CMay

A real problem is that you might not even need to give these internet access. If your neighbor gives their TV internet access and it can establish a mesh connection then it might be able to exfiltrate data that way. I don't know of any TVs that do this, but it's always been a possibility.

Another possibility is even if you don't give it access to your wifi, if you eventually give your TV away or sell it, the new user could connect it to wifi and if it has any persistent storage then it could upload all of its stored data about you at that point.

Companies that do this need to end their entire brand, because they're just helping the CCP.

Does this mean that TVs can never be recycled or resold now, adding to the garbage problem? All you have to do is sell the TV to someone who does eventually connect it to the internet and it will upload all the data it acquired while the previous owner had it?

This is not a bold claim, this is just how it is.

If you ask any average gamer, "if you buy a game on Steam or on a CD from Walmart, do you operate on the understanding that you are now legally allowed to make as many copies of it as you want and sell those copies?"

The answer will unanimously be no. If they owned it, the answer would be yes. They might say they own it, but they will clearly and reasonably understand that they do not own it in legal terms, because they understand what they cannot do with it.

Some of them will understand that they can legally make copies for backups, but why would you need the law to tell you that it's legal for you to make a backup of something you own? You wouldn't.

You can buy a hard drive, but buying it does not give you the IP for all the technology that went into it. No reasonable person believes that would be the case, either. You can buy a car, but you can't then copy all the parts and start mass producing your own copies of that car. Do any of you go through the McDonalds drive thru and believe you now own the burgers, fries and all the packaging that goes with it to the extent that you can start up your own McDonalds with logo and all?

Whether it's physical or digital, even if people have contradictions in their head since they aren't lawyers, they understand enough about how things work to conclude that what they understood when they pressed the purchase button equates to not obtaining total ownership of all aspects.

It is simply true. This is so broadly understood that I don't even think you would need to use a jury. A judge could simply throw the case out at this point on that alone, if it hadn't already been settled in past legal precedent, which it has.

> McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?

It worked out fine?

> I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"

Many communists were armed and had guns, aiming to take over every country on Earth. The US, Japan and Germany were fighting back against them in China, Spain and Germany.

> How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal.

I figure objectively. Far more Japanese were killed by fire bombings, which could be done extensively, at scale, with impunity. Nukes were important and consequential, but if the goal was simply to kill Japanese or destroy strategic targets then we already had that problem well solved.

Japan had thoroughly spread propaganda of racial superiority and being divinely chosen. One of the benefits of dropping a nuke compared to fire bombing, is that it immediately leaves a humbling impression.

> Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.

The US created the League of Nations, which was the first known collective security organization like that to prevent a repeat of World War 1. Ironically, the idea came from a German. World War 2 demonstrated that Europeans weren't prepared to defend each other.

The Western Union was mostly an attempt to demonstrate to the US that European countries were now ready to defend each other, rather than failing. This is relevant right now, because there are concerns that Putin wants to test NATO to see if their resolve collapses the same way it did during World War 2 under the League of Nations. In order for NATO to be formed, the US had to be convinced that European countries could be active participants rather than passive consumers of defense guarantees, which is also again relevant since we've been pushing harder for European countries to meet their defense spending commitments.

> Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?

People actually traded in other currencies for USD rather than ditching it after 2008.

> The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy?

Unitary Executive Theory is not autocracy. You seem to have capacity to reason and maybe don't understand how the US works, so I'll explain. In the US, we have many states. All of the states can check the federal government, because it is the states that created the federal government to start with, as an expression of the people.

The federal government has multiple branches, which each have different responsibilities. The president doesn't control the legislative or judicial branches, only the executive branch. If the president did some kind of truly insane dictator thing, there would be bipartisan support to impeach him and it would be upheld at the supreme court. If he simply went into a restaurant and started shooting people, he would be detained, impeached and imprisoned. The illusion the media spreads that somehow the president has gained control of both legislative and judicial branches is not reality.

China does not have a military. The Chinese Communist Party has a military. In the US, the military serves the constitution, which serves the people. If the president started tearing up the constitution and somehow the legislative or judicial branches were destroyed, the military would step in. Yes, the president is the commander of the military, technically, but nobody is above the constitution.

The best way to defend the US constitution is to be an originalist which uses well established understandings of the spirit, original intention and demonstrated early application of the language of the constitution. Trump's administrations interpret it using originalist arguments.

I know that it is difficult to hold a view that media seems to hate or not support, because surely media has merit and smart people who know the truth and they will speak the truth, right? Unfortunately, we cannot give up our capacity to make up our own minds. The fact people can make hand gestures and emotional facial expressions on video now does not give them any more authority than a quote from a newspaper 100 years ago.

> Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China?

Rolling up on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran weakens China's proxies. It has also caused China to start to draw down on their huge oil reserves which reduces their sanction proofing which mitigates some of the risk of World War 3. Helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure is another component of that, because that is another source of oil for China that they are coming to understand cannot be relied on.

Tons of oil is moving through the strait now and none of it is Iran's, because we're blockading them. This is fine by us, because it's more oil China has to take from its reserves. Our #1 priority is stopping World War 3. Preventing Iran from getting nukes, shutting down their space program (keep in mind, Russia's space program was just hit too), limiting their ability to harass their neighbors, shutting down their drone supply chain so they can no longer support Russia's war in Ukraine and more are all side goals by comparison.

What the media says, what China says, what Iran says, what Europe says about all this... it's usually ignorant oblivious garbage. We aren't overly motivated to tell everyone what we're doing or why we're doing it. We're doing what we think we need to do. People can heckle from the sidelines, but it is the norm throughout history that most people don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's very common especially for things like war, where the media will be 6 months 5 years or even 50 years behind what the reality is.

> As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.

I've spent thousands of hours researching these things, watching substantive intellectual debates and interviews, legal interpretations, geopolitical analysis and so on. I don't go in with a preconceived notion, only digging for anything that supports it. I'm not an idiot. Just because some fancy highly respected person says something, doesn't mean it is true. Smart people are wrong plenty, which is a fact that means we cannot delegate our ability to reason.

If you can formulate strong counter-arguments, I'll listen. Just don't make lazy arguments.

> Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries

The US isn't an empire. Is Germany a US territory? Is Japan a US territory? Is Iraq? No. Is Panama? No. Puerto Rico and Hawaii are happily part of the US. We don't have to use military force or economic leverage to keep them part of the US. If the US government was destroyed, we would recreate it, because it is good.

The US also championed natural rights globally, which recognizes that people have rights that are not derived from any government, but are inherent. Guess which countries reject this? China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and others.

> We barely win any of them

Winning depends on what you wanted to achieve. We don't need to win, we just need to get what we want. Our military won in Vietnam, but when conflict started again the government voted not to get involved. The Vietnamese love the US and hate China. South Koreans love the US. North Korea's leader loves the US and hates China. Japan loves the US and hates China. Saddam Hussein was killed in Iraq and we established forward bases to use against Iran. Afghanistan hates Iran. Osama bin Laden was killed. European countries and most Middle Eastern and most Asian countries are friendly with the US.

Everyone seems to recognize how Russia, Iran and China align. Our allies are getting stronger, because we're giving them tough love, while Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Iran are all getting weaker.

You can interpret all of that however you'd like, but it doesn't sound like losing. People can delude themselves all they want and the media can yell from the top of the trees how everything is awful and we're losing and so on, but reality gets a vote. Don't let other people tell you what is real. Figure it out yourself and come to your own conclusions.

> Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam

Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical. Comintern was aiming to conquer the Earth with global communism. It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2. The Soviet Union has caused more death on this planet as a result of its communist expansion threat than any other country in history. So yes, we are anti-communist. And you should be too.

> Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?

It was largely symbolic and demonstrative. Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using. There wasn't any guarantee Japan was going to surrender and you have the benefit of being in the future, which they did not. You should also try understanding what Japan was doing to other countries. It was horrific in every sense. They had to be stopped by any means. You could argue part of the strategy of using the nukes to end the war early was to pre-empt the Russians gaining ground in Japan and getting stuck with a second communist split like in Germany. That concern was certainly validated by Russia's push for Korea decades later. Korea would have been fine without Russia trying to gain communist control there.

> Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran

Countries do all kinds of things to achieve their strategic aims, the US isn't remotely unique in that regard. Still, we didn't encourage him to invade Iran and we only supported him when he started losing to prevent Iran expanding into Iraq.

> You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.

It was more complicated than that. Britain was taking advantage of Iran and Russia was trying to establish communism in Iran. The new leader was essentially getting rid of elected members of government and becoming a dictator. It wasn't a good situation to start with and the US didn't want Russia to establish communism there. Even decades later when the revolutionaries took over, the communists helped them overthrow the government and then the revolutionaries executed the communists. If everyone had left Iran alone, we probably wouldn't have gotten involved.

> Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.

Peace in Europe does not exist because of the EU. The US formed NATO with the European countries. That established a mutual defense agreement so if anyone attacked anyone else, everyone would join in and defend.

> I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice.

I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes. Far more people died from other weapons than nukes and the US has done more to prevent the proliferation of nukes than any other country. Nuking Japan also wasn't a single country decision. Multiple countries had to agree to it, because of what Japan was doing. Nobody is going to use nukes today unless they want to end their country.

> I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.

You can't change the whole world at once and even if we could, we wouldn't want to. That's a communist thing. There are monarchies and dictatorships that are largely tolerable, like Singapore. Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something. I can't know every strategic plan we've ever had or why we had it.

> I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.

The US dollar, defense agreements, preserving international waterway navigation and aggressively pushing back against communism has done far more to improve the stability of countries than any time in history. The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.

I think you have your feelings way too invested into your opinions. If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind, but I don't think the same could be said about you. If you don't have the freedom to change your mind, then you'll stagnate.

That wasn't the question you asked. The question you asked was about a couple decades later. When we helped overthrow the previous leader, it was because the fear was that he was establishing communism in Iran. He was unelected, removing the actual elected representatives and undermining the Shah. Of course after removing him, the Shah ended up not being much better, but can't win'em all.

The spark that caused the whole thing as far as I understand, is that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil which kept upsetting the population until they wanted something to be done. This probably gave communists an opportunity to come in, nationalize the oil and be the saviors, before then simply becoming the new oppressors of the population.

I don't think anybody was a hero, just Brits, Russians and the US strategizing around a country that seemed lost.

Yes, after Saddam invaded Iran, because Iran was trying to export its revolution to Iraq. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran though. It was just one more war caused by Iran exporting revolution which has happened several times in the Middle East already.

It was an opportunity to weaken Iran which is a far worse problem in the Middle East than Iraq was. Iran had fired most of its airforce pilots for not being Islamic radical enough and with their airforce in shambles, Saddam saw an opportunity. Then Iran had to rush to rehire their old airforce pilots regardless of their dedication to the revolutionary cause or regime just to fight back.

We didn't start World War 1, or World War 2, or the Korean war, or the Vietnam war. We didn't make Russia attack Ukraine. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran or Kuwait. We didn't make Iran fund terrorism around the region and the world.

We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO. We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East so it isn't constantly at war, often caused by Iran proxies.

What country is it that you're defending? Iraq? That country that invaded its neighbors, lit all the oil fields on fire, committed genocide and buried all the bodies in countless mass graves, attempted to kill the US president, attempted to blow up the World Trade Center and abducted women then raped them while recording it to show the recordings to their family to shame them? Is that what you're defending? Please tell me, I want to know.

Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?

The world is not a very nice place. Make sure you know what you're defending. We have free speech in the US and people can do their own journalistic research and reporting even if it goes against our own government. These other countries don't have free speech, so they can spread all kinds of lies about the US and ban any other opinions inside their countries. That means people become indoctrinated and find it more difficult to think for themselves to get closer to what the truth is.

> if you run one model, run glm-5.3

That is a horrible take-away from this, with only 28 tasks and a high pass rate for most models, it says almost nothing.

Test a model for your use case and use the fastest, smallest, cheapest model that 100% satisfies your use case.

Or, if you truly do need a model with strong generalized performance, definitely do not take a benchmark like this serious with such a limited task set.

I think they said they were keeping the old UD 2.0 quant for the larger sizes? So maybe they kept those the same and simply reuploaded them. They said the newer UD 3.0 quant performed worse on some things for the higher quants. So now it's a mix of UD 3.0 and UD 2.0.

Download the original model with the original template, not updated versions of the model or finetuned versions of the model.

Then create your own reasoning tests to verify that it is working correctly. You can set a specific seed value to make sure the generation is the same every time, that way you can identify any tokens that are different.

Afterwards, try making small incremental changes to the template and validate your tests each time in order to try to adopt the improvements from the newer templates. If the reasoning quality degrades, undo your changes and try again or test alternative solutions.

Well in my case I'm using llama.cpp and the mmproj is required, but I think it is just an extracted part of the original model file. Even with audio, yes it technically supports them natively and they're "encoder-free", but in practice that doesn't mean no translation or processing is required before it goes into the model. It does require much less processing though, which reduces latency.

As for coding, for sure there are many important details that a model needs to know in order to produce correctness and the smaller a model is the more it ends up training out. If there's a task you do consistently enough though, often times you can simply provide a pile of essential context so it has good enough reference to not need the extra training data.

The updated version will handle tool calling better by default, but the reasoning quality is no longer preserved and is mutilated quite badly.

Google provided incorrect settings and an imperfect template.

Unsloth modified the template and then finetuned their own version of the model to optimize for some benchmarks as a means of validating quants.

Google and Llama.cpp then adopt template changes by default, so anyone downloading the new model or even using the original model will now automatically be using it incorrectly.

Llama.cpp also uses the same inference setting defaults regardless which version of the model you use and some settings are simply defaults it uses for all models.

Then even if you account for all of these, you have to be using Gemma 4 itself correctly, which many people do not.

All of these little changes and inconsistencies hurt some of the model's original capabilities. Even if you go directly to Google's repo and download the full float 16 weights with the template they have there now, you cannot simply assume you're getting the best results.

For me that moment was Gemma 4 12B QAT. You're not suddenly going to start throwing your hardest programming problems at Gemma 4 12B QAT, it is still 15B parameters less. It's more that, aside from pelican art which isn't what local models are for, I didn't see anything on Simon's post that it couldn't assist with or largely succeed at.

It can run 80-100t/s on a laptop, can understand images natively and do bounding boxes, read tiny text, understands audio natively as well and can transcribe or translate anything you say, can do accurate long context retrieval with pretty large context windows, tool calling, excellent reasoning and is very token efficient.

It's only 7GB including the mmproj or 8GB with MTP. The Qwen 3.8 27B model Simon was using is ~18GB with MTP+mmproj, rather than 17GB alone. The point is not really that you compare these models directly, but that Gemma 4 12B QAT was really a special moment in model releases deserving of a similar reaction relative to its size, but was mutilated by Google themselves, Unsloth and Llama.cpp.

The overall appreciation I think we're seeing this year in particular is that people are easily surprised when multiple things are improving simultaneously which produce seemingly exponential changes. It isn't just that models are getting smaller, or that reasoning is getting better, or that speculative decoding is becoming mainstream, or that models can understand audio and images better now, or that they can reliably call tools which expands their capabilities, or that context windows are getting larger, or that accurate retrieval is improved, or that.... and so on. It's all of them narrowing in at once that is starting to make local models incredible and truly useful for far more use cases on the existing hardware people already have.

The nature of LLM benchmarking is that they seem to saturate public benchmarks so quick, they are a uniquely efficient case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I'm not asking anyone to take my word, they can believe or not and in practice people should be taking signals from a variety of places and doing their own testing to see how models behave in their own use cases. What I'm measuring and why I'm measuring it may not be the most important metric for your specific use case.

Most other models are simply failing at these tasks. I think the tasks are relevant to overall model capability, but they are not the only metric. You don't give a jellyfish a tool and expect it to produce wonders, so the other capabilities of the model matter.

> In my experience MTP's speed increase doesn't seem to justify the apparent loss of success at the edge

If you set manual MTP settings, you'll override dynamic adjustments the inference engine will try to do. Sometimes the dynamic adjustments aren't optimal. With the settings I use, MTP is always a net win.

> What exactly are you doing that the prompt is eating an entire 65536 window?

I'm not using the full context window.

> Surely it would be better to let it use any number of approaches that call tools to access that in parts and reason/summarize to an output file as it works through the whole thing.

Tools would not help.

So long as they have flash attention enabled, Llama.cpp enables Sliding Window Attention by default for Gemma 4 models. Even if they're using Ollama or LM Studio I would expect those to mostly be doing the right things.

Gemma 4 12B, Gemma 4 12B QAT, Gemma 4 31B, Gemma 4 31B QAT

Gemma 4 26BA4B would get close, but not quite and sometimes even get stuck in loops despite a repeat penalty.

Do not use any newer updated templates or Unsloth fixes. Use older official templates that released with the models on the huggingface repo. The template here worked: https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-12B-it/tree/657684fef0...

llama-server --model "model.gguf" -fa on -np 1 --jinja --ctx-size 262144 -b 768 -ub 768 --cache-type-k f16 --cache-type-v q4_0 --repeat-penalty 1.1 --chat-template-file "chat_template.jinja"

If you don't explicitly point to the template file, then llama.cpp will either use the template inside the model file or it will use its own template copy and your results may vary. Obviously some of the template fixes are useful to people, so it depends if you're having problems with tool calling or can't fix the tool calling in other ways for your scenario.

My experience with the QAT models was that quantizing v to q4_0 gave me better results than q8_0 or even f16. I think the Gemma QAT models may have been QAT trained to expect a q4_0 quantized v cache. If you're not using a QAT model, I would leave both at f16.

Another thing aside from using the QAT models and a Q4_0 v cache since you're having trouble fitting the models, is that you don't have to use the mmproj if you don't intend to use vision. If you need vision, but are hurting on VRAM, then you should be using --no-mmproj-offload. That will keep the mmproj loaded in system RAM instead of on your GPU. Loading images will be a little bit slower, but it can still be quite fast and you'll have more breathing room on your GPU. If you don't provide the mmproj file on the command line at all, then it won't load it anyway. If you're using some program like LM Studio, a simple thing you can do is move the mmproj and mtp files out of the directory for the model so LM studio can't find them and then it won't load them at all.

For Qwen 3.8 27B, doing any quantizing definitely hurt results a lot, so in my case I used: llama-server --model "Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf" --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-p-min 0.35 --spec-draft-n-max 2 -fa on -np 1 --jinja --ctx-size 65536 -b 768 -ub 768 --cache-type-k f16 --cache-type-v f16

Well, I will say:

#1: it does not require deep world knowledge, because that's not what local models are for.

#2: it directly attacks drive-by understanding, overly linear processing training, poor attention mechanisms, poor reasoning patterns or lazy assumptions that ignore very easy low hanging fruit.

#3: it requires solid instruction following in the face of errors. a lot of models will run into errors and then fall back into some kind of error recovery process that bypasses instruction following.

#4: does not require prompt fine tuning to tweak to each individual model. they all seem to understand.

#5: not unfair. almost every model demonstrates in their reasoning that they have the necessary information that if reasoned about appropriately, could arrive at the correct answer.

#6: not designed to add unnecessary complication that it is intended to exhaust reasoning budgets of any sort, so it is not inherently unfair to models that reason a little more or less. for example, it does not require unnecessary reasoning soaks (ie: hiding the prompt inside base-64 encoding)

#7: has real world use and is probably applicable to overall ability to generalize.

#8: can be scaled up as models get better.

#9: is a very good indicator of how bad a model is falling apart under various inference settings.

Yeah, Glimmer is excellent. You don't really test Glimmer with one-shots, because it's explicitly designed for multi-turn solution finding. The way I see it, if I've got a task that could be done either agentic or requires a lot of context (for example, dumping 600KB of API documentation and another 300KB of codebase for a project) then I would reach for Glimmer easy and it seems like it could get there most of the time.

Qwen might be useful to bring out for a second opinion on some more focused details that are largely information complete. Like, use Glimmer to bring together all the relevant critical data and evaluate what the actual problems are, then maybe prototype a solution. If it's still acting up, maybe throw the resulting context at Qwen and let it meditate on it.

I think there was some study done where ideally you would want to throw a bunch of different models at a problem since they don't all have the same perspective or diagnosis on what the problems or the solutions are.

Credit where it's due. Qwen 3.8 27B is only the second local model after Gemma 4 that managed to correctly reason through one of my private benchmarks. It took 5x as many tokens to do it and 12m30s with MTP enabled, but it did do it.

Gemma 4 reasoned through it more implicitly, while Qwen 3.8 reasoned more explicitly. Laguna and Muse Glimmer failed hard on it, though they're useful for other tasks.

The VRAM usage seems way less efficient than Gemma 4 or Glimmer though, with 32K of context taking 2.5GB of VRAM. With those, even with MTP or a DFlash model loaded, you could still fit 256k-768k of context. With Qwen 3.8 27B I can't even fit 128k if I quantize V to Q4_0. Maybe with some trial and error I can find some settings that perform well enough with a larger context window that it's still useful for longer tasks.

Lots more testing to do, though I was getting some decent results out of Muse Glimmer which was more than twice as fast and supported huge context windows, managing to solve some bugs that Gemma 4 struggled with. I can't even begin to throw that task at Qwen, because just the prompt alone would use the entire context window and then it would reason for probably that same amount.

If you've got a 32GB card, it should be a decent model even if it really is memory hungry.

EDIT: Tried a few kv cache quantization settings, but it failed with those. I designed this benchmark to be pretty brutal in the face of KLD and any reasoning quality loss, so it's not too surprising. Gemma 4's QAT held up pretty well, at least and could consistently complete it.

> For example, there is a legal requirement that Congress authorize military action longer than 60 days. They’re advancing a theory that this is unnecessary or magically resets a timer anytime a cease fire is declared but that doesn’t make it lawful, any more than those guys saying they can only be tried in admiralty courts are lawful just because they don’t want to stop what they’re doing.

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

"With minor variations in emphasis, basically all administrations since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution10 in 1973 have maintained that Con gress cannot constitutionally restrict the President’s commander-in-chief powers grounded in Article II of the Constitution."

This is not new. It is not Republican or Democrat and pressing harder on this point prevents Iran or China from thinking they can simply wait 60 days. That would not be good for the military in harm's way or for encouraging negotiation.

> We’re deterring China by losing to a much weaker opponent while simultaneously giving China a huge economic and political advantage? Giving Iran the ability to tax shipping for the first time and doing it in Chinese yuan is a deterrent in the same sense that you deter a dog by feeding it sausages.

The US attacked Iran to achieve a set of goals. The strait was not really a primary part of the initial goals, but still it's a forced issue. They are losing so badly that their only remaining option is to harass their neighbors, which will further weaken Iran's position in the region for the next 50 years. China was sanction proofing itself so that it could have breathing room to take Taiwan, but attacking Russian oil infrastructure, attacking Venezuela and attacking Iran now has China drawing from its strategic oil reserves. The less reserves they have, the less sanction proofed they are. The less likely they are to make an attempt on Taiwan. Still, we're not attacking Iran only to deter China. Remember, Iran has attempted to assassinate the US president multiple times as well as Netanyahu on top of all the other awful things they've done over the past 50 decades.

> I can see why you prefer to believe this but it sure is striking to see that politically-incorrect gun owners have their guns used to justify killing them while politically-correct ones are seen as having a right to carry theirs even when actively making illegal threats.

Look, the number of people that die this way is so infinitely small that it is not a remotely relevant part of life. You are more likely to get struck by lightning or die in a commercial airliner accident. It is not some standard policy to simply go around shooting people who have guns and have some kind of political leaning. That would probably be a hate crime. I don't doubt mistakes happen, but the few people dying this way are generally violent and not innocent. People spread video clips and sound bites that intentionally encourage a certain interpretation in order to promote hate and distrust. It's almost always propaganda. This is not simply some Rublican/Democrat thing, this is propaganda and psychological manipulation funded by countries like Russia, China and Iran.

The number of people that agree with something does not inherently make it good or true. History has proven that.

Many people don't own guns, partially because violent crime in general has declined significantly over the past 200 years. The justifications for ownership still exist, though.

The US is under attack, so the amount of anti-US propaganda is at an extreme. The lies told about the US government or what it's doing or why it's doing it are extreme.

The US is applying unitary executive theory to bypass gridlock in congress while still trying to operate within the law. They are surrounded by lawyers and thinktanks to work through this, which is far from lawless. The reason we're doing this is to deter China and push back against what they're doing in the world.

We're in a moment very much like the moment before World War 2. It's not the same, but it's similar enough that action is warranted.

As for guns, generally if someone is shot while having a gun it's because of all the other things they did that led up to that moment.

Pointless has a couple interpretations and regardless which one you pick, your argument is hard to defend. If you're operating largely in rhetoric and vibe, then it was never logical to start with.

Since you asked my opinion, I will say that it is nuanced and have thought a lot about these topics.

People need to have the power to influence their government and the government largely needs to operate in the interest of the people. It doesn't have to do what the people want, but I think governance needs to understand what the people want and interpret how best to address it. Kind of like how developers think of what users want.

The right to bear arms is critical. That is a form of power and self defense which can save your life, your neighbors life, or millions of lives from some kind of tyranny. The governmental structure of the US is so good, there is no comparison anywhere else in the world and we're not even remotely close to some sort of totalitarianism like China has.

At the same time, we do have surveillance capitalism accelerating and privacy is a form of power too. Even though I dislike it, in the current moment we're in I feel like it is unavoidable. When the threats against the state increase (whether the power of the people, or otherwise), the defenses increase too. I think most people who gravitated to HN understand the risk of threats leading to safety solutions that kill freedom and privacy a little more each time.

Iran built out a huge camera surveillance network to track their people, then Israel hacked it and used it to track them back. Surveillance capitalism is a double edged sword. You catch some types of crime, terrorism, whatever. That is great. At the same time, it opens up a huge vulnerability allowing the destruction of your whole state.

So then what about open weight models? People really do not understand the enormous scale of the threat. We do not let regular civilians run around with nuclear bombs or develop biological weapons or any number of things. It's not that the people want them and the government doesn't let us, it's that basically universally people do not want any other people to have that power either.

AI is like... mass manufacturing someone smarter than the smartest human that ever lived and allowing an infantile 16 year old with raging hormones to send a swarm of them off to cause chaos like some kind of necromancer. There are things these models know how to do that the citizens of any given country should want to largely be kept in responsible hands.

This is actually a double sided issue too, because you don't simply give everyone infinite power so they can defend against tyranny. If you've ever seen ideological activists, then you know people can be tyrannical too. Silencing you, cancelling you, ending your career, livelihood, disturbing the peace and so on. The government isn't the only threat. If the potential power of AI causes too much chaos, then the government has little choice but to crack down on society in more ways and AI can be the very thing that caused what you wanted to avoid.

I think open weight models are great, up to a point. People should own a gun for self defense and a car to get where they need to go. It's great to be able to ask private health questions to an open weight model in an era where everything you tell your doctors goes into some online database to be stolen by China. AI can help people be better at the essential things and fill in gaps where they're lacking. There are measurable points though, where models are just force multipliers beyond any reasonable norm for problematic types of tasks.

We don't need nukes. I don't need a carrier group and spy satellites. The people who control those swore to defend the constitution, which defends the people. Some people disagree that AI can ever be good enough that these scale of threats are even comparable. It's ok, they're just actually wrong in a fully logical, serious and non-rhetorical sense. The problem is that with open weight models you only have to be wrong once. That floppy someone copied in the 1990s is still floating around somewhere. In that sense it may be inevitable, but if we allow ourselves a head start then perhaps we can manage it better in the future when we're more ready.

There are a couple current mitigating factors, for now. One is that a lot of safety training and filtering is occurring, so even if some companies distill from the big companies they are getting filtered results. Another is that any model big enough to be dangerous is hard enough to run that the threat can't easily scale up in a residential or private company scenario.

None of this is going to help us from countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and so on using powerful models to crack down on their people while accelerating chaos around the world if they choose. So long as countries have nukes and can maintain ways of accurately measuring interference, there will be red lines we tell each other not to cross.

LiquidAI LFM models are amazing, but very situational. IBM Granite series are also unique and interesting for trying to reduce liability and extend local context size. Nvidia ships some and there was also that Inkling model recently. Poolside just released theirs.

Meta might release something this year. X AI's Grok is still due to release a model, if Elon keeps to his word even if they only release a distilled version. Reflection AI has been quiet, but their access to compute is ramping up. Microsoft's MAI is considering releasing some open weight models which would be great to see!

Ilya's SSI is unlikely to release an open model since he's aiming for radical safety. That bet could pay off if the existing approach produces so much chaos within the next 10-20 years that some global ban is achieved and a super safe model is promoted as the compliant route.

We don't get many huge model releases though. I think it's harder and more expensive to safety align them. Even if you do, people will work around the safety and abuse the models. Plus it makes it even easier for Chinese companies to distill things that aren't as easy over filtered APIs.

There is a lot of internet propaganda to the effect that the US is simply unable to release open weight models or that China has so many more AI companies that the US is drowning in Chinese open weight models, but it's more like we're being careful and China doesn't care. If you host a model in China, it has to be censored and downloading any models requires you to provide your identity. Huggingface is banned there. When they release their open models in the west, they don't have to care whether the models are aligned in any way.