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Cake day: July 30th, 2026

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  • Republicans pass up no opportunity to deride the post office and they defund it/depopulate it every chance they get. I was just at the post office, huge post office in a major metro that’s always been very busy. It now has only one of three buildings open, half the lights off inside it and one clerk at the counter. The line is always out the door. Meanwhile several people in line, quite obviously Republicans (old, white, obnoxious/noisy), are bitching and moaning about how shit the post office is. Republicans are stupid, shitty, worthless people.








  • mortgage rates are climbing

    This shouldn’t be cited as a bad thing with inflation where it is. Interest rates are the primary lever that the Fed uses to control inflation. When interest is higher, inflation cools down. When you lower them it heats up. Not that it’s that big a help when the price of gas is doubling because of *checks notes* an unending war in the Middle East that nobody asked for.

    Constant, nonstop lowering of interest rates ordered by a fucking idiot from 2016-2020 (going to near ZERO) most directly caused the current housing price situation. Guess which idiot I’m talking about. That’s right, the same guy who has been trying to do the same thing for the past two years because when property values go up, so does his bottom line and nothing else in the world fucking matters to the orange dipshit.









  • I’m not here to argue that point. But my crappy NUC based LLM can answer the Beatles question. What it can’t answer is “what was the name of the guy who famously rolled his eyes while Yoko Ono screwed up his performance?” Right off the top of my head, neither can I. But OpenAI’s model would have no problem with that question.

    So when I say “smarter than you or I” I don’t mean AGI and I’m not trying to get into an AGI conversation. I mean something that runs locally, doesn’t rely on the Internet and can answer almost any general trivia question accurately. And LLMs are already there, but not yet on your phone. When they are on your phone, people won’t need OpenAI or Sam Altman’s models anymore. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m refuting Altman’s claim that we will pay for intelligence like a utility.


  • I don’t make a lot of predictions about artificial intelligence, but I will go out on a limb on this one and make one: this will never happen.

    The human brain runs on 20 watts of power. Right now I have an AI running on an Intel NUC (Qwen 2.5 9B) that can do most home automation tasks I run through it (setting timers, setting reminders, making to-do lists, turning things off and on), as well as answer general questions (“who were the members of The Beatles?”) and be (mostly) correct. It uses about 65 watts of power to do so.

    It’s nowhere near as smart as I am and it uses 3x the electricity I do. But I couldn’t do this even last year. Efficiency gains to this technology have a ceiling so high that I don’t think most people believe it because they see all these data centers being built and people like Sam Altman talking dumb shit like this. The future of AI will be local. It will run on your phone and be smarter than you, and in fairly short order.

    We are already able to run models locally (Qwen 3.8 27B) that blow last-gen frontier models away (and give current frontier models a run for their money), but you need a high-end setup like an RTX 5090 24G and 64G system RAM.