lrvick

5 percent is generous!

Still, many of us are experimenting with ways to decentralize power and have no interest in the traders and grifters. We have an interest in buying things online with privacy like VPNs or servers. Donating to people that were cut off from banks like political dissidents. Having some access to liquidity that will work even when a false accusation freezes your bank accounts. Or a way to pay creators tiny amounts of value in exchange for content without needing ads or big payment network fees. See projects like LBRY making an alternative to Youtube. Most of the interesting things happening in crypto are happening quietly without VC marketing budgets to attract the finance bros.

It is important these experiments continue to evolve until something checks enough boxes for the average person to trust it more than a bank or paypal.

This may take decades to get right, but humanity will be better for it.

As someone that feels both parties are irredeemably corrupt, I left because I am anti authoritarian and Twitter both before and after Musk has repeatedly unfairly applied rules for clear political reasons which made it no longer a fair or honest platform to participate in.

Because the big centralized corporate banks having complete control of our lives is a great solution that we should never try to compete with in decentralized and sovereign ways?

I use Freetube instead of YouTube exactly because no login, no algorithm, no ads, no sponsored content. Just chronological actual content from channels I care about.

It really is a big difference.

That said I would only -consume- content ripped from YouTube. I have no account and no interest in publishing there.

I went down the same path starting about a decade ago with airplane mode, and deleting apps until my phone was so boring and rarely used I canceled my cell subscription about 8 years ago.

Have not carried a phone at all since. I rarely carry any electronics at all and exclusively use cash in person to make me mostly digitally invisible IRL.

Stopped using X and all big tech services. Google, Apple, Microsoft... even deleted my Facebook and Linkedin with thousands of connections. Github I have not used in years and will probably delete once I finish migrating repos to my self hosted git.

Other than email, Matrix, and online forums like this one, I pretty much just use a terminal, and will probably do those things in a terminal soon too as my locally hosted AI helps me rapidly write better CLI tooling.

Also exclusively use freely licensed open source software and self host almost everything I rely on, including AI. I have never been happier or more productive in my entire life.

My worry is rarely about an employee being dishonest. It is about what a dishonest person will do to that employee to obtain their access.

Any organization putting billions of value in the control of any single individual or computer should be treated as though they were caught trying to donate to North Korea with plausible deniability.

If the tech never gets any better, I already have the power at home to re-create almost any software that exists.

Also home training and torrenting are a thing now too. Open weight models will never stop being released one way or the other.

Fair Enough. Edited to make the same point in a way that I believe complies.

Those are all pcie cards marketed and sold to consumers that run on consumer boards. I bought one at a time over months whenever I find cheap used ones on ebay, always under 2k. A single card would be plenty if this was not my career and if I was not working on many things in parallel.

This whole rig cost less than the car the typical fast food worker bought with a loan to get to work.

But yet they can afford to pay Anthropic $200/mo forever?

This hardware pays for itself pretty fast.

Prices will of course come WAY down, but even today, even rideshare and delivery drivers still manage to get loans to buy cars that cost tens of thousands of dollars because they need it do their job.

People that need AI to do their job should consider owning the means of production as a top priority IMO instead of being perpetual renters without any privacy or defense against getting priced out.

Many sessions working in parallel breaking a problem into small parts can chew through any complex task I have been able to imagine. Even complex software reproducibility and compiler bugs that previously I spent months solving as one of something like a dozen people in the world with substantial expertise in this area.

I literally put 3 GPUs in a machine and let it crank for 2 weeks until it built a microkernel OS for itself and wrote its own network driver to get online a few days ago.

I am not sure many more complex problems in software exist than that.

There is no reason for me to ever subscribe to any AI providers other than maybe code-review diversity from different models.

[flagged]

Damn spell check. I typed it correctly the first time.

Anyway, I have 8 r9700 GPUs racked up that can run a dozen or so sessions of qwen 3.8 flash next at once at > 100tps each.

I build operating systems and fix compilers with them and reverse engineer anything I want. Never given money to Sam or Dario or anyone else for tokens. If consumer gpus and models never got any better, I am all set.

As someone that has audited most of the major crypto custodians, who mostly ignored my advice and chose speed over security, I am honestly not even a little bit surprised.

Seriously, often many members of an engineering team have the ability to move billions of dollars in value solo.

Negligence is absolutely the default.

I wonder how long before people figure out that you can run alliterated models locally on consumer hardware capable of doing all this without help from Sam or Dario.