It’s so ridiculous that many projects don’t even support pip+venv (much less system python packages. shivers). They literally check if that’s what you’re trying and pre-emptively fail.

Some projects become impossible to run in any combination because some dependency (looking at you, sentencepiece) no longer works outside a narrow set of circumstances, unless you hand build some obscure github PR, disable all the dependency checks and cross your fingers and hope the wheel builds.

And I’m sorry, but I don’t have 200GB of space, tons of spare RAM, and an intricate docker passthrough setup for every random python project. I just have like four different 3rd party managers (conda/mamba, uv, poetry… what’s the other one? Ugh)

This is spot on.

And on the apparently contradictory “AGI” development, I’ll add the Big Tech kingpens like Altman/Zuck/Musk are hyping that while doing the exact opposite. They say that, turn around, cut fundamental research, and focus more on scaling plain transformers up or even making AI ‘products’ like Zuck is. And the models they deploy are extremely conservative, architecturally.

Going on public statements from all three, I think their technical knowledge is pretty poor and they may be drinking some of their own kool-aid. They might believe scaling up transformers infinitely will somehow birth more generalist ‘in the sky’ intelligence, when in reality it’s fundamentally a tool like you describe, no matter how big it is.

I said it in too many words, but everything’s magnified. ‘AI’ is an extremely useful tool, yet the current overhype is even more insane, and has muddied everything. It’s like a caricature of the dotcom bubble, but real.

Yeah.

I mean, npm deserves some healthy fear/skepticism, but everything is relative.

There are ML hobbyist/tinkerers here. I’ve seen it on zip, db0, itjust.works.

But it all gets downvoted, and I think those folks (me included) tend to keep their heads down on “AI” topics.

You don’t see a lot of true AI bros here, but they honestly don’t know squat and wouldn’t give a good answer either.

Allegedly Google, early in this craze:

“We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither/

Ultimately the dotcom fantasy kind of panned out. A few tech companies have massive control over society now, with what is essentially cloud/internet business. They have a moat.

…But with the AI bubble, I think folks are underestimating how fast and low the “race to the bottom” is.

As random examples:

• Look at something like Nemotron 4B, which makes a lot of mundane ‘AI’ data processing people assumed to be big and power hungry (with these data centers) basically free: https://huggingface.co/jet-ai/Jet-Nemotron-4B

• Look at GLM 4.6. I can run it on my Ryzen/3090 desktop, for free, and for the first time, I feel like it’s beating Claude and Gemini in some stuff, at 7 tokens/sec: https://huggingface.co/Downtown-Case/GLM-4.6-128GB-RAM-IK-GGUF

These are both literally from the past day.

And all this is accelerating. Alternate attention is catching on (see: Qwen 80B, Deepseek experimental, IBM Granite, probably Gemini). bitnet is already proven and probably next, and reduces the cost of matrix multiplication by an order of magnitude or two.

In other words, AI as a “dumb tool” is rapidly approaching “so cheap, it’s basically free to run locally on your phone,” and you don’t need all these megacorp data centers for that. There’s no profit in it. It’s all fake planning, and the ML research crowd knows it. That’s much more extreme than the dotcom hype, where cloud hosting/dev cost is kind of a fundamental thing.

It’s kind of crazy how problematic pip is, though. There are enormous ecosystems like conda, poetry, arguably Docker all built around “pip not working right.”

I see so many people want to install vllm or something with like a 95% crash and burn rate if they aren’t already proficient with Docker, complete with the spare disk space to basically ship a whole other machine.

Meanwhile, massively complex Rust or Go or whatever packages… just work. With the native tooling, for me.

To be clear, I like Python, and I believe many issues can be smoothed with time (like improving its JIT and maybe encouraging more typing in codebases). But pip and its ecosystem are forever cursed.

1.7% is still a HUGE drop in that context. This is a sector, at a time, that does not like subscriber losses.

Yes, stuff like this works. It’s why they worry about MAGA controversy too, unfortunately.

That’s the issue, isn’t it?

I see this on the internet a lot. People posit things like “wouldn’t it be awesome if these fired devs got together” or “Why don’t they make good stuff anymore? Wouldn’t it be great if somone made a thing like this old beloved thing…”

…Except it’s already happening. Or happened.

And there’s just so much noise on the internet, it’s largely unknown to the folks who’d be interested.

To be clear, I’m not blaming OP, and I’ve done the exact same thing myself. But I still find it kind of… sad.

Anyway, thanks, I am bookmarking Exodus and Archetype Entertainment now.

This makes me think of the Ellisons buying Star Trek and Avatar. Why wouldn’t they shutter or castrate two notoriously ‘woke’, expensive, questionably profitable franchises?

Same here :(. Though to be fair, the Saudi’s political leanings aren’t a perfect parallel.

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Does the reality even matter anymore?

Pop quiz: can you guys remember the last 20 major US shootings?

I can’t. I certainly don’t know their outcomes.

Folks will internalize the first wild rumor they heard (indirectly) from Twitter or CNN or whatever before attention moves to the next shooting, and that’s the impression that lasts.

Yeah. There’s domestic pressure for this anyway, unfortunately.

Gundam

The physics of the mechs (from my very sparse knowledge of Gundam) are pretty questionable, lol, which is fine because they’re there to be spectacular.

AFAIK Huawei already forks Android (and the Play Store) for their stuff, but I have zero knowledge beyond that.

Hard, relativistic STL sci fi can still get super weird, see: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a

To add to this, Jason Schreier is a well known, and well sourced, gaming journalist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Schreier

But you aren’t wrong. There’s no way to know that via Bluesky unless you’ve happen to read his stuff from Bloomberg and before. It’s almost like Twitter is a terrible format for news or something…

It would be interesting if EA pulled away from lootboxes for their owner’s ideological reasons.

What’s China going to do? Fork Android more officially?

Some non-Gentoo distros ship CPU-optimized builds anyway, so even that is quite questionable.