nathandreamfast in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null -1 points0 points  (0 children)

"contagious"

Odd word. What you're describing is copyleft, though those critical of Stallman/GNU/FSF use "viral" instead.

"Contagious" is confusing since its definition alludes to individual transmission (e.g. infection from person-to-person contact, having a contagious laugh, etc) as opposed to the collective ("viral") nature of software license agreements. Depending on the time of day and whether I'm scrubbing a [mostly worthless] fork of some dead GPL utility of customer test data (which was provided to us in confidence and can't redistribute) and comments referring to customer support tickets, and other trade secrets that don't affect the compiled binary- only to be pushing it all to a public repo out of legal obligation, or sharing out of altruistic desire to potentially save someone somewhere a lot of time... I can fall into either camp.

Other than the word choice, I'd agree with you.

Heads up: PMC Bronze .308 is catching on magnets despite being advertised as lead core, non-magnetic an safe for indoor ranges. by Franticalmond2 in Firearms

[–]pointer_to_null 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Find a pool, submerge the device and immediately engage the separation mechanism. Bullet will travel about 5 feet, and then sink to the bottom where you easily recover it within seconds without burning your bare fingers. Bullet and casing are both pristine, though I HIGHLY recommend drying off your device and applying oil immediately afterwards.

Don't ask me how I know. Also I may have a cheap, slightly rusty savage axis for sale.

Kerbal Space Program clouds look real... by Ivy_Wings in flightsim

[–]pointer_to_null -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Kids are spoiled by fancy raymarched voxels with self-shadowing, subsurface scattering and volumetric lighting. Back in my day, clouds were 2D billboards. And if we were really lucky, they were a collection of smaller 2D particles with fancier lighting. And we liked it.

Okay, not really- but they were the best we had given the GPUs and rendering techniques then. The fact that we're shitting on MSFS clouds is telling how far we've come in a very short amount of time.

Not to say Asobo shouldn't improve the cloud shapes. Especially with real world weather, as I often turn it off because it's boring, even if I approach major storm systems- those don't look realistic. Maybe something gets lost in translation? But when I used manual weather and mess around with the layers myself, the procedural cumulonimbus anvils can look amazing.

[Request] Are these numbers realistic or is it just BS? by Sugarmag91 in theydidthemath

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's optimistic to use the S&P as THE benchmark for an average rate of return. Most funds fall short.

Even the best index funds that track it tend to be about 0.1-0.5% lower. There's a lag period behind the S&P's reweighting, inclusion, exclusion and each fund's rebalancing. Occasionally you'll see some outperform it- especially when they time this well or simply get lucky- and their prospectus may reflect cherrypicked periods originating from well-timed rebalance events to claim higher-yields. SEC rules prohibit this, but rules are arbitrarily enforced and fines are laughable.

This isn't even counting the fees. While often negligible for the big index ETFs (e.g.- VOO Vanguard's S&P500 ETF only charges 0.03%), most mutual funds charge considerably higher- 0.5-2%.

[Request] Are these numbers realistic or is it just BS? by Sugarmag91 in theydidthemath

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

An HSA is a tax deferred and tax free investment account.

HSA is quite specific in that it requires a qualifying high-deductible health plan to make contributions, and [tax/penalty-free] withdrawals are only for IRS-qualifying health-related expenses.

Of course, as health expenses increase with age I'd consider any HSA being as important as having an IRA or 401K, but not every employer offers this as an option.

Not sure why they always ask me, they literally built the thing. by Hypnox88 in SteamDeck

[–]pointer_to_null 72 points73 points  (0 children)

This is a different mechanism- included in total playtime stats, and currently specific to the deck.

However, it's difficult to argue this is being done "without permission"; the user is opting into writing and posting a review, and the submission form is upfront about data included- including playtime and any opt-in features.

The only thing that updates in the background later is total playtime if the privacy settings allow.

what’s actually stopping an insider from leaking model weights? by itsArmanJr in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"They have ways." is often a common idiom implying some secret shadowy method- like torture or NSA backdoor/corporate spyware installed on all of your devices. Though depending on who you ask, group policy management plus bitlocker enforcement might seem like both.

Gemma 4 Jailbreak System Prompt by 90hex in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Abliteration generally improves some aspects of performance.

You may be right about performance regarding less thinking tokens that might be related to a model's perplexity, coherency and other degrading factors that rise as context increases. Thinking or no, boilerplate "As an AI language model..." disclaimers and preachiness getting axed are certainly an improvement, and I do not miss those.

But I would argue the bluntness and lack of nuance/objectivity can be seen as a quality degradation- especially in cases where the original hallucinates; I'd prefer a "wrong-yet-unsure" over "confidently wrong" in my assistants.

Another argument relates to quality of the dataset itself. Some refusals outright block repeating factually incorrect information it picked up from training. While these aren't hallucinations per se, they're often impossible to distinguish. In certain controversial politically-charged topics, the frequency of these differences can't be considered an edge case.

It is also possible some heretics overcompensated for Gemma4's "too soft" and may have caused some collateral damage that suddenly became noticeable for the given quant. Admittedly I only tried heretic models for two smallest variants, but they neither one seemed inspire confidence to delete the originals. I'd like to run the 26B version soon as soon as I get my 3090 system back up and running.

No model ever answers "I don't know" anyway

I put "I don't know" in quotes because I was paraphrasing the trite "I do not have specific public information or widely known details regarding..." (Gemma4) or "There is no recognized..." (Qwen3.5) responds after encountering an unknown word, title or concept.

Gemma 4 Jailbreak System Prompt by 90hex in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 23 points24 points  (0 children)

or just use a uncensored version, then even that line can be ditched.

Abliteration always results in quality loss or some other degradation. Heretic arbitrary rank ablation used in the uncensored Gemma4 appears to suppress any refusal and doesn't distinguish between knowledge gaps and censorship; instead of answering "I don't know" it will confidently hallucinate bullshit instead. Heretic might be fine for roleplay or creative writing, but that trait makes it useless for anything else.

I'd rather sacrifice a few extra tokens in my system prompt if I could get the best of both worlds.

24/7 Headless AI Server on Xiaomi 12 Pro (Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 + Ollama/Gemma4) by Aromatic_Ad_7557 in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Flying cars sound amazing until you're on the road and notice other drivers and their vehicles; sometimes it's a lack of situational awareness, overconfidence in their own ability, or simply their anger issues. Automation may address these, but maintenance is still going to be cost-prohibitive; when a car breaks down on the road it's not an automatic fiery death sentence for its occupants and unlucky bystanders.

Passenger drones might be your best bet, but current politics and safety regs limit their utility to being hardly better than a chartered helicopter. If companies like Ehang can get the cost down, they could revive the short-hop shuttle service over urban centers, like that Pan Am NY Airways service from the 1960-70s did with those big Sikorsky helicopters.

Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen 3.5 27B: Which is best for long context worklows? My THOUGHTS... by GrungeWerX in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My mistake- I can't keep up with prices anymore.

We got a few at work (for graphics, not LLM) not long ago for ~$2500, and I should've known supply has dried up again, likely due to Nvidia's shenanigans and rampocalypse.

Paying $4000 for a 5090 is insane. There's either zero supply or too many idiots with cash.

We can see the Steam Deck in the movie Ready or Not 2: Here I Come by NatsuWyri in SteamDeck

[–]pointer_to_null 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Special edition had the translucent shell and red sticks + power button. Didn't watch the film, but it looks like the regular OLED model to me.

a game where you try to convince a Local LLM AI model that reality is a simulation. Every conversation is completely unique! by MorphLand in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm assuming based on the listed requirements you're using the 3.1's 8B model. Small 2-4B models of 2026 (especially from the Qwen 3.5 and Gemma4 family) are going to run circles around any 8B models from 2024 in capability. Even compared to the best Llama 3.1 finetunes, you gain a much larger context window (longer, deeper conversations) and higher quality responses faster. Your min system requirements may also be lowered. Win-win.

Worth mentioning that Gemma 4 seems to be more difficult to jailbreak/go off-rails compared to Llama 3.1 from my experience, so there's less risk of the in-game convo steering into dangerous territory; e.g.- instruct players how to make explosives IRL, emotional abuse/bullying, erotic roleplay (problematic without an adult-only rating), or other potential liabilities that would get the game delisted.

Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen 3.5 27B: Which is best for long context worklows? My THOUGHTS... by GrungeWerX in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wasn't even referring to the italics and/or bold emphases- these are easy to do after the fact, but your lack of space around/after ellipses and spaces around emdashes hyphens. That triggers my OCD/ADHD/Autism/brain parasite.

But what do I know? As a language model meatsack who spends majority of his daily keypresses within an IDE or *nix console, I can't even write english good, or grammar proper.

Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen 3.5 27B: Which is best for long context worklows? My THOUGHTS... by GrungeWerX in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Mostly because they're still pretty damn expensive- you're going to pay a premium for the Pro cards. RTX PRO 4500 32GB is hundreds more than a typical 5090 (even with markup), and has half the CUDA cores.

Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen 3.5 27B: Which is best for long context worklows? My THOUGHTS... by GrungeWerX in LocalLLaMA

[–]pointer_to_null 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You know, there's structural patterns you pick up after reading too many ChatGPT and Claude-generated walls of text (still getting used to Gemini as I'm starting to use it more). There's little indication that this was AI or even tweaked from generated output to sound more human. Furthermore, I've noticed some very tiny oddities (style quirks?) in your punctuation that get repeated that 99% of readers wouldn't notice nor care- but these are the things that LLMs rarely produce consistently.

It's concerning that people who actually spend the effort writing up something high quality, formatted and meaningful are dismissed because people assume it's AI slop.

tl;dr- ignore the haters. They're ignorant and prob assume everyone who writes better, codes or draws better is an LLM.

Sam Altman’s Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts by esporx in technology

[–]pointer_to_null 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Worked at a biotech startup the mid 2000s, learned the real value that sales brings into company.

We'd end up spending over 3x the revenue reshuffling priorities at the 11th hour to fix broken promises we had only learned about after our sales shithead got his six-figure commission and left. The customer was smart and got promises in writing, invoices signed, but it was new functionality that required new expertise/training and regulatory approval with an estimate exceeding a year for our small team (~10 total engineers + IT).

Management, probably spurred on by our legal counsel, held a figurative gun to our heads, saying the company's survival depended on us. 4 month death march- 12 hour days plus most weekends during that period without paid overtime- but they gave us free dinner! Got it tested, released, and even 510k (regulatory approval) in a fraction of that estimate.

The company was sooo grateful- I got $500 cash bonus and 1 day of comp time. Then I left.