I do indeed hate living under capitalism

I’m actually building LoRAs for a project right now, and found that qwen3-8b-base is the most flexible model for that. The instruct is already biased for prompting and agreeing, but the base model is where it’s at.

Yup, and this is precisely why it was such a monumental mistake to move away from GPL style copyleft to permissive licenses. All that achieved was to allow corporations to freeload.

I very much agree there, but think of how much worse it would be if we were stuck dealing with proprietary corporate tech instead.

How is that wishful thinking? Open models are advancing just as fast as proprietary ones and they’re now getting much wider usage as well. There are also economic drivers that favor open models even within commercial enterprise. For example, here’s Airbnb CEO saying they prefer using Qwen to OpenAI because it’s more customizable and cheaper

“We’re relying a lot on Alibaba’s Qwen model. It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” he said. “We use OpenAI’s latest models, but we typically don’t use them that much in production because there are faster and cheaper models.”

I expect that we’ll see exact same thing happening as we see with Linux based infrastructure muscling out proprietary stuff like Windows servers and Unix. Open models will become foundational building blocks that people build stuff on top of.

I mean you can believe whatever you like. I’m obviously not going to convince you of anything here. We’ll just have to wait and see who’s right.

Europe is pretty much entirely dependent on US platforms having failed to develop their own the way China and Russia did. There’s no European Yandex or Baidu equivalent, no European Alibaba, and so on.

A few more

• The US withdraws from NATO causing it to fall apart
• The US annexes Greenland
• The US invades Venezuela
• A country exits the EU
• A major financial crash in the west
• Israel and the US attack Iran
• Far right parties form governments in major European countries
• Organized resistance of the AFU collapses
• Ukraine goes bankrupt due to insufficient funding from the west
• There’s a major break up between the US and Europe

maybe it’s a vacuum lifter :)

Hopefully this stuff pans out. I’d love see it happen.

This is existing high performance hardware that you can buy. I’d love for there to be something equivalent built using RISCV, but there’s not.

Honestly, I suspect it makes very little difference in practice which one you’re using if you’re going to communicate with people outside Proton. If I use Gmail, and you send me an email from your Proton account, guess what happens.

I haven’t actually tried that. I got it running on my M1, but only used it with the laptop screen.

My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.

The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.

Exactly, and there is already some work happening in that regard. This project is focusing on making a high performance RISCV architecture https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

I really hope the project doesn’t die, they had some people leave recently and there was some drama over that. Apple hardware is really nice, and with Linux it would be strictly superior to macos which is just bloated garbage at this point. I’m also hoping we’ll see somebody else make a similar architecture to M series using ARM or RISCV targeting Linux. Maybe we’ll see some Chinese vendors go RISCV route in the future.

In terms of functionality, it works well. The main limitation is software availability. If you rely on anything that can’t be built for the architecture then it’s not going to be a good daily driver.

It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:

I am very impressed with how smooth and problem-free Asahi Linux is. It is incredibly responsive and feels even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 7945HX and 64GB of RAM.

M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.

It’s amazing how people just can’t learn the lesson that the problem isn’t that a particular oligarch owns a public forum, but that public forums are privately owned in the first place.

I’m betting within a decade if it actually works