I would be concerned about the privacy implications, but imo it is ok to do if it makes you feel better and isn’t causing problems in your life. Seems kind of similar to something like writing fanfiction or keeping a diary, only you have a tool to help prompt what you write.

Same, I think some people find some things funny and some don’t and it isn’t all about generational cohort

tbf the widely used nomenclature for them is “open weights”, specifically to draw that distinction. There are genuinely open source models, in that the training data and everything is also documented, just not as many.

https://youtu.be/nS9QtzGwBcc simple enough that maybe it won’t get annoying

Ideally I don’t want my car to be a computer at all, maybe isolated chips to run the abs and such very well defined strictly necessary tasks but that’s it. Maybe a company will happen to make a good car at one point in time, but there aren’t any companies you can trust not to fuck it up if they have perpetual access to tinker with it.

Cars should not have software updates

You don’t need to be an “absolutist” to believe in free speech. Open exchange of ideas is valuable. Not needing to be suspicious of everyone hiding what they really think out of fear is valuable. Censorship powers are very tempting to abuse and the consequences of their abuse are terrible, therefore they should be strictly limited. Believing in free speech can just be understanding this stuff and having a bias against shutting people up as a go-to solution.

Hale allegedly sold the DVDs and Blu-rays through e-commerce sites

Why would anyone do this, surely there are better ways

How do you know they are going to reduce military influence?

I don’t, but it seems like other countries are getting the message that they can’t count on the US to defend them and their alliance is shaky, which seems like it could lead to working towards replacing our role and becoming less dependent, which would be great, because again, we’re the bad guys.

How are tariffs going to help people who are struggling to afford anything as it is?

They are not going to help with that, unfortunately. A worse economy is the price of cutting back on free trade, and the current administration will put as much of that price as they can on the people least able to afford it. Done right, it would be in combination with redistribution to the people who are worst off. I’ll admit, this part is bad.

If the goal is to get people to buy American, what is stopping everything from only being controlled or made by corrupted people or corporations who set up on American soil?

To me, the desired outcome of inevitably mutual tariffs isn’t getting people to buy American, it’s reducing the leverage and influence of international corporations, which are malevolent and can use that influence in harmful ways. If local companies have a built in advantage, divide and conquer tactics shouldn’t work as well (ie. cut safety regulations or face retaliatory job loss). The typical corporate pattern of building up a monopoly and then using that leverage to extract money by fucking everyone over shouldn’t work as well on an international scale. Free trade agreements that give companies rights at the expense of people will hopefully have less appeal and make less sense.

Not accelerationist, I think tariffs are genuinely a good direction to go, and so is reducing US military influence.

I’m not a republican, but from my perspective the US empire has been a force for evil in the world for almost all of its existence. International free trade elevates the power of corporations above countries (ex. international IP law enforcement). The neoliberal status quo sucks, and even if tariffs and pressuring US allies to build up their own militaries and not rely on us are being done for the wrong reasons and not in the right way, they still act to dismantle it. I can see it being better than the alternative in the long run, at least for the world if not for those of us living in the US.

For me I get prompted with a captcha on redeeming a free game, almost every time

How would it get past the captcha? EGS always has a complicated captcha

Look at 2020 during covid where the medical workers did not have PPE and how the supply chain was/is still stressed

I think these are more logistical and planning problems than fundamental lack of supply. The mask shortage was resolved by increasing production afaik. There is a large discrepancy between countries in the ratio between quality of health outcomes and expense of healthcare per person; even if it turns out to be a supply problem to get the most advanced available medicine to everyone, it is certainly possible to get the most impactful medical services to everyone.

We also lack the natural resources where we can just throw money aka paper at problems and their gone forever.

This is probably true though, spending by itself might not be enough, just I think that’s more because of dysfunction than natural resources.

It’s a fair point but that’s such a smug way to say it

We don’t have the supply to fill the demands

What makes you say that? Making food and housing and medical care for everyone isn’t impossible

I use a script I wrote that plays music from Bandcamp with probabilities based on liking/disliking songs and the albums Bandcamp recommends in association with the rated song. Wary about sharing it anywhere though as it’s definitely against the tos.

People can easily self host email, file backup, etc but pay for service anyway

Who pays for email? Who pays subscriptions for file backup? Why would you when you can just use another companies service that is free? Self hosting AI is increasingly viable, but that isn’t even the problem for companies hoping to make billions on it, the problem is that as soon as they try to put the squeeze on their customers they will just go somewhere else that offers the same thing. Look at what happened with Deepseek; OpenAI can’t maintain dominance.

AI will be prohibitively expensive to self host for a very very long time.

It already isn’t, there are tiny models that are practical for some things that will run on basically anything, and there is a lot you can do with a mid to high end graphics card. Nvidia is artificially limiting vram but that’s not going to remain the limitation for long. But even if AI running on datacenter hardware maintains a big advantage, that’s not enough for these companies to make huge profits selling access.

My wife uses AI to write complex Excel spreadsheet formulas saving hours. She still has to double check them but it saves enormous time. My friend uses it to write proposals. Again it needs to be checked and again it saves hours of time.

AI doesn’t replace people. It provides a productivity boost and it has been doing it for 2 years now.

To me it’s obvious that AI is and will be really useful, but one of the great things about it is that it looks like a lot of that won’t be possible to gatekeep. Which seems like it would also mean that efforts to monetize it will fail.

Yeah, sorry, my tone was too harsh there, it’s definitely relevant context