I own some laser tag equipment that’s amazing hardware and has absolutely shitty software. I rebuilt the entire server side of the software stack using a local LLM (Qwen3.6 35B A3B) running on my laptop. I’m very happy with the outcome, I never could have done that myself.

Has anyone ever taught you about the dysphemism treadmill and euphemism treadmill?

Banning words, or trying to reframe them as bad has never worked. It just pushes people to use different words that end up with the same meaning.

Sexism, Racism, Ageism, all the isms… they will always exist as long as more than a handful of humans exist. Humans in large groups are pretty terrible. We didn’t evolve to be particularly nice.

The answer to that is yes… Everyone should be able to do a little bit of plumbing.

However you don’t need to a plumber every time you use the toilet so that’s a bad example.

The concern is scale, Someone cooks your food every time you eat. One person can only cook for a limited number of humans. It only takes a dozen people to actively provide water to every house in a city.

The problem with your argument is that humans need to eat somewhere between 2 and 5 times a day. Nothing else on your list comes anywhere close to that level of frequency or importance. Just because you learn how to cook doesn’t mean you have to cook every meal either. You should still just know how to do it.

That being said, there is an economic line where this matters. If you make $100 an hour, and have the opportunity to work overtime, cooking is a waste of your time unless you’re batch cooking or just doing it for enjoyment. However, If you’re making $12 an hour, the time cooking likely saves you more money than you would make working and then using that to pay for meals out. The actual tipping point will change depending on your wage and the cost of food.

I’m a bit of a wierdo in this, I have not once in my almost 40 years of life ever ordered food delivered to me. I’ve gone out to eat, I’ve picked up takeout myself, but I have never had food delivered to my home. I make enough for that to make sense, but I just don’t.

So many exceptions to that one that it’s useless. You absolutely can overpower bad technique in a lot of situations.

Go watch idiots break car windows in rescues. If you smash it hard enough, it will eventually break. Whereas a small tap with a sharp object in a corner can crack it with almost no force at all.

Except this one is actually false, you can in fact polish a turd. Here’s the Mythbusters clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

I’m running Qwen 3.6 35B A3B (the MoE model) on an 8GB Vram Nvidia GPU with 32 GB of ram, with tweaking (and Turboquant) I’ve got it up to 30-40 Tokens per second and a 260k Context. It’s very usable. I’ve seen people report success with Dual 3060 Cards, but you’re still talking $1000-1500 for that kind of setup even if you have parts of it already.

Slammers were metal, pogs were not.

The best way to fix the cost of living crisis in the first world is to tax the absolute shit out of land value (not property value, land value which doesn’t include the building)

I’m talking like a 10-20% tax per year on the value of the land. So if a house is worth $1.6 million, and $1 million of that is the land, the tax per year is somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000.

Now you might think, there’s no way anyone could afford that… and you would be correct.

The point of the tax is to do two things A) reduce the value of the land (which in turn makes the tax cheaper) and B) for pieces of land that are still extremely valuable, force them to be developed into dense units (which don’t increase the tax since it’s on the land only) and spread the tax out among more people to make it reasonable.

The tax amounts collected should be returned to everyone via a basic income and/or income tax reductions.

This makes it so that say a family of 5, living in a reasonable amount of house for them, gets enough back to not pay more at the end of the day. While that retired couple with a 5 bedroom house practically downtown gets very little back and a high tax bill, pushing them to sell that to a family or even a developer depending on the market there.

It hurts people who take up too much valuable land, and rewards people who choose to live in condos or townhomes if they want to be in town, or to live further out if they want a detached home.

Side effect, it also entirely fucks over property speculators. Developers can still keep doing their thing, just better because now they don’t have to pay a stupid amount for the land up front. They just have to build at a reasonable pace to reduce the tax bill, rather than holding a project in limbo while the values all go up around them.

Being concerned about at technology and being against that technology are not synonymous.

Companies and programmers who are using it for real world development don’t care about $1000. A good programmer will run a company $10k or even $20k a month for their salary. If they can add even 50% to the output from that programmer they will throw $2000 a month at it and not even blink an eye.

The Anti-AI folks don’t talk to that kind of person much. They’re not running in the same social circles.

Meanwhile, I have a working application I built to replace a shitty corporate android app for a product I own that’s used for my side hustle. Built using an agentic harness using a local opensource LLM. Coding such a thing myself was beyond my development skill level, and it probably would have cost $100k-200k to pay a programmer to rebuild it to the level that it’s currently at now.

I only park in one specific aisle at Costco. I will wait for someone to walk back to their car just to get a spot there.

That has nothing to do with the technology. The last crash was caused by a global virus, and the one before that was the banking system…

For an equivalent prompt and similar quality answer, yes. Inference prices are dropping.

However, higher quality answers (or more complex prompt handling) are currently going up in inference price.

The fun part will be once quality hits a point where the average user (or even business) doesn’t care about the incremental quality change any more. Then it’s going to be a race to the bottom for performance per dollar.

Who cares if the not all companies or investors make money? They can make their bets, some will win and some will lose. I just want better tech for cheaper prices.

We’re all products of our environment.

The ironic part about your statement is that you seem to have negative feelings towards your parents open sexuality, but there are cultures where that’s within the realm of normal. It just so happens that the environment you were raised in outside your home happens to consider the environment you were raised in inside your home dysfunctional.

Especially in areas of extreme poverty, there often isn’t enough space for privacy, so it just isn’t a thing. If you have a single room hut with 14 children… that didn’t happen because the parents snuck off into the bushes every time. It’s not considered improper or dysfunctional.

When they start acting like it.

First three always, fourth sometimes, definitely not the last two.

You still don’t get it.

You don’t need to eat Lettuce to be healthy, you’ve been taught to think that way but it’s not even close to the truth.

Do you think that people 100 years ago had fresh produce all the time? That’s not how it worked for most of human history and they definitely ate healthier than we do now.

Frozen vegetables don’t have extra salt. Canned sometimes does but a) salt isn’t unhealthy and b) you can rinse them to get most of it off if you wanted.

Juice is not healthy. That’s pure marketing bullshit. It’s almost as bad as soda.

Your mindset is wrong. You expect what society has told you to to do. That’s expensive because our society is built around selling you shit you don’t need.

This is only true if you have fallen into the trap of not understanding what healthy means.

Eating healthy can actually be very cheap, you just won’t get to eat the things that societies thinks are exciting or the most delicious. You won’t be getting “I can’t believe it’s not meat” and the latest type of chia seed detox bullshit.

You can eat rice, lentils, onions, carrots, potatoes, oats, chickpeas, beans, tomatoes, bananas, and some dairy products and keep your meal prices down to less than a dollar while filling all nutritional requirements.

A basic Indian Dahl on rice works out to significantly less than a dollar per serving if you buy the ingredients in more than single use packages, 500 calories, 17 grams of protein, 8 grams of fat, and 80 grams of carbs for $0.75 is pretty fucking healthy.

Two servings of oats and a banana for breakfast? 50 cents, for again around 500 calories, 17 grams of protein (mostly the oats), and 7 grams of fat. You could splurge on a bit of yogurt and keep it under a dollar easily.

In terms of “effort” if you consider cooking 10 portions of Dahl for an hour and then freezing them individually to be too much effort, you don’t actually care about the cost of eating, you’re just too lazy.

That last thing could be said for most humans, especially those in the lower salary brackets. We still employ them in droves, and supervisors to supervise them too.