Neither is the Internet or the computer you are using, or the highly developed efficient language you are speaking, nor the clothes on your back, the medical care you’ve received, the worldwide logistics that enable you to have a nice miso soup, or maybe a slice of cheese every once in a while, or even the engineering, math, and, science that allow anything and everything to exist in our world, yet people throughout history have worked very hard to make those things for you.

If you don’t want to contribute back, that’s totally fine, just know that the rest of humanity is working hard to keep you alive even if you don’t.

Someone has to dispose of your trash, and it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be you.

It’s not hard to get a job, but it might be hard to get the specific job that is ideal for you.

It’s not a free speech issue it’s a free press issue:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The press is called out separately on purpose.

Of course, actually it states congress, but the supreme Court has ruled that it applies to all members of the government, and so thanks to common law, it would apply here.

This is a joke right? I really really hope that they aren’t trusting randoms to know how to manage a gpg key properly.

It’s hard enough to get people actually interested in it to do it correctly.

And using gpg to constantly identify yourself would mean needing to keep multiple copies of your private key all over the place. I find it unlikely that regular people are issuing new keys and revocation certs properly. Not to mention having canonical key servers (maybe the government could manage that, but the individual is responsible for maintaining a way to get the canonical most up to date key)

Using gpg backfires because if you lose access to the key or it’s compromised (say by putting it on your phone) you lose everything. They work for people who know what they are doing because you are supposed to issue keys for specific tasks and identities, but there is just no way that that is happening.

Law firms are so so so not socialist.

Partnerships only involve a few select attorneys at a firm, associate attorneys, paralegals, legal assistants, and every other role is not part of the partnership, and has no stake other than their vested interest in getting their paycheck (the same as any employee).

“Big Law” firms have thousands of employees excluded from any partnerships including billable (associates, paralegals) and non billable (legal assistants, HR, IT) staff, the partnership is more of a private ownership club where people are accepted mostly on vibes and sometimes, rarely, on merit.

The partnership structure is pretty antithetical to socialism, since it’s structured in a way to exclude people deemed not worthy of receiving profits (But still somehow needed to make the profits??).

TL;DR: a small group of owner operators within a larger company is decidedly capitalist.

There has always been money, it’s just other people footing the bill for you.

You don’t pay all at once, you need to pay quarterly tax estimates or you will be constantly paying penalties.

I really wish people would stop giving bad tax advice to strangers.

https://www.irs.gov/payments/underpayment-of-estimated-tax-by-individuals-penalty

Just so you know, you will likely face underpayment penalties doing this.

I suggest you avoid giving 16 year olds tax advice.

If the lesser evil were consistently voted in year over year, the evilness would slowly decline.

The problem is that doesn’t happen. The lesser evil is often not selected, that’s the part that shifts the scale.

This is right wing rhetoric.

‘If you don’t like it, then leave’ is a nationalistic approach that is unhealthy for a country and it’s people. It’s also inherently ableist as it assumes that anyone who doesn’t want to be somewhere has the means to be able to leave easily.

Pretending an entire nation of people support the presiding leader is also pretty naive and would likely get you flamed if you said it about other hot button countries such as Russia, China, Palestine, Israel, Iran, or any of the multitudes of countries that have problematic leadership.

He’s not worth the wasted filament…

How is it any different than 80 people coming in individually and ordering?

It’s a shame rockbox doesn’t support video playback though.

How is stability for you? My 7th gen with about 750gb is pretty unstable, mostly I have a lot of difficulty transferring since the iPod crashes 15gb in all the time.

If it’s an iPod classic/video, you can repair them all very easily and there is huge aftermarket support.

But if you want touchscreen and android plus am app store, why not just buy an old smart phone?

You can do both dedicated servers and official matchmaking servers. It’s what counter strike does as an example.

That way if the official servers go offline, you only lose the matchmaking, but the game isn’t totally dead.

You kind of get it, it’s not really a dictionary, it’s more like a set of steps to transform noise that is tinted with your data, into more coherent data. Pass this input through a series of valves that are all open a different amount.

If we set the valves just perfectly, the output will kind of look like what we want it to.

Yes, LLMs are prone to hallucinations, which isn’t always actually a bad thing, it’s only bad if you are trying to do things that you need 100% accuracy for, like specific math.

I recommend 3blue1browns videos on LLMs for a nice introduction into how they actually work.

I’ll just say, it’s ok to not know, but saying ‘obviously’ when you in fact have no clue is a bad look. I think it’s a good moment to reflect on how over confident we can be on the internet, especially about incredibly complex topics that cross into multiple disciplines and touch multiple fields.

To answer your question. The model is in fact run entirely locally. But the model doesn’t have all of the data. The model is the output of the processed training data, kind of like how a math expression 1 + 2 has more data than its output ‘3’ the resulting model is orders of magnitude smaller.

The model consists of a bunch of variables, like knobs on panel, and the training process is turning the knobs, the knobs themselves are not that big, but they require a lot of information to know where to be turned too.

Not having access to the dataset is ok from a privacy standpoint, even if you don’t know how the data was used or where it was obtained from, the important aspect here is that your prompts are not being transmitted anywhere, because the model is being used locally.

In short using the model and training the model are very different tasks.

Edit: additionally, it’s actually very very easy to know if a piece of software running on hardware you own, is contacting specific servers. The packet has to leave your computer and your router has to tell it to go somewhere, you can just watch it. I advise you check out a piece of software called Wireshark.

Why do you think it needs an Internet connection? Why are you saying ‘obviously’

Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn’t make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).

And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren’t actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.

‘A’ != ‘a’, they are just as unequal as ‘a’ and ‘b’

Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers’ intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.

Being able to back up and then encrypt the messages on cold storage for when I may need to go back through an old conversation doesn’t negate something like disappearing messages.

It’s the best of both worlds, messages go away over time so if you lose your phone / it’s compromised, you don’t give up the goose, but you also have a nice safe stored version in the off chance you need it.

The danger imo isn’t in having the messages at all, it’s more about how, when they are just on your phone or whatever, they are generally not locked down.