231–240 of 351 posts
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From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.
"The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought" https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
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I had a look at eurouter.ai and it seems like an extremely bad offer. - The prices are ridiculous (15 % markup for free account). - They have a rate limit of 1000 requests per month, unless you pay 40€ per month for ... what exactly is their value proposition? - They have a single provider (TensorX) for DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with a cache read cost that is over 100 times higher than DeepSeek ($0.44 vs $0.003625). Notably,…
Hosting anything in EU must cover redtape and carbon taxes in electricity bill.
Low carbon does not equal expensive, either. Solar is the cheapest power generation method. Solar plus grid scale batteries is in the same cost ballpark as natural gas.
There’s nothing about data centers that is inherently a high carbon business. It’s only a high carbon business in places like the US where political leadership purposefully fights against renewable energy projects that private businesses want to undertake on their own dime.
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No, as long as they follow the requirements, especially the data privacy agreements. What would you? Price?
Output quality immediately comes to mind, of course. Models are converging, but they converge in bands, and frontier is frontier. I would not like to have any workflows in any area of my business where output is generated by an assortment of models from different providers. For trivial, mundane tasks that might be fine, but it certainly doesn't apply across the board.
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"The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought" https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
Same old tired arguments from Americans about how if you don't let fascists have free speech, it's not really free speech.
In any case, practically speaking, censorship helped the rise of the Nazis: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would...
You can see far-right parties surging across Europe. Speech restriction isn't just authoritarian, it's also counterproductive.
As an American I am actually quite worried about Europe's far right. Those guys are very scary, and it's creepy the way they have been able to influence the right here in the US. The MAGA movement was far more multicultural back in the 2010s, before Europe's far right was able to influence it with their ethnic cleansing and pogrom fantasies.
If you're in a hole, maybe stop digging?
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/... The age old joke; A Russian and an American are drinking at a bar The Russian says "I'm impressed by american propaganda. It's so subtle but effective." The american responds "What are you talking about, we don't do propaganda."
I'm of the opinion that there is considerably more wailing about US government propaganda than actual US government propaganda. People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples. Probably because there are legal restrictions on covert propaganda in the US: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covert_propaganda To be clear, I'm happy to grant that: * The Pentagon won…
> ... misinformation (likely Ukrainian-origin) ...
Your post is also "a half-baked, un-falsifiable conspiracy theory with little supporting evidence" ;)
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From all the large governmental institutions, the EU is the one currently holding up traditional western values. That gives it street cred in this subject.
With all the issues in the US and generally wrong direction, I can’t remember them ever arresting people for mean tweets in the way that Germany and the UK have. They all seem to be running full speed towards a surveillance state.
The numbers commonly being reporting include stalkers, criminals, etc.
You don't get arrested for being politically incorrect in the UK. You get arrested for posting something threatening, harassing, inciteful, or grossly indecent. Also, being arrested and being charged are two completely separate things.
I’ve been wanting to get better acquainted with local inference but I don’t have the hardware, which has made me think about something I haven’t seen discussed, which is local collaboratives. The economics makes it seem like a group of people joining together to run good hardware and an open model might make sense, but I haven’t seen anything like this mentioned. Have I been missing it? I think it would be pretty nea…
The reason you don't see more of this is because everyone does the math, realizes it's not a good deal, and then gives up on the idea. There's a post at the top of /r/localllama about this exact math right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ubrcwj/tokenom... TL;DR: Running GLM 5.2 is going to cost about $20K minimum, and that's going to be painfully slow compared to the cloud hosted versions. Even the…
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They would quantize the model. That'd make it cheaper to run, and have slightly worse output but it would still generate outputs with a similar feel, derived from a compressed version of the same knowledge base etc. They wouldn't even need to do this uniformly, quantized versions of the model could be routed only a subset of the requests. They could do this to nerf the old model, or more likely just to give themselve…
And guess what all the providers of open models do: They quantize, badly.
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I'm of the opinion that there is considerably more wailing about US government propaganda than actual US government propaganda. People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples. Probably because there are legal restrictions on covert propaganda in the US: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covert_propaganda To be clear, I'm happy to grant that: * The Pentagon won…
> Many Europeans believe ... > ... misinformation (likely Ukrainian-origin) ... Your post is also "a half-baked, un-falsifiable conspiracy theory with little supporting evidence" ;)
If the US was attacked the way Ukraine was attacked, and foreign intervention was key to our survival as a nation, I expect the Pentagon would deploy foreign info ops in that situation. That doesn't seem like a heavy lift to me.
Occam's Razor: If something is a core/essential national interest, it's reasonable to expect a government to pull out all the stops. But governments are fairly ineffectual for the most part. Everyone saw how the USG mishandled e.g. COVID, mishandled the war with Iran, yet we expect the USG to be wizards at covert propaganda? It doesn't really track. I'm sure we are doing covert propaganda here and there, and we would ramp it up in an emergency.
Anyways, if you want to point to specific content you suspect as USG propaganda, be my guest. My point is, the fact that people rarely do this seems evidence against widespread USG propaganda. "They don't point it out because the propaganda is too good" has a suspicious un-falsifiable quality to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/... The age old joke; A Russian and an American are drinking at a bar The Russian says "I'm impressed by american propaganda. It's so subtle but effective." The american responds "What are you talking about, we don't do propaganda."
I'm of the opinion that there is considerably more wailing about US government propaganda than actual US government propaganda. People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples. Probably because there are legal restrictions on covert propaganda in the US: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covert_propaganda To be clear, I'm happy to grant that: * The Pentagon won…
A few years prior to the Budapest Memorandum, the UN Security Council had authorized military action to liberate Kuwait. 42 countries participated in the coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Gulf_War
The expectation at the time was clearly more than just "we'll bring it up at the UN for dicussion". The current weaseling over the exact wording looks weak and pathetic, and has a certain flavor of propaganda that tries to convince everyone of something that's not quite true. The fact remains that the US strong-armed Ukraine out of nuclear weapons, and when Ukraine was eventually invaded, tried to strong-arm Ukraine into surrender. This reflects very poorly on the US.