nl

I'm aware there are downsides.

I'm old enough to have lived without the internet. I'll take this over that anytime.

> Facebook has shown it cares more for money than being a steward. Don't see how you can trust them.

It's precisely this love of money that make me trust them. They value what they get from my data, so they do their best to keep it to themselves.

That's much better than ISP (for example) that sell raw traffic data.

> Self custody doesn't require using a hardware ledger

Does this mean you recommend not using one? Because that goes against all the common best practice recommendations from when I did a couple of years working in Web3 stuff a few years back.

> I think it's naive to suggest that self-custody is just a novelty with no value.

That's not what I suggested.

I suggested that it is less secure over time than centralized exchanges, even with the things you listed.

> Since the invention of say Bitcoin

Convenient date to pick there.

> which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?

NVDA.

It's a productive use of resources, not a last-fool-standing pyramid scheme.

I'm a long time HN user. I work on privacy tech (as in I'm paid to work on it).

I have a Facebook account and use Instagram.

My reasons are many:

I believe it should be my choice what happens to my data, and don't particularly care if Meta has the parts I share with them.

I don't believe advertising is intrinsically evil, and in fact I think it's probably been a net-good for society.

I think Meta is a better steward of my data than ISPs or telecoms.

I know someone who isn't an Elon fan at all but has switched completely from Dot to Grokbot. Most of their company has done the same and now they are contemplating cancelling their OpenAI plans (they still use Claude heavily, but Duet isn't available on Teams plans).

I agree with this.

Further:

> They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts.

I completely reject this framing. Learning on something has always been part of the social contract (public libraries are a great example).

Venice AI just seems completely sketchy though.

They have what seems good prices, but then you realize the "Pro" plan only includes "Pro" models, not "Advanced" and there is no list of what is what.

So you Google and find the Reddit conversations where it turns out hardly anything is included.

I think the point the OP was making was that you can rent this for a couple of hours when you need it, and then it makes sense. If you are using it say 2 hours a week (or even 5 hours a week) it's going to be much cheaper than building your own hardware for a long long time.

No the OP, but I keep a $10 rolling budget on vast.ai. I tend to use it more for training things, but equally as useful. I pay about $0.15/hour for an A4000.

OTOH if you are really concerned about privacy it's probably not the best choice (it's random people's machines).

It can be, yes.

It's certainly not a clear downside.

This is an odd distinction.

Google still has to build and run the chips they rent to Anthropic. I think from their last earnings Google makes ~30% on it, excluding R&D costs. It's a nice business for them, but hardly the thing that is going to make or break Anthropic as a business.

>You're just glancing over every

You're glossing over

> every single niche they've tried to launch and failed to get any traction on.

This isn't true. I personally know a company that has trained over 300 companies this year to use Claude Cowork mostly for "business operations" type tasks.

People love offloading boring, repetitive tasks to it. And the spend is spending - most start on a free plan and after 3 months have multiple people on the Teams plans.

> Chinese models are pretty much on par.

There isn't even an open source harness that is close to Cowork. ChatGPT work is closest, but everything else if coding focused and a mess for people who aren't coders.