Its interesting I didn’t see any nuance in the initial response.

But yes I don’t disagree consumers shoot themselves in the foot constantly for various reasons, mostly ignorance.

Brand loyalty, propaganda marketing, etc etc

The problem with your latter half is things like… Effective monopolies on required goods, small businesses going down because a Walmart opened up then jacked up prices, cable companies agreeing to not compete in geographical areas, regulatory capture in various industries, etc etc.

It’s not as easy as “market self corrects”

I don’t understand why you think it’d be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldn’t we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?

Think about hearing aides or other similar “enhancements” wherein were simply adjusting the input in a way and the brain is still able to process it.

I would agree it wouldn’t be the same as a literal human, thinking like Fallout 4 style synths, I consider them people (in universe of course lol) even if they’re not literally humans.

If you like Bethesda games, check out some of the wabbajack modlists

At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?

I still think you’re conflating the aspect of life we experience as somehow separate from the procedure our brain takes to present that to you.

I’d say mods is where the true value lies, I’ve extended my Bethesda gametime significantly because I can install modpacks and get complete overhauls in various flavors.

I know there are mods on PS/Xbox but it’s much more limited and most require payment on consoles AFAIK.

Steam frequently has deals though, look at the price history on fallout 4 (don’t have one for anniversary upgrade unfortunately)

It has dropped to below $10 8 times in the past year alone

Ah yes, the classic blame consumers for big business decisions.

Could push for government regulation/oversight or even developmental efforts to relieve the supply constraints.

Nah consumer bad 😠

I literally thought it was Epstein on first look

“If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.”

Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.

Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.

There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.

I do agree Chrome was the better browser, hell I switched to it primarily after a few years because of how much faster it was.

I don’t really think that’s the case anymore though, Chrome has been enshittifying for years now, and in my experience, they’re pretty on-par, except of course I can use extensions without the impending doom spectre on Firefox and on mobile.

Always? Firefox existed before Chrome

That’s kind of their whole thing

Status symbols

Exactly my feelings as well, even “time saving” MTX is insidious because it provides an incentive for the developers to slow progress to entice users to buy the mtx.

I’m mostly fine with cosmetic-only MTX but that’s because I’m able to control my impulses on buying those kinds of things the majority of the time, unfortunately I have known people who are not good at impulse control and end up spending literally thousands of dollars on bullshit cosmetics. They don’t even play the game they spent all that money on anymore.

I mean one is literally required to play the game, the other does not.

So depending on what micro transactions are available, it seems worse to require a monthly sub then have truly optional/cosmetic mtx

Oh I know, it’s just what I see in every thread when some kind of outage or major bug is discovered. Half the comments are hurrdurr probably vibecoded.

A large majority definitely hate it to the point of having blinders on for sure.

On one side you have corpo hype/lies, and the other is LLM is slop garbage and terrible for anything, also developers wrote perfect code before LLMs and now everything that breaks is AI slop caused.

They’re putting copilot in everything, it’s not just github that has copilot lmfao

“They’re burning cash too fast”

Their most recent earnings was 82.9B just last quarter, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I think the reality is open source and normal people are who continuously push progress forward, how much of the internet scaffolding is literally on the backs of open source projects?

A shit load.

LLMs are no different, and I can’t agree with you that open source models are not a threat to the big players.

I’m not sure why you’re downplaying what I’m saying about extending access and lowering prices, yes of course corporations don’t do it out of the goodness of their capitalist hearts, but history shows that it does in fact reduce in cost over time, which was your initial point. “Oh must be nice for you that you can afford $20 a month and have your own homelab to self host models.”

I grew up lower middle class, my home was repossesed by the bank during the housing crisis and my parents divorced.

I moved out at 18 and joined the workforce and have managed to get a middle-class wage via my efforts and a bit of luck. I hate my job and the morons in charge but the job market is shit.

I love open source software and the ideas beyond knowledge and work should be shared with others so we can all benefit (which is unfortunately not how this capitalist system works) and yet we have Linux, we have an amazing amount of open source projects that people do simply because they want to. Those are the people we should support and the ones who freely train and fine tune open source models.

To your point about “software doesn’t become faster with time” mother fucker I remember windows 95, you’re delusional if you don’t think we’ve come an insane amount. I remember webpages taking minutes to load, interlacing vs non to help with image loading.

In the realm of LLMs, the software itself on the open source side has improved leaps and bounds in just the past 6 months on my same hardware.

I understand your negativity, it’s hard not to fall into it when the world is how it is right now and things feel like (and are) getting worse in most ways.

Phones require specialized hardware and designing, to run and produce, LLMs only require normal consumer grade hardware and the desire to learn how to make it work. Will it ever be mainstream? Based on Linux vs Windows/Mac, probably not, but that doesn’t mean it’s pointless or impossible.