> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
Yeah, for me it's the latter. Until recent years, it was at least possible to defend the US as having some good principles, despite how imperfectly defended or promoted they may have been. That in turn could make it worth defending. Now, it's just blatantly turned into everything it always stood against.
I think they are already massively winning on efficiency... which is about to matter a lot as the frontier models jack up their prices in order to some day see a profit (and no, Anthropic getting massively subsidized by Elon out of spite doesn't count for long term profits).
> The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes.
Bit of a tangent, but I recently watched Fight Club with my son. He was surprised he liked it because he'd gotten the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes. I was like "exactly, Matrix is actually good too...".
Avoiding a work of art because of identity politics is no way to live life. That is true whether it is right wing or left wing identity politics. One should just give the work an honest go, and form one's own conclusions, without worrying about whether "those people" might have enjoyed it as well.
I remember when Fight Club came out and joke was along the lines of ”you mean the gayest movie like, ever?!” Palahniuk, the author of the book (the film changes very little) came out himself only years later. And it is so very very very queer coded, back in the early 00’s even straight people noticed it. And Matrix trilogy is of course made by two transwomen.
I don’t really understood why manosphere thinks these films as some tough guy films or something. Then again, I think I do.
> The best "free" experience I've found is using OpenCode with Big Pickle.
I have absolutely zero interest in free. I honestly don't think I'm even remotely in the same demographic as people using free tiers / models.
I want to pay. I don't want my data used for training. I want it to be open. I want it to be consistently up (more than Claude!). I want it to be fast. I don't want it to be subsidized as that's just an excuse for shitty quality. Deepseek flash knocks it out of the park on all of these except you're data is used in training. I'm fine with it being hosted since there's no way I'm using it 24/7, but data MUST be private.
Basically I want Hetzner and OVH to run open model clouds. I'm convinced this is going to happen eventually when everyone realizes this is a commodity.
If you think your data isn’t being hoovered up I’d like to point out that every model is possible due to federal crimes committed to obtain the information they were trained on. Regardless of how much you are paying, your data is worth another petty civil infraction.
A million times this. There is “private” as a corporate-legality licensing perspective. There is “private” as a human concept. The two are seemingly opposite, yet as all the money is focused on the former there’s no airtime left for the latter.
When discussing this, may I ask (I know you are probably bored of the actual arguments), what does "trained models on data that wasn't theirs" actually mean in practice?
Again, I know these arguments have been done to death, but every human who reads source code that wasn't written by them, or views art that wasn't created by them, and practices against this art, is training their brain on data "that wasn't theirs".
They are frequently making a living doing so.
Is this distinction the scale, or is there actually a different more strict definition that we should be using as a common language to talk about this? As in, I should not even be reading certain source code if it is not licensed appropriate, or I will be in breach because I'm training myself illegally? And the same question for art, etc?
In general humans don't have perfect recall. Even people with what we might call a photographic memory don't have the ability to memorise millions of lines of code and output them with little effort.
It hinges somewhat on the concept of how much you believe things are being learned and how much is just pattern matching and borrowing a solution from memory. Certainly in the early days of Copilot it was possible to get it to output chunks of open source code near verbatim.
I think, generally, people are probably closer to believing that there is some kind of reasoning being carried out by these models than in those early days but it would also be easy to strip all of the immediately identifiable comments etc from the training materials to make it harder to detect.
> how much is just pattern matching and borrowing a solution from memory.
It's easy to show that this is not the case. This is a well-known phenomenon in ML, known as generalization - specifically, compositional generalization. See e.g. https://research.google/blog/measuring-compositional-general... for a description - although note that that post is from 2020, and models have become much better at this since then.
People can "believe" what they want, but there's plenty of work that definitively falsifies beliefs about "borrowing a solution from memory".
A product is not a human. They are selling a product based off copy-righted material without the rights to it. It's a pretty easy line to draw, honestly.
Which is not illegal to do. It becomes illegal if you directly use or reference the material in your product. Consuming copyrighted material personally is fully legal, training a model on that same copy-righted material is illegal. Where is the contention?
>Consuming copyrighted material personally is fully legal, training a model on that same copy-righted material is illegal. Where is the contention?
The contention is obvious in your statement. Is it illegal to train a model, and why? Why is it legal to train a human on copyright material and then sell those skills, vs training a computer and selling the skills?
Once they feed your data into the training dataset, they can delete the individualized copy. The training dataset is, of course, a trade secret that can never be exposed without causing serious harm to the company's model, or equivalent legalese that will prevent it's disclosure to all, governments included.
Copyright violation is not per se a crime. I think a colorable defense of fair use, even if it would fail in a civil trial, would negate the mens rea element. I can't easily find caselaw or articles regarding this, though, as most criminal copyright cases involve straightforward reproduction and distribution schemes. Maybe that's because prosecutors won't press cases that might raise a question of fair use?
But I agree with your larger point. AI companies have copied Uber's aggressive posture, pushing the legal envelope with expectations of positive return. Surely they'll continue doing the same in other areas.
The curiosity is that these companies somehow got around crimes and are above law (1) and these crimes mean something in a limited jurisdiction, like copyright laws of USA/Canada are not world’s (2). So it’s all cyberpunk at this point.
You can pay, and also use deepseek-v4-flash. OpenRouter even lets you "block" or limit your usage to providers that don't train on data. Since the weights are open, other companies are already serving the model on non-DeepSeek owned hardware: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash
What do you mean? Are you objecting that they communicate with the provider on your behalf? But how else would you design such a system?
Plumbing you straight through would require nonstandard certificate juggling and they wouldn't be able to implement their core service of providing a standardized API nor could they transparently route your request to the fastest / cheapest / whatever provider on the fly nor could they implement transparent fallback nor could they implement their policy of not billing you if the response from the provider is invalid.
Also the chosen provider could fingerprint your network stack if you communicated directly. The routing service is acting as a proxy and for most providers fully anonymizes requests (it does send a stable uid to some of them though).
Precisely this. That somehow is okay to put your trust into man in the middle. To your comment how you do it - yes it is difficult to do it right, but not impossible.
Good to know. I hadn't checks since early is DS4's launch when they were the only provide (I think maybe there was one other, but they also trained on your data). I see several private options now.
Yes, but I think that'll change eventually. If you trust hosting your code with a specific cloud provider then you'll probably also trust them for code assist. At least that's my theory.
There'll probably need to be a threat of massive litigation should they fail to comply with such a policy.
Maybe people will trust companies, but those companies will rarely deserve that trust. Anyone that pays attention sees breach announcements almost every day. Security is never a concern for these companies until it embarrasses them. Then, as soon as the negative attention fades, security again becomes the second to last priority.
Do not trust companies with any data that is important to you unless the effective management of that data is required by law, and the laws are comprehensive.
If your contract says there's no data retention and then a bunch of your retained data gets leaked in a breach presumably you have grounds for a lawsuit.
My company has all the code in a private GitLab instance (almost everything else is on AWS, but not GitLab), but they still use Cursor, so our internal code gets sent to whatever AI company the model I select in the dropdown belongs to. Scary if you think about it: if you use Cursor, you don't have to trust only one specific AI company, you have to trust all of them...
> If you trust hosting your code with a specific cloud provider then you'll probably also trust them for code assist.
I'm interested in this thought. There is significant motivation for providers to create a verifiable way for them not to deal with having access to client interactions with LLMs at all. Whatever standards and protocols have to be come up with in order to reassure clients.
Any good standards for privacy when interacting with LLMs could also trickle down to smaller providers, and everyone could offer guarantees. Even if the guarantee was literally just an insurance policy and a private court to decide if it pays out.
I trust AWS in this space. I'm 100% sure that they will be precisely honoring the terms of service for Bedrock (I've never looked to see whether they claim to train on your data though).
You didn’t look because you subconsciously know you don’t need to. AWS has a solid track record, and the certifications and audits to back it up. and that’s why everyone trusts them including the most extreme of regulated industries.
Bedrock in fact does not train on your data. It was a big deal when it was announced that they share data with Anthropic for Fable, but even then it was gated away where you’d have to explicitly allow it.
I see that OVH offers Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, which is a bit surprising to me. I thought that EU providers had to comply with the AI act where you have to provide opt-out and information about the training data once the model is sufficiently large (over 10^23 FLOPs, likely the case here), but providing information is not possible since people who train those models only give vague information at best.
Does anyone know if OVH is ignoring the law here, or whether it does not apply for some reason?
I'm probably somewhat adjacent to you. I would be happy to pay, but I just don't want to pay any of the companies that are actually offering things right now. I had the $20/month sub for Claude for a couple months, until one day I kept inexplicably getting errors saying I hit the limit even though their site showed my usage at less than half for the session and 8% for the week, and it seemed silly to pay for something that couldn't even properly respect its own measurements. OpenAI sketches me out too much as a company, Cursor feels lackluster when I use it for work from the account they pay for (and now is getting acquired by maybe the only AI company even sketchier than OpenAI), and I wasn't particularly impressed with Gemini or Mistral Vibe either when I tried them on the free tiers either.
I was paying around $500 / month on average between multiple providers for over a year. I cancelled one a while ago because of pretty bad service availability (Bet you guess who that is!), which by all reports hasn't improved much.
For me, paying from $200 - $500 / month is reasonable if I can sustain a disruption free flow that doesn't require constant yak shaving. What I've found experimenting with DeepSeek on some open source library stuff is that it's actually going to cost me much less if I don't need frontier vibing (which I don't).
For me it's about the value of my time. I think that it's important that we have open models, but for getting real work done, my time is too valuable to waste it on subpar results or additional agent management when a max plan covers all the use I need. It's not worth quibbling over. If the cost / benefit ratio changes, I'll be looking harder at local set ups, but not at the moment.
What mature implementations of S3 are there? MinIO that rugpulled the community, Garage that doesn’t even have proper setup scripts in their Docker containers and expect you to do the init manually, or Zenko cloud server that more or less got abandoned? I think there’s also SeaweedFS which might do better but I’m surprised at how shitty everything seems in this space - surely people aren’t being crazy and either storing their files on the FS directly to expose access to them through their app (hello directory traversal attacks) or storing them in relational DBs (hello wasted bandwidth and bloated backups).
The odd jank extends further, like Sonatype Nexus and some other software hardcodes AWS regions to choose from when configuring the storage even though your self-hosted implementation doesn’t have anything to do with AWS so you just have to come up with fake regions. If the cloud vendors each have to reimplement it because there is nothing as quality as PostgreSQL is for DBs, but for S3, then I’m hardly surprised at the state of things.
I just assume Opus is constantly nerfed based on capacity. I was exclusively Claude for a long time, but the inconsistency in quality, constant outages, and slow downs were too hard to work with.
I just use dumb and fast models now. I'm more engaged. I think that the higher the quality of the model, the more you tend to vibe with it, and then the more hallucinations you then miss. I'm not sure which is more productive, but I definitely burn out faster the more I vibe. At some point you're spending your time on forums, discord, or youtube instead of engaged with what you're building. Or you yak shave about your tooling and end up creating the 600th multi-agent gastown harness and blowing thousands of dollars on tokens to create it only to discover it's too expense to actually use.
I agree with you. The more I vibe code, the less interested I feel in what I'm building. Working with models that force me to think, especially with personal projects, helps me stay engaged and enjoy what I am doing more.
The short segment I saw on reddit, I believe, of Ivanka talking about an island gave VERY strong AI vibes. Is this interview real and are there links?
This is the first I've seen it referenced so haven't given it much thought.
> In fact, I don't even know why Rust would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would work just fine
FWIW I've noticed that agents are pretty good at writing "High-Level Rust" for most basic applications, which gives you pretty great performance (orders of magnitude faster than RoR), great deployment, probably great security if steered by a senior, and pretty great maintenance again if originally steered by a senior. I feel like this is a not-so-secret secret.
I personally won't be using dynamic languages for anything but toy scripts now. (well, except JS, which is hard to avoid with the massive size of WASM bundles)
P.S. I assume Go is still great as well, but IMO Go no longer has an identity. What are they going for anyways? Garbage collected rust? "How to invent a perfect niche and then throw it all away in 21 days". /rant
Identity? Most folks don't think that way anymore. I try to funnel them from Python to GO. I want to ship binaries. I want them to think about dependencies and if they really need them.
It's only a problem for the ones left holding the bag. I'm at an all-time low allocation percentage in the US stock market and considering pulling more out still. Full on casino vibes at this point.
It's doubled in five years while inflation's gone up by 30+ percent. Where exactly is there to hide? Not gold - that peaked and went down a lot. Let's not talk about BTC, either.
Real estate? You've got taxes on that in the US, it's how our governments can pretend to not tax us as much as in Europe while still taxing us as much as in Europe (property tax goes to schools)
I mean, gold is up significantly more than then broad market since Trump took over, but that doesn’t mean you should gamble on it continuing.
I don’t trust real estate either. Seems like anything with a middleman is setting record levels of grift right now. I don’t trust the industries reports. No one is regulating or checking numbers.
I shifted into more bonds. Probably a bit early, but I’m not a pro. I’ve just lost trust in the market which no longer seems tied to reality or at least my limited understanding of reality. Staying in it just feels yolo atm.
Isn't Anthropic currently killing that market though? I've been hearing about a lot of businesses pulling back after having experienced the reality.
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