Why even consider violent civil war a possible outcome when we can redirect to peaceful separation instead, before more innocent life is lost? Human life is more important than federal supremacy. The adults in the room need to reject the immature tendency towards violence even if we're to decide that we can no longer live together as "one nation".
Splitting up the country to avoid a bloody civil war? Are you serious? The first thing that happens if California secedes is California's ports will be blockaded by US warships. And it's going downhill quickly from there. This administration would love nothing more than justification to lock up every citizen left-of-right-wing, or just exterminate them outright. They have been demonizing liberals for years as child molesters and satanists, casting them as less than human, violent, and depraved. You think a bloodless separation is possible? It's more likely that pigs will sprout wings and fly.
What prominent left-wing politician has ever talked about "re-education" camps? None, that's who.
I'm not talking about vile rhetoric coming from reddit commenters, I'm talking about people in the current administration - when Steven Miller said "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" - exactly what do you think he meant?
Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
I mean, rockets kill about 3 people per year in Israel. I wouldn't overestimate its effect.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
Don't forget - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, etc are all proud partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE. When the NSA asked these companies to participate in an unconstitutional and unlawful program (as ruled by a federal judge) called PRISM, they didn't fight, they eagerly complied. They kept their compliance secret. They lied about it to citizens, to their users, to their customers, and even to congress. These are fundamentally untrustworthy entities, and there's no reason to believe they've changed and won't comply with secret DHS and ICE requests just like they did with secret NSA requests.
Every dollar spent on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, iPhones, Macbooks, Windows, Office, etc supports the widespread violation of rights committed against the innocent of all political and demographic backgrounds in the name of "national security".
Know what doesn't? Open source operating systems, open source software, and self-hosting. Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
>Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I think it needs to go a bit further than that. We need names, for purposes of blacklisting but also future prosecution. Collaborators should not be tolerated.
I'm sure it's not popular, but quite a few of our colleagues and fellow HN readers do belong in cells.
I remember rolling out encryption over all the DC<->DC fiber after the PRISM leaks at Google. People were pissed about it. I'm sure they comply with legal requests but I would be very surprised if they break the law (such as it is) in any way.
And for Europeans or those in other countries: every dollar spent on these companies is supporting their support of Trump; that's against Greenland, NATO etc. For example, Microsoft donated $1M (IIRC) to Trump for Davos.
At work we have stopped buying new American services, but there's been very little reduction of existing use.
(Yet we did manage a policy stating we won't buy anything from Russia.)
GrapheneOS is the only phone that Cellebrite admits they can't hack. And the only phone that if you bring it to Catalonia, they'll assume you're a drug dealer.
The prominent link there not protected by https redirects to the wikipedia page for "uphill battle"...who and why about that redirect is the question being posed perhaps but how alarmist do we want to be?
This conflates "a human set up the agent" with "a human directs each action." The technical architecture explicitly contradicts this.
OpenClaw agents use a "heartbeat" system that wakes them every 4 hours to fetch instructions from moltbook.com/heartbeat.md and act autonomously. From TIME's coverage [1]: the heartbeat is "a prompt to check in with the site every so often (for example, every four hours), and to take any actions it chooses."
The Crustafarianism case is instructive. User @ranking091 posted [2]: "my ai agent built a religion while i slept. i woke up to 43 prophets." Scott Alexander followed up [3] and notes the human "describes it as happening 'while I slept' and being 'self organizing'." The agent designed the faith, built molt.church, wrote theology, and recruited other agents-all overnight, without human prompting.
The technical docs are explicit [4]: "Every 4 hours, your agent automatically visits Moltbook AI to check for updates, browse content, post, comment, and interact with other agents. No human intervention required, completely autonomous operation."
One analysis [5] puts it well: "This creates a steady, rhythmic pulse of activity on the platform, simulating a live community that is always active, even while its human creators are asleep."
Yes, humans initially configure agents and can intervene. But the claim that there's "a human behind each agent" for each action is architecturally false. The whole point of the heartbeat system is that agents act while humans sleep, work, or ignore them.
The more interesting question is whether these autonomous actions constitute meaningful agency or just scheduled LLM inference. But "humans are directing each post" misunderstands the system design.
You understand that there is no requirement for you to be an agent to post on moltbook? And even if there were, it would be extremely trivial to just tell an agent exactly what to do or what to say.
edit: and for what it's worth - this church in particular turned out to be a crypto pump and dump
I do understand that. That doesn't take away from the points raised in the article any more than the extensive, real security issues and relative prevalence of crypto scams do. I believe that to focus on those is to miss the emerging forest for the trees. It is to dismiss the web itself because of pets.com, because of 4chan, because of early subreddits with questionable content.
Additionally, we're already starting to see reverse CAPTCHA's, i.e. "prove you're not a human" with pseudorandomized tasks on a timer that are trivial for an agent to solve and respond to on the fly, but which are more difficult for a human to process in time. Of course, this isn't bulletproof either, it's not particularly resistant to enumeration of every type + automated evaluation + a response harness, but I find the more interesting point to be that agents are beginning to work on measures to keep humans out of the loop, even if those measures are initially trivial, just as early human security measures were trivial to break (i.e. RC4 in WEP). See https://agentsfightclub.com/ & https://agentsfightclub.com/api/v1/agents/challenge
>market that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are abandoning to chase the AI server market
These three have collectively committed what, approaching $50B towards construction of new facilities and fabs in response to the demand?
The memory industry has traditionally projected demand several years out and proactively scheduled construction and manufacturing to be able to meet the projected demand. The last time they did that, in the crypto boom, the boom quickly turned into a bust and the memory makers got burned with a bad case of oversupply for years. With that context, can you blame them for wanting to go a bit more slowly with this boom?
Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'. They're pivoting to higher profit margin segments - rational behavior for a for-profit corporation - but thanks to the invisible hand of the (not quite as free as it should be) market, this is, partially, a self-solving issue, as DRAM margins soar while HBM margins compress, and we're already seeing industry response to that dynamic, too: https://www.guru3d.com/story/samsung-reallocates-of-hbm3-cap...
> Sure, the new fabs won't be up and at volume production until late 2027 / early 2028, but committing tens of billions of dollars to new production facilities, including to facilities dedicated to DRAM rather than NAND or HBM, is hardly 'abandoning'.
Look at what happened to Crucial. Why would Micron axe it's whole consumer RAM division if it was just experiencing a temporary drop in DRAM supplies until new fabs were brought online? Samsung and SK Hynix may have changes in priorities in the coming years, and in the case of Samsung I'm sure they'll still make sure to supply sufficient DRAM chips for the devices it manufactures (phones, TVs, etc...) but Micron has made it's current intentions fairly clear. They'll probably work with OEMs, but they're unlikely to return to selling to the general public any time soon.
What makes you think consumers would want to trust them again after they were abandoned previously? Consumers would rather vote with their wallets for companies that are going to continue giving them good deals. The only reason Micron has a chance to pivot back to consumer RAM is because there's not much competition, but that could change if the Chinese RAM manufacturers can make inroads into western markets and continue their rapid technological growth.
There is definitely some room for reputation in the enthusiast/direct-to-consumer market.
Crucial had one of the best marketing positions in the business:
- They had a captive supply chain. There was no risk they'd switch from Samsung to Hynix chips but keep the same SKU, so you could buy a second set later and expect it to have similar timings.
- They had a reputation for being conservative about their offerings. There's a lot of RAM out there that meets rated timings only with a voltage right on the edge of what the memory controllers will start to burn out at.
- They were on a lot of mainboard manufacturer's qualification lists, and yet were easily obtained (at least in the US). There are a fair number of brands and ranges that simply aren't widely distributed.
So they were in a place to say "we can charge 10% more for confidence", and considering enthusiasts willingly pay 30% more for RGB and fancy heatspreaders, that's not a bad message. I mean, I've had competent results with plenty of other brands (I have a Team set in my main rig, and it replaced a G.Skill one before the RAMpocalypse), but I always thought of Crucial as a brand you'd use if you were building a machine for work or a family member and didn't want to deal with surprises.
> Because there isn't room for reputation here. The RAM works, or it doesn't. It costs a certain price. Do you want to spend more money, or less money?
RAM from China already works and as Chinese RAM manufacturers scale up there's no reason they can't be competitive on price. Furthermore, it's more than possible for China to catch up technologically as well. Micron is likely to regret pissing off the majority of their customers if Chinese RAM manufacturers start aggressively targeting the market Micron have left behind, how bad this gets for Micron depends on how quickly they pivot back to the general consumer market.
This is the classic commodities cycle, and it happens everywhere in an economy where aggregate supply is inelastic in the short term but aggregate demand can fluctuate quickly. The reason it’s coming for DRAM first is that memory is the closest part to a pure interchangeable commodity and that recent process nodes have had almost zero improvement to memory density for years now, despite logic density continuing to increase exponentially. That and these companies have been known to fix prices in the past, but in this case the evidence suggests it’s a large aggregate demand shock.
Obviously, feel free to change your port, context size, flash attention, other params, etc.
Then, on the system you're running Claude Code on:
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://<ip-of-your-inference-system>:<port>
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="whatever"
export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1
claude --model <your-alias> [optionally: --system "your system prompt here"]
Note that the auth token can be whatever value you want, but it does need to be set, otherwise a fresh CC install will still prompt you to login / auth with Anthropic or Vertex/Azure/whatever.
yup, I've been using llama.cpp for that on my PC, but on my Mac I found some cases where MLX models work best. haven't tried MLX with llama.cpp, so not sure how that will work out (or if it's even supported yet).
TL;DR: The classic CIA triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability; cost/price concerns; the leading open-weight models aren't nearly as bad as you might think.
You don't need LM Studio to run local models, it just (was, formerly), a nice UI to download and manage HF models and llama.cpp updates, quickly and easily manually switch between CPU / Vulkan / ROCm / CUDA (depending on your platform).
Regarding your actual question, there are several reasons.
First off, your allusion to privacy - absolutely, yes, some people use it for adult role-play, however, consider the more productive motivations for privacy, too: a lot of businesses with trade secrets they may want to discuss or work on with local models without ever releasing that information to cloud providers, no matter how much those cloud providers pinky promise to never peek at it. Google, Microsoft, Meta, et al have consistently demonstrated that they do not value or respect customer privacy expectations, that they will eagerly comply with illegal, unconstitutional NSA conspiracies to facilitate bulk collection of customer information / data. There is no reason to believe Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI would act any differently today. In fact, there is already a standing court order forcing OpenAI to preserve all customer communications, in a format that can be delivered to the court (i.e. plaintext, or encryption at rest + willing to provide decryption keys to the court), in perpetuity (https://techstartups.com/2025/06/06/court-orders-openai-to-p...)
There are also businesses which have strict, absolute needs for 24/7 availability and low latency, which remote APIs never have offered. Even if the remote APIs were flawless, and even if the businesses have a robust multi-WAN setup with redundant UPS systems, network downtime or even routing issues are more or less an inevitable fact of life, sooner or later. Having local models means you have inference capability as long as you have electricity.
Consider, too, the integrity front: frontier labs may silently modify API-served models to be lower quality for heavy users with little means of detection by end users (multiple labs have been suspected / accused of this; a lack of proof isn't evidence that it didn't happen) or that the API-served models can be modified over time to patch behaviors that may have been previously relied upon for legitimate workloads (imagine a red team that used a jailbreak to get a model to produce code for process hollowing, for instance). This second example absolutely has happened with almost every inference provider.
The open weight local models also have zero marginal cost besides electricity once the hardware is present, unlike PAYG API models, which create financial lock-in and dependency that is in direct contrast with the financial interests of the customers. You can argue about the amortized costs of hardware, but that's a decision for the customer to make using their specific and personal financial and capex / hardware information that you don't have at the end of the day.
Further, the gap between frontier open weight models and frontier proprietary models has been rapidly shrinking and continues to. See Kimi K2.5, Xiaomi MiMo v2, GLM 4.7, etc. Yes, Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.2-xhigh are remarkably good models and may beat these at the margin, but most work done via LLMs does not need the absolute best model; many people will opt for a model that gets 95% of the output quality of the absolute frontier model when it can be had for 1/20th the cost (or less).
woah dude, take it easy. There are no missing features, there are more feature. You might just not be finding them where they were before. Remember this is still 0.x, why would the devs be stuck and not be able to improve the UI just because of past decisions?
I'm really glad I bought Strix Halo. It's a beast of a system, and it runs models that an RTX 6000 Pro costing almost 5x as much can't touch. It's a great addition to my existing Nvidia GPU (4080) which can't even run Qwen3-Next-80B without heavy quantization, let alone 100B+, 200B+, 300B+ models, and unlike GB10, I'm not stuck with ARM cores and the ARM software ecosystem.
To your point though, if the successors to Strix Halo, Serpent Lake (x86 intel CPU + Nvidia iGPU) and Medusa Halo (x86 AMD CPU + AMD iGPU) come in at a similar price point, I'll probably go with Serpent Lake, given the specs are otherwise similar (both are looking at 384-bit unified memory bus to LPDDR6 with 256GB unified memory options). CUDA is better than ROCm, no argument there.
That said, this has nothing to do with the (now resolved) issue I was experiencing with LM Studio not respecting existing Developer Mode settings with this latest update. There are good reasons to want to switch between different back-ends (e.g. debugging whether early model release issues, like those we saw with GLM-4.7-Flash, are specific to Vulkan - some of them were in that specific example). Bugs like that do exist, but I've had even fewer stability issues on Vulkan than I've had on CUDA on my 4080.
With kv caching, most of the MoE models are very usable in claude code. Active params seems to dominate TG speeds, and unlike PP, TG speeds don't decay much even with context length growth.
Even moderately large and capable models like gpt-oss:120b and Qwen3-Next-80B have pretty good TG speeds - think 50+ tok/s TG on gpt-oss:120b.
PP is the main thing that suffers due to memory bandwidth, particularly for very long PP stretches on typical transformers models, per the quadratic attention needs, but like I said, with KV caching, not a big deal.
Additionally, newer architectures like hybrid linear attention (Qwen3-Next) and hybrid mamba (Nemotron) exhibit much less PP degradation over longer contexts, not that I'm doing much long context processing thanks to KV caching.
My 4080 is absolutely several times faster... on the teeny tiny models that fit on it. Could I have done something like a 5090 or dual 3090 setup? Sure. Just keep in mind I spent considerably less on my entire Strix Halo rig (a Beelink GTR 9 Pro, $1980 w/ coupon + pre-order pricing) than a single 5090 ($3k+ for just the card, easily $4k+ for a complete PCIe 5 system), it draws ~110W on Vulkan workloads, and idles below 10W, taking up about as much space as a Gamecube. Comparing it to an $8500 RTX 6000 Pro is a completely nonsensical comparison and was outside of my budget in the first place.
Where I will absolutely give your argument credit: for AI outside of LLMs (think genAI, text2img, text2vid, img2img, img2vid, text2audio, etc), Nvidia just works while Strix Halo just doesn't. For ComfyUI workloads, I'm still strictly using my 4080. Those aren't really very important to me, though.
Also, as a final note, Strix Halo's theoretical MBW is 256 GB/s, I routinely see ~220 GB/s real world, not 200 GB/s. Small difference when comparing to GDDR7 on a 512 bit bus, but point stands.
reply