Live data from Hacker News

There is minimal downside to switching to open models

marble.onl

291–300 of 351 posts

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#291
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"UN Security Council action" is a broad term that can include deployment of international UN-led military forces, as in the Korean War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command 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/wik…

"Russia blocks Security Council action on Ukraine" ... "A ‘no’ vote from any one of the five permanent members of the Council stops action on any measure put before it. The body’s permanent members are: China, France, Russian Federation , the United Kingdom, and the United States." https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1112802 (emphasis mine) This is 101-level UN stuff. If Ukrainian diplomats were unaware that Russia…

  > This is 101-level UN stuff. If Ukrainian diplomats were unaware that Russia can veto Security Council resolutions, that means they were totally incompetent.
There are ways around it, if there's a will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...

It is safe to say that the present lack of leadership from the US was not foreseen at the time. It was unimaginable that Russia would launch a major ground war in Europe and that the American president would blame the victim of the aggression and try to coerce them into surrender while sucking up to the aggressor. This is not how things were conducted back then. It was the era of Schwarzkopfs showing strength and resolve by giving presentations on how coalition tanks had pummeled the enemy in the past few weeks, not of Sullivans showing weakness and indecisiveness by endlessly yapping about "escalation".

The core problem is that the US has spent almost a century embedding itself in all kinds of relationships (cultural, political, economic, military), but has lost the ability to carry out that central role. Biden did not save Ukraine. The limited but valuable military support fostered an unhealthy relationship that gave the US a veto over Ukraine's (and other allies') actions, but the US leaders do not have the statemanship to use that power responsibly. Biden's legacy is the shortsighted micromanagement that turned the fast and effective Ukrainian counteroffensives of 2022 into slow and costly trench warfare of 2026, all while emboldening enemies like Iran to launch assaults like October 7th.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you care about not being a sharecropper on Sam's or Dario's plantation Couldn't have put it better myself. That's what all this comes down to. Owning the hardware, owning the inference. Not perpetually renting them out on a meter like in the dystopian future they're envisioning.

You also have the option to not use AI

Yeah but the truth is I don't want to go back to the pre-LLM world. I've been programming alone for over ten years. Having a coding buddy to talk to, collaborate with or just bounce ideas off of quite literally changed my life. I don't want to go back to solo programming, and my projects aren't exactly swimming in a sea of active contributors.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#293
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, on a 96GB Mac Studio and Gemma+Qwen, it's definitely fully doable. fully doable but not really for coding on 16GB. but svelter models and cheaper (eventually) hardware are coming!

Macs are expensive hardware, but I'm always seeing people running LLMs on them. Is anyone running on cheaper generic hardware and Linux?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Q4_K_M.gguf spread across few 8-16GB GPUs is cheap as reward points for a comparable Mac if you don't mind heat, noise, and not-blazing-fast generation speeds.

Most ATX cases only has 7 PCIe I/O shields and can't take more than 3x double slot cards, but many gaming systems can take 2x double slot full length 16GB cards, and they should be fine for many purposes. Cooling is most easily done by a squirrel cage fan mounted with a 3D printed bracket at the back.

Cheap parallel action crimping tools for Molex 5556 works too - PCIe 8-pin is NOT 5557, it's differently keyed, so the specifically PCIe intended housings have to be used for cables, if you are crimping your own.

No one is mining crypto anymore, and crypto PSUs are being dumped dirt cheap, should you want a stable bulk 12V supply.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#294
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that gets me about anthropic red lines is "of Americans", okay so the rest of the civilized world is up for grabs then? It's okay to destabalize allies with sabotaged tests (in machine learning) and data exfiltration outside America? What gets me the most is that they claim that the model should follow the https://www.anthropic.com/constitution and they claim that it's embedded into the model. However, syste…

> anthropic red lines Alleged red lines. Could be just talking points for garnering sympathy. Big tech aren’t exactly known for being truthful, especially big tech partnering with esteemed Palantir.

[deleted]

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you ever read Manufacturing Consent? A conspiracy is not necessary for wide-spread propaganda campaigns—just a confluence of incentives that act against the common interest (even in the US) but work in the interest of the ruling class.

and then Chomsky goes on to form a deep online friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#296

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…

>I'm of the opinion that there is considerably more wailing about US government propaganda than actual US government propaganda.

okay....

>People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples.

YOU'VE ALREADY SAID THAT

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#297
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever read Manufacturing Consent? A conspiracy is not necessary for wide-spread propaganda campaigns—just a confluence of incentives that act against the common interest (even in the US) but work in the interest of the ruling class.

and then Chomsky goes on to form a deep online friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

The idea of reading is that you yourself think and reason about it, not that you blindly trust anything based on the author's name, deeds, or reputation. Ad hominems are a cheap way to remain ignorant and - yet again - fall into the trap of blindly believing some other third party.

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#298
post #243

I find the attitude shown in this post very surprising. On the one hand, the post starts with a story of adopting Linux and other FOSS. The core of FOSS is giving its users the ability to understand and modify software they run. On the other hand, the rest of the post is about using a tool (LLM) that the author has no way to modify and no way to understand. Huge matrices of floats are at best comparable to compiled c…

I’d disagree wrt “modify”. There are all sorts of tools for modifying LLM weights (ie to remove refusals, remove layers or experts, merge models, finetune, and more) and a quick glance at huggingface or civit will show those in very active use. I don’t think the hardware requirements are relevant. If a research lab publishes the code their particle collider runs under the GPL, that doesn’t make it not OSS even though…

You can also edit binary distributions of models with means besides changing their weights. See "LLM Neuroanatomy: How I Topped the LLM Leaderboard Without Changing a Single Weight."

On the spectrum of:

  careful engineering--hacking--mad science
This kind of thing falls far towards the mad science end of the scale, but has proven effective.

https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/rys/

Re: There is minimal downside to switching to open models

#299
post #273
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not an European company serving the LLM That's a pretty big downside if data privacy and sharing is one of the main concerns.

I'd like to see some real reasoning here that is based on facts.

One of the facts is the existence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act, in conjunction with https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2705 and https://www.nsa.gov/Signals-Intelligence/FISA/.
Post reply on HN