Indeed, I wonder if it'd be easier, even if as you point out more expensive, to build a data center in a city. Just renovate an existing industrial building and hope nobody sees the planning notices.

Just responding to this point as an FYI. Data Centres are so specifically designed that it easier to lay waste to any existing structure that is on the land and start over. The company I work for has thousands of warehouses world-wide and really wanted to utilize what they had. The only practical solution was to fill the warehouses with data centre "modules" (think data centre in a shipping container) and even then there was an amazing amount of re-fit work. And nobody wants those data centre containers anymore.

Another random point: Data Centres in traditional hot-spots for them and/or inside cities are called "Tier I Markets" in the business. Latency was a really important consideration at one point (and still is for a lot of apps), so data centres needed to be near to population centres. So-called "AI" workloads don't care so much as they are more request-response in nature, so they are going up anywhere and everywhere where you can get power and permitting permission.

(Disclaimer: my organization does not consume water for DC cooling (we use air chillers), and all our power is renewable).

You don't get it.

Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.

Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.

A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.

Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

I hope that after I die, the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."

I don't recommend it.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.

Someone please bash some sense into Apple.

I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.

I'm old. Like, well, really REALLY old. And you would think being essentially immortal would come with perks like being able to see, but having effective ciliary muscles and them being completely dead are two different things.

I watched the preso and my first thought was "Jesus (... thank you again sir), Apple keeps making better phones for old people!" This seems like one such phone, although I don't see myself opening my wallet for one until my 15 pro max is truly utterly dead (heh), and I know for sure that the hinge / crease is going to hold up.

Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.

It's really useful as a spam-sink.

Nebula is actually the one streaming service I ever subscribed to for a while, mostly because I like documentaries and for all I've heard their business model is more in favour of the actual creators.

Dude, what is your problem?

I mention not owning a TV because it's topical - it means I didn't not notice the quality going down slowly over time, so I might notice the difference more than those who did.

Nowhere did I imply that not owning a TV makes me better in any way. It's a personal choice, that's all.

Why you jump on that so aggressively - maybe ask yourself why that is.

It means Iran has severely limited the capacity of the Strait of Hormuz. It's a hostage situation. No one is winning, but the objective isn't to win in the sense of completely closing the Strait, the objective is to create a sufficiently long period of pain that eventually the US and its allies walk away. Christ almighty, force multiplication is hardly a new concept.