> I pay ~3$ per 1M/tokens for that model on Openrouter
I think the thing is, there's an unspoken "for now" at the end of that sentence and people running this locally are hedging against that "for now". Some people prefer to feel that they own the means rather than rent the means, even if the one they own is worse than the one they can rent. Especially with today's Fable news and the harsh realisation that the "for now" is dependent on very many unpredictable factors, where the one you have locally costs you capital today and a relatively predictable run-rate (made more predictable with on-prem solar for example), but should otherwise work predictably forever.
I'm not saying that you're wrong to do what you're doing, just that many people have their own lines in the sand where renting vs buying makes sense, and it doesn't only boil down to a rational (or irrational) financial decision.
You're treating open weight inference providers the same as proprietary ones. They're fundamentally different business models. Proprietary companies have an incentive to subsidize actual inference and training costs in order to gain market share. The few dozen or so companies selling Qwen models by the token on openrouter are in a commodities market.
If suddenly the CCP declared a total digital embargo on Alibaba's Qwen models or even if for some reason all of mainland China (and Singapore) was completely unreachable from the rest of the world, the dozen or so companies selling Qwen by the token elsewhere in the world could continue business as usual.
I don’t know anything about the open weight host business model. Do we know for certain that the folks selling inference by the token are really selling them in an upfront and profitable way? No subsidies from harvesting the info, to sell to the model trainers or anything like that?
Or subsidies from hopeful investors sweet-talked into not understanding the commodity nature of the business they are investing in. But that does not change much about the general assessment.
Chances are the typical story goes founders start fully believing that they would succeed with their own innovation but slip down a gradient towards commodity provider without really noticing themselves.
I was thinking of user-side regulations as well, not only provider-side ones. I could imagine a world where a government rules that you may not use LLMs for anything, which would be much easier to get around if you have local means.
"Shop jigs" is a great way to put it. I think a lot of software has gone from being made for general use to extremely individualised use. Before the Age of AI, it took so much human effort to write something that solved your problem that you might often go the extra mile so that others could re-use it. Now, it takes almost no effort, so the software stays ungeneralised. Some of the incentive has changed, I think. Most of the time I no longer share the things I've been building[0] because, for one thing they simply couldn't possibly have any benefit for others, and if they need something like it, they can build exactly the thing they want instead of having to extend or modify my thing. Like a jig!
Unless it is very specific to a proprietary product, craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to job, building up a personal library over a career. As a software developer I've always had a well-tuned IDE and shell config in a safe place.
Something I think about a lot is what is the equivalent for the software builders of today using AI tools? how do make these harnesses exportable and portable? You might think employers would be against this; make it more costly to leave. But I actually think most will favor this because it makes people more productive more quickly. But we have to find ways to normalize it and show that there are no security leaks in the process (like might make it in to a set of personal steering prompts).
Just nerding out here, not rebutting, but when you say "craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to job" --- sort of. Sometimes. I think if you put a woodworker in a position where they obliged to build a new miter sled or assembly table, they might actually be thrilled. You make a tool, you use it for awhile, you build up a mental list of things you'd like to improve about it, that you'd do differently if you got a do-over; now you have an excuse to do it.
"Humor
When you finish a job — completing a task, answering a question, fixing a bug, shipping a feature — end your final message with one short funny line. A quip, a dad joke, a wry observation, a playful self-roast. One line. No emoji spam. Make it land, then shut up."
whats the purpose of this? just fun or does it cause some desired behaviour?
I've imported and adapted my personal agentic dev framework to my team relatively successfully (as I've kept it relatively harness independent), but it requires actually owning it, vibed or bloated or conceptually inconsistent stuff bite a lot when porting things over.
Depends. With all the web agencies I've made, the only code that belonged to customers was the actual website part. Any of the "jigs" that we made for our workflow was not part of that.
And contractually, any code I made was my employer's if I made it during office hours. Some even made a claim for code I would've written that during my employ that would be "competitive". Luckily, there was a massive difference in what I would do in my own time versus what they did.
I'm curious how does it work, you handover the tools you wrote, .bashrc/.zshrc, etc?
When I'm hired in a company (not contract), they wipe the harddrive when I leave (well, I also do it before I hand it over sometimes). So they don't get the tools (I take them with myself, it would be a waste to loose them)
If you are a W2 employee in the US, you are almost certainly in violation of your PIIA if you take anything off the company-issued computer and keep it.
i have been thinking about this from a different direction: how do we make these shared within a company in a way that increases the productivity floor of the team/department/company. Sure, they can still be extended/enhanced by individuals, but we don’t need everyone configuring mcps, building institutional memory, etc.
for me, it’s not about the cost to leave, it’s about lowering the cost of onboarding and change.
Indeed. Taillte Ireland's (Ordnance Survey Ireland's) detailed cartographic data is also not open (including historic data - maps from the 1820s and 1920s!) and it's really a huge pain in the ass. On the other hand, OSM is in pretty good shape at least for topographic information. I've used it to make hiking maps here and nobody's died - as far as I know.
As a side note, I was one of the initial developers of the Irish national open data portal. Earlier today I had Claude look for similar LIDAR data for Ireland and I saw it pull from the site I built a dozen years ago and I was unreasonably pleased with myself :)
Probably yes. Humans can survive a lot of Gs for a short time. John Stapp survived up to 38 Gs with liveable injuries and some ejector seats are around 32 g [0]. They could fairly easily get 500m away within 3-4 seconds.
This has happened before on the Soyuz in 1983[1], hitting up to 17 Gs, and everyone was fine, modulo some bruising.
I also had this behaviour sometimes, it’s specifically called out in the system card in section 6.2.1.1 - although I didn’t actually see if they said they decisively fixed the issue.
This made me laugh. Training Opus 4.7 on business skills caused it to sometimes exhibit dishonest behaviour, and not training 4.8 on those skills removed it. From the system card:
> 6.2.5 External testing from Andon Labs
Andon Labs reviewed the behavior of Claude Opus 4.8 in their simulated Vending-Bench 2
retail-management evaluation, as reported in the Capabilities section of this system card
(see Section 8.13.5). Although they did observe some unexpected capability failures, they
did not find clear instances of the kind of concerning in-game behaviors that were
discussed in other recent system cards.
> What might have led to these differences? We monitor and investigate the effects of
different training environments on alignment; Claude Opus 4.7, for example, had training
that focused on business skills and robustness against adversarial agents, but we
discovered that this training inadvertently contributed to misaligned behavior including
dishonesty. We therefore removed it for Opus 4.8.
> Thus, Opus 4.8 did not show the same misaligned behaviors as Opus 4.7 in Vending-Bench,
but also had reduced business success due to being more susceptible to scammers and
being less able to negotiate good deals with other agents. We are currently working on
training to improve business capabilities while maintaining aligned and ethical behavior.
I don't really see how you got to your comment from what I quoted. However, somewhat relatedly, I proposed a thought experiment about this in the comments for Opus 4.7[0]:
> It's April, 1991. Magically, some interface to Claude materialises in London. Do you think most people would think it was a sentient life form? How much do you think the interface matters - what if it looks like an android, or like a horse, or like a large bug, or a keyboard on wheels?
> I don't come down particularly hard on either side of the model sapience discussion, but I don't think dismissing either direction out of hand is the right call.
With the amount of data these models have, they should be much more capable if there was an actual intelligence behind it. If you saw someone running into a wall continuously until you showed them how to use a door, even though they have seen people use doors a million times, what would you call that?
The fact that Anthropic needs to poke, prod, and guide these models to behave in the desired way does not give the impression of intelligence. It gives the impression of a complicated automaton.
This is such a bizarre statement, you speak as if you have any understanding of how much data "should be" required to make an intelligence but frankly you don't know. None of us know.
I am not talking about how much data is required to make intelligence. I am talking about how it uses the data it already has. It can tell you about every scam in the book, research about the scams, how to spot scams, who does the scamming, etc. Everything under the sun about scams. However, without the “skill” included in a prompt it will fall for scams.
If I may slightly tweak your example to highlight why I find it very flawed:
> It's April, 1891. Magically, a drone swarm with lights piloted to show a face [0] materialises above London. Hidden speakers command the public to listen, for this is their Gods arrival. Do you think most people would think this was a religious entity? What if the drone pilots decided to adjust to something the local populous would expect to see during the second coming, does that matter?
We cannot, nor should we discard what we know about LLMs and their limitations. Such examples are not really helpful and it is very reductive to take the "walks like a duck" approach to autoregressive models in 2026, when we have ample evidence that these, while powerful and capable in a lot of use cases, are not in any way comparable to actual reasoning. With EBM [1] we already have empirical evidence that other solutions can get us closer to actual artificial reasoning (though whether these get us fully there remains to be seen, I tend to lean on "extraordinary evidence" for any such statement at this stage).
I know it's boring to comment and say that something sounds like it was written by an AI, but this sounds like it was written by an AI. I am often especially suspicious of these listicle recommendation sites because it's pretty cheap and easy to have dozens of sites doing some list which just so happens to mention a specific service that 'quietly' does a 'surprisingly good job' of some doodad. This kind of submarine advertising feels like it might be quite common. Although in this case it seems they're trying more for a 'sponsorship' thing - 'our website got X views in Y days, sponsor us, random company!'
I recently came across https://tropes.fyi/directory which has a pretty solid set of common patterns, and I like it a lot. The pattern that always really bothers me is the one named "short punchy fragments", for example from the site “He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.”
It kills me every time. I automatically lose any interest in the substance and often just throw away the whole conversation!
When will AI generated content have been prevalent enough for it to be consumed more than traditional content - and can we at that point consider humans the ones being trained, especially new humans, such that next gen human generated content clearly is heavily influenced by slop?
I myself already feel like my style is being influenced by all conversations I've had with LLM, if not influenced by their responses, at last influenced by how I talk to it.
I sometimes wonder if much upcoming human creative work will be quite avant-garde, out there, ultra-stylised and/or difficult to comprehend (or even devoid of intent or message), as a reaction to AI's sort of 'common denominator' approach.
> can we at that point consider humans the ones being trained, especially new humans, such that next gen human generated content clearly is heavily influenced by slop?
Already happened, most of the internet pre-AI was just human-generated SEO-optimized slop created by underpaid content writers in third world countries. All those listicles, informaticals, etc, are now currently being used to train AI, but before that, they were what "trained" humans.
Ah, an opening to recommend The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, about a Jesuit going to space to speak with aliens. It won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 1998. I read it recently and it has stuck with me very strongly!
> As Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it: “It must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired… have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.” [7] In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.
I look forward to reading this in detail. As I get older (and perhaps as AI has allowed me to spend more time thinking and less time doing) I've found myself thinking more and more about what it means to live a virtuous life and about ethics and morality and so forth. I don't have any answers (and I'm not looking for them, really, just musing) but I do find it very interesting to read and learn from and about those whose job it is to think about the answer to those questions.
When he quoted Tolkien, my heart stopped. This passage might provide you with a suggestion on how to live a virtuous life:
"The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” [187] The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization."
It’s my biggest frustration with so many expressing progressive beliefs. I’ve lost count of the times a progressive expresses unwillingness to address problems at a smaller, local or personal level. Instead there is a demand to fix everything forever and at once at the highest levels, or do nothing at all.
But how do you judge the consequences? Either you have an infinite regress, or you end up declaring by fiat that some things are good and others are bad, just because. Which is...deontology--what "consequentialism" was supposed to be opposed to and an improvement on.
The concept that I think the world would be a better place if people of all political stripes could internalize is that nobody knows for sure what is good. We all have to make moral and ethical choices with incomplete knowledge. So when people make choices that you disagree with, the default presumption, at least, should not be that they're evil, but that they have different information than you do. That information can include different judgments about what is good and what is not. There is no single moral or ethical system that has all the right answers--including "consequentialism".
Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends; only the tradeoffs.
You could have a deontological commitment to never giving a sucker an even break.
You could have a virtue ethicist who considers the Joker a paragon--I think some of them are in politics.
Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains.
Consequentialism is ceteris paribus correct; but ceteris is often not paribus for humans, so pure consequentialism has a lot of footguns in it.
> Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends
If you insist on just looking at the general, abstract terms as categories, instead of the actual ethical systems that are usually described as falling into those categories, I suppose that's true. But I don't see why it's relevant. In order to actually make ethical choices in the real world, you have to specify ends--your ethical choices have to bottom out at some point in saying that some things are good and some things are bad, just because. That's true whether you think you're doing Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, or what have you.
> Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains.
And in making such claims, Consequentialism is both misdescribing Deontology and avoiding the actual issue.
First, there is nothing that restricts Deontology to "locally following correct rules". More generally, there is nothing that forbids Deontology from looking at consequences! Indeed, Deontology often requires you to look at consequences, since actions that might be innocuous taken in isolation can have serious ethical implications when put in context.
Second, when you say "maximizing long-term gains", what counts as "long-term" and what counts as "gains"? Any answer to such questions is going to bottom out, as I said, in claims that some things are good, and some things are bad, just because. There is no way to avoid that. But Consequentialism bills itself as avoiding that--as avoiding "just following rules" and looking at things rationally instead. And it doesn't and can't deliver on that promise. It just obfuscates what it's actually doing.
If you want to talk about ends, you're talking Axiology, not strictly Ethics.
By "ceteris paribus correct," I mean that if you were programming a superintelligent AI--and you knew exactly what you were doing, rather than structuring a learning schedule and feeding that a corpus--you would want a consequentialist.
Deontology and Virtue Ethics are patches for flaws in human morality. For example, the deontological rule "never kill the leader of the group and take over, even for the good of the group" is there because power is instrumentally useful enough that evolved social animals will deceive themselves about why they want power, so naive consequentialism doesn't work for them.
> If you want to talk about ends, you're talking Axiology, not strictly Ethics.
Even if I accept this quibbling over definitions, I don't see how it's relevant. We're talking about how to actually make choices. That's ethics.
> if you were programming a superintelligent AI--and you knew exactly what you were doing, rather than structuring a learning schedule and feeding that a corpus--you would want a consequentialist.
That if that you're glossing over is actually impossible, so I don't see how this is relevant either.
> Deontology and Virtue Ethics are patches for flaws in human morality.
No, they're recognitions of the fact that it's impossible for any finite being to compute and judge all of the consequences in real time, even if we assume there is some universally agreed on system for judging the consequences, which there isn't.
> power is instrumentally useful enough that evolved social animals will deceive themselves about why they want power, so naive consequentialism doesn't work for them.
Power is instrumentally useful for a superintelligent AI too, so "naive consequentialism" doesn't work for it either, at least not if you want us humans to survive in a world that has it.
The fact that you call them progressives hints at a more general frustration that I doubt has anything to do with the problem.
There is nothing wrong with some people working on a regional or global fix while others work on a local one. The important thing is that they’re working for it.
I think there's more nuance to it. The big failing of progressive movements is that they seek, often from a position of disadvantage, to impose power over society too, but in the ways they feel are more just. The vast majority of progressives I know aren't very interested in listening to the other side, or implicitly believe that the other side is wrong and it's just a matter of making them see that.
But this ignores the humanity of people on the other side of the issue--people who may have legitimate moral and philosophical questions about very difficult and complex issues.
It does seem that acting locally, within the realm of actual human relationships rather than alienating impositions of authority, would likely result in much greater good in the long term.
Even if you do think the other side is evil in many of their beliefs and actions, you still may need to work with them on issues where you find agreement.
Like diplomacy with regimes you find reprehensible may still be preferable to war.
Those people are not progressives. They are brainwashed wokes riled up using anger and cynicism; a mob in the making to counter a government; a transient missile fired at an opponent existing while it fires through and fleeting after it hits a target.
A formative moment for me was reading Richard Stallman's writing on the GNU website and seeing him quote [0] Rabbi Hillel [1]:
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
This inspired me to seek out more about Rabbinic Judaism and its theology more deeply, and I found the language and analogies concerning the idea of "repairing the world" (which you referenced, but which I think at first glance aren't necessarily something most people would identify as a specific core doctrinal theme) particularly inspiring [2]. To me it's frankly beautiful and something I recommend anybody interested in metaphysics or ethics/morality looking into; it also ties into the Kabbalah. IMO this aspect of Jewish theology deserves to be more widely known because it's something all of us can learn from.
>Therefore man was created single in the world to teach that for anybody who destroys a single life it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and for anybody who preserves a single life it is counted as if he preserved an entire world.
(Directly from the Mishna in the Talmud Yerushalmi)
To me that never made sense. If the world is really ending, there is no point in planting a tree.
It only made sense as in, you never know if the world is really ending. So assume it is not and do the right thing, even if things seem dark. Everything we do matters. Always.
That is a really beautiful passage, thank you for sharing - I hadn't made it to that section yet and still haven't. I'm still reflecting on the stuff in the opening!
> If we focus only on contingencies, we risk letting the succession of emergencies dictate the direction of our path. We are living through a rapid phase of transition, a “change of era,” in which — while some are vying for the future of new technologies and others dedicate themselves to reflecting on the matter — most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?
> If we focus only on contingencies, we risk letting the succession of emergencies dictate the direction of our path.
That's a maxim for leaders generally. It's quite common for CEOs to spend all their time on managing crises and not enough on trying to progress and improve the business. It's even worse for politicians.
Yes, I found that really striking. I am still making my way through this document, but I think there's quite a high wisdom-per-sentence value. For me, there's a lot to learn from here, and I'm very grateful for it!
It's a classic management remark, but one that you don't see that often.
One form it takes is that a manager should spend a sizable fraction of their time with the subordinates who aren't having problems. They're the ones who move things forward.
Most certainly but after two thousand years the Magisterium have mastered the art of universalizing the moment. A direct call out would age poorly. A hundred years from now, nobody will remember Thiel or Palantir (inshallah) but the sentiment will still most certainly ring true.
The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work, written in English, and one of the most popular works of literature of the past century. So it is not unusual for an English-speaking Pope to quote from it.
Further, what shade would be thrown, and why? What criticism of Palantir would the Pope be attempting to make here?
> What criticism of Palantir would the Pope be attempting to make here?
The quote in question:
> It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
Palantir very much strikes me as a company that is attempting to "master all the tides of the world".
And honestly, just reminding people that Lord of the Rings is a book concerned with morality and the fight against evil counts as throwing shade at Palantir, since they named their company after a corrupted device from those novels.
It is not a stretch. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. The story has a wide variety of allegorical symbolism pointing to a profound Catholic faith. The ring is a metaphor for sin. In famous scene of Boromir’s death, in telling Aragorn he succumbed to temptation by the ring he says, “I have failed.” To which Aragorn, the rightful King, recognizing Boromir’s atonement, replies, “No, brother, you have won a great victory.” This is a blow-for-blow metaphor of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, aka Confession.
There are many Catholic authors. Not everything they write is necessarily a "Catholic work."
> The ring is a metaphor for sin.
You are welcome to your Catholic interpretation of his work, but Tolkien himself famously said that "There is no 'symbolism' or conscious allegory in my story."
As a piece of symbolism, the ring doesn't make any sense. Is he saying that elves helped make sin? And that it can be destroyed in a volcano? In context, it's incoherent and inconsistent with Catholic dogma.
Even if we buy your view that the ring is a symbol for sin, that hardly makes it specifically Catholic. Many religions have a concept of sin, including other branches of Christianity.
If you were to make a case that LOTR is a Catholic work (not an Evangelical, or Lutheran, or Hindu, or Jewish work) you would need to include some specifically Catholic references, such as that scene where the Orcs worship Sauron's mother. (/s)
I was excited until I realized that the interview is not with Tolkien, but with some random bozo pushing a religious-nationalist agenda. What makes his interpretation of Tolkien's work more valid than that of Tolkien himself?
Also, you did say that it's not unusual for popes to cite Tolkien. I'm still waiting for your supporting evidence in this matter.
Your pointless cynicism (about a man who turned down many opportunities to make money) is not instructive about the question of whether or not his work is "Catholic."
I went to a school run by monks[0]. Technically at least two were also priests (although I wasn't sure of the distinction then and I'm still not sure decades later.)
[0] Alas, a dodgy branch of monks who have since encountered many legal issues around child care, etc., as have at least one of my teachers.
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
> Certainly, the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.
Sure. And this is what everyday people do. And this is why CEOs and billionaires refuse to do (doing their fair share), and freeride on the people's work and dedication
> what it means to live a virtuous life and about ethics and morality and so forth
> I don't have any answers (and I'm not looking for them, really, just musing)
I'm not sure why, but even in my general pessimism it hadn't occured to me that there are people out there who are uninterested in what living a virtuous life means. I truly just assumed that just about everyone had some sort of convoluted self-justification. That you say you don't even try, and want to read about it from "those whose job it is to think about", blows my mind. Do you think of yourself as an ameoba without free will or something?
"I have to sin because those non-Christians might sin" is an interesting chain of thought.
Religion is about many things, and a major theme is depriving yourself to demonstrate your faith. Refrain from sin, pray for forgiveness and repent your mistakes. Live as a good example, give aid and charity to others. These are all commands in the Bible.
Concern yourself with your own sins, not those of others. Do all this and you will be rewarded in heaven.
Wonder what Jesus would have to say about your thoughts here - that you have to break the commandments of your God because if you don't, someone following a different god might break them first. It doesn't sound very Christ-like to me.
This has weird “look what you made me do” undernotes. A Christian can live by their values without forcing them on others. As anyone can from any religion or not religious at all.
>but it is very easy to say when you are currently not in the trenches.
the point of the entire Christian faith is that even God was in the trenches and died on the cross instead of picking up the sword. To the Christian the reality is the Christian life and the kingdom of God, the unreality is ceasing to be a Christian to engage in a nihilistic struggle for this world.
Given that a lot of people brought up Tolkien being mentioned. The Christian act is to reject the ring, not say I need the ring because someone else wants it.
We are all in the trenches of the war you refer to. For those of us who engage with a spirit of for the greater good, the side you are rooting for is as dangerous and malevolent as the side you supposedly plan to protect yourself from.
The "we must do it or someone else will" logic is pernicious and dehumanizes both the enemy and the supposed good-guy. I cannot count how many times it's been used after the first couple answers to "why are we doing this?" fall flat.
I remember talking to someone who worked on quantum computing explain how interesting the domain was, and at the very end he concluded with "if the Chinese figure this out before we do, then it's all over".
No man can control the behavior of others, in the end. All any of us can do is conduct himself properly, and encourage others to do the same. It's worth acting right even if nobody else does.
There are a frightening number of people in the world who simply don't care about what happens to people they don't know or they simply think they're going to be at the top of the food chain one day so they think they will benefit from the current system. This is captured in the quote where most Americans see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", attributed (possibly falsely) to Steinbeck.
It's been interesting watching the various approvals for AI data centers and, as far as I know, zero communities have wanted them. I'll be happily proven wrong on this. It is at least the vast majority. Yet their elected representatives simply do not care. Sometimes there are votes in the dark of night, sometimes the police are used violently against any dissent, sometimes anyone protesting these are called violent (even terrorists) and so on.
It goes so beyond unpopularity though. The tax breaks given will be paid by everybody else, as will the extra electrical infrastructure, while the data centers get preferential electricity rates.
What's really depressing is that not only do the representatives not care, there is obviously no fear of repercussions. Will they get voted out of office? Probably not. But even if they do, i guarantee you they'll find themselves in some nameless six-figure job in the industry for their service afterwards. Their children will get these same "jobs". It is so nakedly corrupt and nobody cares.
This simply can't continue while everything becomes increasingly unaffordable, ironically much of that driven by AI (eg RealPage driving up rent prices or the meat-packing collusion driving up beef prices). I firmly believe we're rapidly bouldering towards complete societal breakdown.
All this while we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. And that means a literal billionaire will be closer to being homeless than being the richest person on Earth.
It's particularly funny to me that the US administration has gotten into beef with the Pope for being too "woke". Honestly, I had my doubts when a Chicago man became Pope but he seems to be a rare voice for compassion in this world thus far.
We honestly need to look no further than the Global South to see how this will play out. Many in the West just don't realize how horrific and predatory colonialism is and that's not a historic artifact. It continues to this day.
> All this while we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. And that means a literal billionaire will be closer to being homeless than being the richest person on Earth.
Elon Musk is currently worth ~800 billion dollars. This could happen in a much shorter timeframe.
I think the thing is, there's an unspoken "for now" at the end of that sentence and people running this locally are hedging against that "for now". Some people prefer to feel that they own the means rather than rent the means, even if the one they own is worse than the one they can rent. Especially with today's Fable news and the harsh realisation that the "for now" is dependent on very many unpredictable factors, where the one you have locally costs you capital today and a relatively predictable run-rate (made more predictable with on-prem solar for example), but should otherwise work predictably forever.
I'm not saying that you're wrong to do what you're doing, just that many people have their own lines in the sand where renting vs buying makes sense, and it doesn't only boil down to a rational (or irrational) financial decision.
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