It seems we’re all experiencing a form of sticker shock, from the bill for getting ease-of-use out of software that we demanded for the past few decades.
It’s a trope now that loads of internet users will complain about Mac OS & Windows, while digging in their heels against switching to Linux. Just take your medicine people.
Perhaps we need more collective action & coordination?
I don’t see how we could politically undermine these systems, but we could all do more to contribute to open source workarounds.
We could contribute more to smart tv/e-reader/phone & tablet jailbreak ecosystems. We could contribute more to the fediverse projects. We could all contribute more to make Linux more user friendly.
I admire volunteer work, but I don't think we should focus too hard on paths forward that summarize to "the volunteers need to work harder". If we like what they're doing we show find ways to make it more likely to happen.
For instance, we could forbid taxpayer money from being spent on proprietary software and on hardware that is insufficiently respectful of its user, and we could require that 50% of the money not spent on the now forbidden software instead be spent on sponsorships of open source contributors whose work is likely to improve the quality of whatever open alternatives are relevant.
Getting Microsoft and Google out of education would be huge re: denormalizing the practice of accepting eulas and letting strangers host things you rely on without understanding how they're leveraging that position against your interests.
I personally really like Apple Vision and the bar it’s pushing. However, using one of these devices long term in a walled garden sounds like a nightmare for privacy and marketing abuse of users.
> Zebra-Llama achieves Transformer-level accuracy with near-SSM efficiency using only 7–11B training tokens (compared to trillions of tokens required for pre-training) and an 8B teacher. Moreover, Zebra-Llama dramatically reduces KV cache size—down to 3.9%, 2%, and 2.73% of the original for the 1B, 3B, and 8B variants, respectively—while preserving 100%, 100%, and 97% of average zero-shot performance on LM Harness tasks.
This is an extraordinary claim, is there a catch I’m missing? Am I misreading?
The catch that you're missing is that Deepseek did this ages ago.
They're just using MLA, which is well known to reduce KV size by 90%. You know, the MLA that's used in... Deepseek V2, Deepseek V3, Deepseek R1, Deepseek V3.1, Deepseek V3.2.
Oh, and they also added some hybrid linear attention stuff to make it faster at long context. You know who else uses hybrid linear attention? Deepseek V3.2.
For a "copy Deepseek's homework" model, it's really good, preferable to DeepSeek for me (at least prior to V3.2, which I haven't been able to fully put through its paces yet). post-training really makes that much of a difference I guess
Linear attention is really bad, it's only good for benchmaxing but it leads to a loss of valuable granularity, which can be felt in the latest DeepSeek randomly forgetting/ignoring/correcting explicitly stated facts in the prompt.
Hanlon's razor is stupid and wrong. One should be wary and be aware that incompetence does look like malice sometimes, but that doesn't mean that malice doesn't exist. See /r/MaliciousCompliance for examples. It's possible that DOGE is as dumb as it looked. It's also possible that the smokescreen it generated also happened to have the information leak as described. If the information leak happened due to incompetence, but malicious bad actors still got data they were after by using a third party as a Mark, does that actor being incompetent really make the difference?
Sorry, no. Hanlon's razor is usually smart and correct, for the majority of cases, including this one.
In this case, it is a huge stretch to ascribe DOGE to incompetence or to stupidity. Thus, we CAN ascribe it to malice.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are many things, but they are NOT stupid and NOT incompetent. Elon is the richest man in the world running some of the most innovative and important companies in the world. Donald Trump has managed to get elected twice despite the fact (because of the fact?) that he a serial liar and a convicted criminal.
They and other actors involved have demonstrated extraordinary malice, time and time again.
It is safe to ascribe this one to malice. And Hanlon's Razor holds.
Setting aside the concept of "stupidity" for a second because it's too hard to generally define for the sake of argumentation, one can absolutely be successful at some things and incompetent at others. Your expectations of their overall competency, as with most assumptions of malice, is what fuels your bias.
Agree completely. Every human is successful at some things and incompetent at others.
I am not making any assumptions of malice, unless we’re getting into “malice is just a perspective, there is no such thing as malice, it’s just your interpretation” in which case the same can be said about incompetence or stupidity and there’s no point in having this conversation in the first place.
But assuming that’s not the case, one must only look at Elon’s X tirade yesterday against Somali Americans, calling the actions of those who help them treasonous, inciting violence against them, etc, to see malice. Or look to Trump’s frequent similar incitements of violence, stirring up of hatred towards immigrants, snatching people off the streets, outright lying, justifying the bombing of noncombatants in fishing boats, etc, to see malice. Both of these men have played social media like a fiddle, cynically playing off the basest fears of human beings for their own personal enrichment, and it has given them extraordinary power and wealth, all while feigning being good people.
reply