“If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.” -- @pluralistic pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/tab… ❤️👍
Pluralistic: Trump’s America can’t even win a rigged game (22 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (22 Jul 2026)Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow)
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![Is there a way of writing the expression<br>\[ \sum_{n=1}^m f(n) \]<br>in a way that omits the term where $n=a$?</p><p>I know it could be written as<br>\[ \left( \sum_{n=1}^m f(n) \right) - f(a) \]<br>but this doesn't work when $f(a)$ is undefined.](https://social.jlamothe.net/photo/13528377976a61653463c9a386467268-1.png "Is there a way of writing the expression<br>\[ \sum_{n=1}^m f(n) \]<br>in a way that omits the term where $n=a$?</p><p>I know it could be written as<br>\[ \left( \sum_{n=1}^m f(n) \right) - f(a) \]<br>but this doesn't work when $f(a)$ is undefined.")
Resuna
in reply to zerok • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Resuna • • •A model that I run on my laptop that doesn't even trigger my fan when it executes is definitionally not "a waste of energy." I consume more CPU when I do a gaussian blur in the Gimp.
Jacob Ibáñez 🔒
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Jacob Ibáñez 🔒 • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Ovidi Nawer
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Using neural networks is, with 1 unit of exception in cancer localization which still can't be truly verified and is rather shaky, an invitation to go back to the point we're now: religious glorification that allows further bullshitry to happen, without any reason besides a "maybe it will be better"
Sadly can't be a fun experiment anymore
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Ovidi Nawer • • •Running Whisper or an Ollama-installed chatbot on my own computer doesn't require anyone to improve anything - no more than my piping the output of a shell command through grep puts pressure on the grep maintainers to release a new version.
Ovidi Nawer
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sophie of Ratsnake Games
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sophie of Ratsnake Games
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •this is "flying doesn't have CO2 emissions because the plane would fly anyway if i wasn't on it" logic and i'm disappointed to see an acclaimed public thinker like you not understand the connection between supply and demand.
Models are getting trained because there is a demand for them from users.
Resuna
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Resuna • • •@resuna Spotting paragraphs in a document where I forgot to put a period at the end doesn't make me less creative. It doesn't damage my reasoning ability.
This is a very weird thing to believe.
Can you explain to me how you think using a spellchecker makes me a worse writer?
Is that only true if the spellchecker uses this form of statistical inference? Or have all the spellcheckers I've used to write 30+ books also make me worse at writing?
Resuna
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow
in reply to Resuna • • •@resuna
1. How is running a FLOSS model on my laptop "expensive" or "convoluted?" I just invoke the model from a terminal, type "find typos" and hit ctrl-V-CR
2. The model finds other typos besides dangling sentence. Here's a before, after and diff:
craphound.com/before.txt
craphound.com/after.txt
craphound.com/diff.txt
Resuna
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Cory Doctorow • •@Cory Doctorow @Resuna @zerok It's more computationally expensive than writing a simple script to do the same thing. You just don't notice it because modern computers are so stupidly powerful.
There is a big caveat to this statement though: the latter requires the user to know how to write such a script, or to have one convieniently handy. Plus, you have to weigh the effort of writing such a script against the amount of work it's going to save you.
Personally, I wouodn't trust an LLM not to hallucinate and subtly corrupt my work in a non-obvious way, but that's a judgement call and you might choose differently.
JBrown, Esq
in reply to zerok • • •Ciourte Piaille
in reply to zerok • • •