WhirlpoolBrewer

62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Perhaps saying most Americans are struggling is doomerism, but what percentage living paycheck to paycheck no longer counts as doomerism and is just a harsh truth? 75%? 90%? Do you think the number of people living paycheck to paycheck is increasing or decreasing this year?

https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-majority-of-americans-are-living-paycheck-to-paycheck#%3A%7E%3Atext=While+one+survey+by+LendingClub%2Cspending%3B+62%25+answered+yes.

In a capitalist society, what is good or best is irrelevant. All that matters is if it makes money. AI makes no money. The $200 and $300/month plans put in rate limits because at those prices they're losing too much money. Lets say the beak-even cost for a single request is somewhere between $1-$5 depending on the request just for the electricity, and people can barely afford food, housing, and transportation as it is. What is the business model for these LLMs going to be? A person could get a coffee today, or send a single request to an LLM? Now start thinking that they'll need newer gpus next year. And the year after that. And after that. And the data center will need maintenance. They're paying literally millions of dollars to individual programmers.

Maybe there is a niche market for mega corporations like Google who can afford to spend thousands of dollars a day on LLMs, but most companies won't be able to afford these tools. Then there is the problem where if the company can afford these tools, do they even need them?

The only business model that makes sense to me is the one like BMW uses for their car seat warmers. BMW requires you to pay a monthly subscription to use the seat warmers in their cars. LLM makers could charge a monthly subscription to run a micro model on your own device. That free assistant in your Google phone would then be pay walled. That way businesses don't need to carry the cost of the electricity, but the LLM is going to be fairly low functioning compared to what we get for free today. But the business model could work. As long as people don't install a free version.

I don't buy the idea that "LLMs are good so they are going to be a success". Not as long as investors want to make money on their investments.

I would defend Tennessee at least partially. Tennessee is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which houses the world's second largest supercomputer (Frontier). Scientists from across the world to come work there every year. These scientists are woefully out numbered by everyone else like you said, but some of the brightest minds are in fact in Tennessee.

Very cool thanks for the informative answers

This is a strong argument. One of my main complaints with modern large companies is the need to operate for short term gains long term losses, so point number 3 sounds amazing to me. Does this mean Intel would no longer be a publicly traded company, but a US Government owned company, something similar to the USPS?

I'm uninformed on this topic, perhaps you or someone else can teach me a bit more on this. What would the argument be for bailing them out, and what would be the argument for letting them fail? Without any knowledge of the consequences of either, I feel like letting the business fail is what we should do. We let businesses fail all the time, especially small ones. Why should we bail out this business when we let other fail all the time?

It feels like the core concern is letting that many people all lose their job at the same time would be particularly challenging issue for the people affected. But these numbers are far less than the number that have been laid off recently by other companies. The government didn't step in to help those people or companies performing massive layoffs, why bailout this company? I don't know, but would like to hear arguments for both

As a foster parent, we get trained on how kids frequently get trafficked and the number one place is anywhere parents feel their kids are safe and don't need close supervision. So anything kid centric like Disney World or family centric like a church are prime targets for predators. Roblox is a kid centric place where parents don't closely watch their kids.

Roblox is a big enough company and has been around long enough that they should be doing something. They should be doing something because they definitely know this happens at this point. If you believe everything they claim on their website is true: https://corp.roblox.com/resource/child-safety, they are doing something. As far as I can tell, there isn't a report or any way to validate they are actually doing anything. You just have to trust that the publicly traded company is investing in a department that doesn't directly generate profits for its stock holders. You have to trust this company is not giving in to pressure each quarter to increase profits and decrease costs around this function of their business.

I push back on the idea that if something is designed for kids it doesn't need to be safe for kids. Roblox has designed something for kids, they should do something to make it safe for kids, and parents should watch their kids.

Awesome, I'll give these a spin and see how it goes. Much appreciated!

Good to know. I'd hate to buy a new machine strictly for running an LLM. Could be an excuse to pickup something like a Framework 16, but realistically, I don't see myself doing that. I think you might be right about using something like Open Web UI or LM Studio.

This is all new to me, so I'll have to do a bit of homework on this. Thanks for the detailed and linked reply!

8GB

I have a MacBook 2 pro (Apple silicon) and would kind of like to replace Google's Gemini as my go-to LLM. I think I'd like to run something like Mistral, probably. Currently I do have Ollama and some version of Mistral running, but I almost never used it as it's on my laptop, not my phone.

I'm not big on LLMs and if I can find an LLM that I run locally and helps me get off of using Google Search and Gimini, that could be awesome. Currently I use a combo of Firefox, Qwant, Google Search, and Gemini for my daily needs. I'm not big into the direction Firefox is headed, I've heard there are arguments against Qwant, and using Gemini feels like the wrong answer for my beliefs and opinions.

I'm looking for something better without too much time being sunk into something I may only sort of like. Tall order, I know, but I figured I'd give you as much info as I can.