ClaytonB
Member

It is 2,000 years deep.

PS: In the age of AI-cheap-as-water, why can't users set their own filters? Why does the filter have to be centralized in X hq? Why not let me choose my own AI filter? Why not let users train filters (at their own expense) and share them for others to use? If you're a "free speech absolutist", the point of filters is not to control "the Conversation", it's to permit users to see stuff they want to see, and not see stuff they don't want to see. X hq doesn't have to be involved in that at all (except for providing a metadata API), just let people run their own 3rd-party filters to fetch posts/feeds they will find interesting. This is not rocket science (pun intended)...

Elon Musk's romance with Right/MAGA is aging like milk in a sauna...

Zuckerberg is clearly doing damage-control. However, I am a big believer in second chances, even for a billionaire who has every reason to know better and has every appearance that he was just running the odds until the bottom dropped out of his agenda. I hope he learns and changes. He started out very young, he's still young, and I hope he takes this chance to swallow his ego and reflect on why the world does not conform to his whims. Maybe somebody upstairs is trying to get a call through to him...

I think they're using the $20/ounce pre-FDR price of gold... 1560/20=78. 75x$2000=$150k. They should have specified the year they're talking about. The dollar has easily lost 99% of its value since 1913.

Bingo. And, if anything, the price differential in gold underestimates the true losses. The CPI index tries to paper over the real cost of inflation by using "hedonics". So, they don't calculate the cost of a display today versus the price of a display 20 years ago. Rather, they first multiply a modern display by 8 on the basis that the modern display has 8 times as many pixels as a display 20 years ago had. Thus, the "true price" of displays has gone down "exponentially", even in dollars (per their absurd calculations). But this same argument, when reversed, shows that inflation is much, much worse than even the gold price would indicate. The way to see this is to look at opportunity cost. OC is "all the things you could have done with your money, besides what you actually did with it". So, in 1920, the OC of buying a dress suit with an ounce of gold is all the other things you could have bought instead, such as a saddle or some furniture. But if you list all the things you could have bought instead of a dress suit in 1920, that list is exponentially smaller than that same list in 2024 for the simple reason that we just have so many more products on the market. Thus, the OC of spending an ounce of gold on a dress suit in 2024 is vastly higher than it was in 1920. This means that the money that the gold that is stolen from us today through inflation imposes vastly higher real cost than the same theft did in 1920. The promise of the American dream in 1920 is that, soon enough, every man would be his own king. And they had good reasons for feeling so optimistic... the economy was almost completely unregulated compared to today, and it was growing like a weed. That dream was secretly assassinated in 1913 and the corpse finally hit the earth in 1971. We are now just choking to death on the necrotic fumes of the rotting corpse of what was once the United States of America...

The 30 seconds of dramatic silence from 0:55 to 1:22 is one of the reasons Hollywood can't make movies anymore. You will never see 30 seconds of dramatic silence in a blockbuster action film nowadays. The execs and senior staff don't have the balls to do it, and I wonder if the actors even have the chops to pull it off. That is what is called ... art. A lost art now, but real art...

Deep State to Dems: Kill Trump, or Burn. PS: Timing of this is hella suspicious... could this somehow be connected to the Eagle Creek Fire in 2017?

46% of Texans admit owning guns. No way in the world do only 46% of Texans actually own guns, LOL...

This doesn't even make sense. The free market is always in operation, even under the most extreme tyranny. The Soviets were basically incapable of supplying their own demand for shaving razors and almost the only way you could get razors was black market razors imported from the West. Everybody bought them, and everybody lived in denial of the fact that they were using black market goods and their economy literally could not exist without this and countless other "cheat goods" smuggled in from the West. Because totalitarian central planning is not only absolute madness, it's actually impossible, see Mises Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. This used to be widely understood on RPF but it seems there are only a few of us holdouts from the old days who remember these things and speak about them. There is no actual alternative to the free market. There are just the delusions of tyrants which last until they collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and are swept into the dustbin of history... "Here lies Ozymandias..."

I think he's acting in overall good faith and it's not just this headline that is my reason for saying that. I was absolutely shocked when Facebook open-sourced LLaMa (their AI model) and they have since doubled-down on that over and over, releasing more and more capable versions of LLaMa that score right up with ChatGPT and Claude on AI benchmarks... it's real AI, not a cheap knockoff. LLaMa has turned into the Linux of AI, basically, as it is the single most capable LLM that is open-source and an entire ecosystem of LLaMa-based tools and services have sprung up around it. Because LLaMa is run locally, it can't be yanked around by the winds of changing corporate policies even by Meta... they've let the bird out of its cage. There are some self-interested reasons why this choice makes sense for Facebook, it's not pure charity. But keeping it proprietary would have also been in their interests in different ways, so the public release of LLaMa, and ongoing support of the open-source AI ecosystem, shows that Zuckerberg is committed to running opposition against the OpenAI/M$ monolith in the AI space. PS: I strongly suspect that Meta is actually way ahead of OpenAI since every time a new ChatGPT drops, Meta releases a version of LLaMa that is at par with it... it feels a little bit like when SR-71 pilots maintained their world speed record by just moving the throttle a little further forward each time somebody else tried to grab the record. LLaMa usually places a close #2 or #3 on the benchmarks, but they're steadily maintaining that position. I have much higher confidence in Yann Lecun's understanding of AI in general than in Sam Altman's (Lecun is head of Meta's AI research lab).

Looking forward to future updates. Would love to see photos/video, as well as plans/diagrams (explanation how others can do it). I feel like we might have a lot more steam in our future...

Go into the rocks, hide in the ground from dread of the LORD and the splendor of his majesty! The eyes of the arrogant man will be humbled and the pride of men brought low; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. The LORD Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted (and they will be humbled), For all the cedars of Lebanon, tall and lofty, and all the oaks of Bashan, For all the towering mountains and all the high hills, For every lofty tower and every fortified wall, For every trading ship and every stately vessel. The arrogance of man will be brought low and the pride of men humbled; the LORD alone will be exalted in that day, Isaiah 2:10-17

For the umpteenth time: If it works for you, good for you. Doesn't work for me or a lot of people I know. EV is just a technology. It has its benefits if you need a glorified golf-cart. It has a lot of downsides if you need something that can operate in extreme conditions, needs to be regularly exposed to salt-water moisture, and so on, and so forth. Like every choice in life, it's a tradeoff. Only religious wackos can't see that, like the Left Climate Cult. Do I really have to explain it?? One man's treasure <-- What you think is the best thing ever ... is another man's trash <-- I have no use for, it's worthless to me

Dolphin 3.0 8B released Dolphin is an open-source, 100% local LLM that you can run on your own machine with full control. You do not need exotic hardware, most gaming PCs can be set up to run a local LLM with decent performance. This model is competitive with start-of-the-art LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, although your actual performance will scale with the performance of the hardware you have. Unlike censored models like ChatGPT, etc. Dolphin is fully uncensored and will answer any question you ask (within its capabilities), no matter how "politically incorrect" or "dangerous" it might be. My belief: The right to run local AI is poised to become the 2nd-and-a-half Amendment... From the model card:

Fight fire with fire -- (the good stuff starts @12:48):

True of some vehicles, not all. And a lot of that can be disabled with a couple simple fixes if it really matters to you individually. In any case, this is not about Rambo nonsense, it's about the agenda to subjugate Americans and impose alien tyranny on them. EVs are just one component of that (cut off the feet). Again, one's man's treasure is another man's trash. If it works for you, good for you. Doesn't work for most of us. Last I checked, Trump said he's not banning EVs, but won't allow gas bans either. That's called THE FREE MARKET. You know, because this is Ron Paul forums so that's kind of a thing around here. OK, then the problem is already solved and no further discussion is needed. Just end the insane EV mandates, and we're good.

The point! "Let's make all transportation into basic infrastructure!" Because, you know, the government has such a stellar track-record on not using basic infrastructure as a choke-collar to gag the subject populace into submission... One man's treasure is another man's trash. If it's a lifestyle you want, you can have it right now in virtually any major metropolis in the US, and even many overseas. Sure, you tip a driver for now, but even that totally first-world problem is going away with Waymo, etc.

EVs -> California has a suicidal 35% EVs mandate coming in 2026. It's a Leftist agenda item. That should be obvious. Self-driving (+AI in general) -> Ultimately, this is about taking away individual freedom of transport. Gas/diesel vehicles have a range of several hundred miles, even more than a thousand with a spare fuel-tank, and they can be driven anywhere, even on backroads, making them difficult to centrally track and control. The "one trick" of the Deep State is swapping out freedom for convenience. So, self-driving EVs will become "so convenient that nobody even wants to drive the old dinosaur-juice burners anymore." As for "the real reason"... Believe Them When They Tell You:

Still more useful than any Federal intelligence agency... pic-tax: