> but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value
It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.
In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.
I have personally seen considerable increases in grocery ingredient expenses for everything I buy which isn't meat. Yes, buying beef or chicken breast is more expensive now as well, but not eating meat would not have a significant impact in my family's much greater annual grocery expenses vs. the same number of people and for the same calendar period of time in 2022 or 2023.
I mentioned meat because the person I responded to mentioned it. I really don’t know the price of meat given I do not consume any of it, I wasn’t trying to say going vegetarian would save you from inflation
There were numerous simulations/war games run by the US and other militaries going back 20, 25, 30 years that basically came to the conclusion that:
a) If Iran was attacked with sufficient severity they would take the step to close the straight of Hormuz
b) Iran was developing or already had small-boat, mine laying, missile and UAV capacity sufficient to do so
c) Iran was actively working on ways to hide this missile, uav, small boat capacity in the general region of the straight of hormuz in hundreds of small locations (down to the size/scale of a civilian small warehouse or garage), making it impossible to air strike/remove all of this capability with any known certainty without causing absurd levels of civilian casualties
d) The only way to remove the missile, small boat, uav capability would be an extremely large boots on the ground and manpower intensive ground based search to hunt it down. You couldn't be sure you could remove the capability strictly from the air.
Counterpoint: it would be a three-week special operation a lot like invading Iraq, in that after minor victories the administration would declare "Mission Accomplished" before burning trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting an insurgency.
If you're counting Iraqi deaths (which you should) it's probably past 500k. 600k if you count excess deaths. Ghoulish.
My point was what the American administration would burn and care about, and they clearly didn't/don't care about civilian deaths. TBH they only care about American military losses as far as it hurts their political capital at home.
It wouldn't even get to that point, because in order to be fighting an insurgency, you have to actually win on the ground and occupy the country.
Without a coalition of fools, the US has zero odds of success in that first step. It wouldn't be a long war of insurgency, it would just be a long war.
Iran is far bigger, far more capable, and far more difficult to wage war in than Iraq ever was.
not saying this should be a tactic we should employ, but the us has never invaded a country with the intent to conquor(except mexico). like, as in, iran is now part of the us.
the world would be aghast... but they already are?
It couldn't do it without switching to a war economy and full mobilization. And that would spell the end of the current US regime long before it would end the Iranian one.
Trump's approval rating has a floor of 40%, but that would likely send it to the 30s, and turn MAGA into a 30-seat party.
I completely agree. I guess i should say it vice a versa. It will be impossible to win Iran and has been proven by everything from vietnam to the middle east escapades...
If you go to war with a country, you cannot allow the country to exist in any form if you truely wish the 'win a war'.
It's a modern, wierd, primarily US based 'design of war', we learned from the cold war. Go in, destabalize it enough, ensure a coup every couple of years, so that region cannot ever be a material threat to you (like the ottoman empire)
I'm also seeing a vast array of smug comments from Seattle and Portland area personal electric car owners who don't realize that $7/gallon diesel affects Everything they purchase. My message to the smug EV owners is: Go hang out by the loading docks for your local grocery store for a full business day and tell me how many all-electric semi tractor/trailer trucks you see delivering product.
> People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k.
This is an extremely HN specific and tech industry specific comment. Go for a day-long drive through middle America, like from Nebraska to Wyoming or something, and 95%+ of the people you will see are living on less than $60,000 total family income per year. A very small selection of very specific jobs start at $200k a year.
These people are in a massive bubble. People with STEM degrees from good schools even with a few decades of experience would often consider $200K in compensation pretty good in a lot of places in the US in a lot of jobs. The developers at Facebook (who are still employed) are really the exception.
The part about head cleaning says "high purity" isopropyl alcohol and then says 70-99%. There's little reason to buy anything other than 99%. Additionally some of the same cleaning swabs and wipes sold for fiber optic patch cable and bulkhead connector cleaning are well suited for this.
These are low cost generic/bulk items you can buy from chinese sellers via Amazon or other sources. If it's good enough to clean 9/125 singlemode fiber it should be good enough for floppy drive heads. Ignore the reel-type cleaners that look like a mini betamax tape, and the push click cleaners, which can only be used on real fiber stuff. Go for the swabs and kimtech wipes.
You should actually dilute it to about 70% with distilled water. It helps penetrate cell membranes and destroy them. You'd be surprised how much fungus and other nasty stuff appears over and inside old tech. I deal with camera lenses myself.
But yeah just buy the 99% stuff and some distilled water and do it yourself. You can wash down with distilled water too so having a few litres lying around is quite handy.
If you find a real iOS zero day that you think has a market value of 2 million, how do you (a) find a legit buyer for it, and (b) ensure you get paid, presumably in your own choice of cryptocurrency?
Even if you dont count obvious dark markets there is plenty of well known companies mostly from Israel buying exploits.
You can even reach them via Linkedin and even demonstrate and sell in person with all paperwork. No risk here because they will re-sell them for much more.
Having it both fully anonymous, safe and in crypto will be harder. You need to have a trusted friend with right connections in industry not to get scammed.
no, I'm making the rhetorical point that the sort of persons that might have 2 million laying around to pay for an iOS zero day for blackhat type purposes might not be the most honorable or likely to actually pay you. And what recourse would you have?
This depends on what you consider black hat. Israeli company that sells surveillance malware to dictatorships around the globe isnt exactly moral, but its legal business.
Unlike Apple or Microsoft buying and selling exploits is their only source of income so they have no motivation not to pay. Reputation is much more important. Also legal system does work in Israel.
> Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractors? To replace manual hand labor. If energy costs continue to rise as they are, and all-electric/battery based systems remain costly and out of the reach of the purchasing power of many small to mid sized farmers, what will happen?
Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse.
Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.
There are mechanization instruments suitable for 5 acre plots, but manufacturers are limited and the potential gains are smaller. Its the same problem as small cheap consumer cars, big investors and capitalists don't want to put money into high volume low margin business with limited market cap. And without mass production costs are significantly higher. Thats why people still maintain 70 year old farmalls and planters and shit spreaders and plows, modern replacements are either crap to be cheap or expensive from low volume.
I personally find any model smaller than something like Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (8-bit quantization, about 49GB memory usage when loaded into llama.cpp) to be too "stupid" for reliable use.
I would much rather not run the model on my local laptop hardware and offload that to some system sitting under my desk in my home office, accessible via VPN, than take the risk of using an unreliable and flaky tool for the convenience of having it on the same hardware on my lap.
I pay very little attention to 8 billion or whatever (or even much smaller) models these days and I don't feel like I'm missing much.
Yes, Qwen 3.6 MoE is hitting like 80-90tk/s on Strix halo. On R9700 I had like 170t/s. It was not possible to keep up. But MoE is circling very often. I switch then to dense model and have 20-30t/s but it is able to solve quite a lot of tasks.
Absolutely. Difference in Q6 vs Q8 is not as immediately noticeable, but if I test by starting from a blank slate context and giving it the same complicated task with Q4 vs a Q8 GGUF file loaded, the difference is apparent. The Q4 will struggle or do 'stupid' things with even simple bash or python. Q4 might not be as noticeable for conversational purely text one on one interaction with an LLM, but when you dig deeper into something that's more esoteric in a training dataset than a chat conversation, absolutely a big gap there.
I think some of the folks in the local llm social media communities are using them for things like company-hosted customer service chat bots, or purely english text writing stuff where Q4 will probably not cause a problem. For more discrete technical work I stick pretty much exclusively to Q8.
I have not spent a lot of time running FP16 'full precision' versions of some things, but as the other commenter says, it's not much difference. There's a really wide array of benchmarks and tests from a lot of third parties unrelated to the trainer of the AI models that shows at most a two percent difference in score and capability between BF16 and Q8.
Q8 quant is very minimal fall off in terms of KLD against the lab 16 bit. If you have the memory for BF16 KV-cache (which is usually easier to stomach) then the Q8 is very close. But even Q8 quant model with Q8 KV-cache is very close.
Smaller quants for the model start to fall off but more importantly, smaller KV-cache quants fall off much faster so avoid less than Q8 there.
It’s not a general rule, and depends highly on the model and the quantisation used. Don’t guess, Unsloth sometimes publish graphs in their tutorials showing the error rate vs file size… sometimes Q4 is great, other times I go for Q6
It's even more aggressive, inconsiderate and boorish to paste multiple paragraphs of LLM output at somebody in response to a question or topic. Let's normalize having no tolerance and calling out people when they're being rude.
It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.
In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.
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