How to get affiliates, and more importantly how to get affiliates who don't make the brand look shoddy?

You're asking me to write an entire book. Depends entirely on what you are selling. But the rule of thumb to get good quality partners is that you should contact them instead of the other way around. And if you know your business sector, then you know which are the people and institutions who have a lot of reach.

Some industries have standardized affiliate marketing which you don't have to think about. For example booking.com for hotels or Amazon for retail. They take a percentage of each sale they make for you and that's it. You don't pay them anything except for confirmed sales.

If you chose black hole paid advertising, then at a minimum you should give out different voucher codes on each channel you advertise on, which give customers a 10 or 15% discount. And give voucher codes to friends, family, colleagues and contacts that they can give to anybody they like. That's the only way to find out where the real customers are and where to target your ads.

Interesting way to lay it out. For us understanding is obviously crucial for prod and repeatable business functions.

Velocity to solution is default for almost everyone else, especially one-off or low impact / low consequence of failure projects.

Velocity to solution is default for senior management, that's for sure ;)

1. Download ollama and give it a try. It doesn't have to be that one but it's an easy on-ramp. Just get a feel for what open source/open weights is capable of

2. Mention it whenever it comes up. Most people have no clue this is a thing and I think it's useful to make people aware. We need access to uncensored / unbiased LLM models - information wants to be free but there are plenty of businesses gunning for regulatory capture as these are very powerful tools.

3. If you're in a position of developing any project that makes use of AI in any form, check the open source models first, unless you absolutely require the best of the best, these other models are pretty dang capable of almost everything any commercial model can do.

4. If your state or {insert legal jurisdiction here} attempts to regulate access to open source tools for this, oppose it with your vote and your voice.

5. Opposed laws that grant commercial AI suppliers any priority or premium access under government purchasing programs.

I'm sure others will chime in, those are a few that pop the mind.

> Download ollama and give it a try

Weren't people pissed off at them for a variety of reasons? Not giving attribution etc.

In case anyone wants other good alternatives, there's llama.cpp and vLLM, each harder to setup but opens the door for squeezing more performance out of your hardware.

I've also heard okay things about LM Studio and I think Unsloth had their own thing as well: https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio

> Mention it whenever it comes up.

You could also vote with your valley and support orgs that release open weights of their near-SOTA models, though nowadays that means giving cash to primarily Chinese companies (e.g. Moonshot and Z.ai). For what it's worth, people are also complaining about them decreasing usage quotas on their subscription offerings as well so seems like the squeeze is everywhere, even DeepSeek raised their prices (which is better than them going broke, I guess).

I recommend llama.cpp over ollama.

Anyway, when you see a model on huggingface you get the exact commands to copy paste to run it locally.

sglang is also worth mentioning. Fills a similar role as vLLM, but with less fiddling at the knobs to get a working setup

For a GUI experience that also serves an OpenAI-compatible API, Unsloth studio or LM Studio is probably the way to go

One issue is that models are only one part of the equation. Search is also extremely important, and for that you pretty much have to depend on a third-party service.

That's exactly how they do it.

There are ML models that do the reverse and output image to text, which assist quite a lot.

The better the text represents the unique thing in the photo, the better the model understands what that text means.

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I think we burned up your tokens

haha. was not expecting this amount of traction. Should be working now

A strategy that can backfire. An unpredictable tool is worse than a bad tool.

I cannot de-Google fast enough.

So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?

No thanks

It’s an extremely strong incentive to not use Gemini for anything serious

Google is a company well down the path of enshittification, they even got rid of their motto "Don't be evil".

As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.

When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.

Is there no value in how the training was done such that it's accessible via inference in a particularly useful way?

That value is there, but google has decided to give it away as public knowledge (ala, their transformer paper).

And i would also argue that the researchers doing this are built on shoulders of other public knowledge - things funded by public institutions with taxpayer money.

Did Microsoft never run Microsoft Mail internally?

It was an email system that ran on top of file system. If I recall, mail clients connected over a networked drive to access mailboxes. So it was never regarded as being very scalable.

Yes, MS Mail for PC Networks used a shared file system for email.

The Workgroup Apps (WGA) divison ran MS Mail for PC Networks since they produced MS Mail. Gotta dogfood your product. The WGA email system used a Xenix gateway to connect with the rest of Microsoft.

The rest of Microsoft ran MS Mail for Windows with a Xenix email backend and address book, since MS was already using Xenix before MS Mail for PC Networks existed.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 contained a one postoffice-version of MSMail, (which could be upgraded to the full version).

Some more Microsoft email-related history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_...

A common complaint coming from many Amazon sellers.