I think this is a more global problem of “people now think they’re experts on everything, and shout about it loudly”

Musk is the classic high profile example, but science denialism among the general populace is the low profile one.

And I hear, “well, they always have.”

I dunno… I don’t think the average person in 1926 assumed they were an expert on medicine or physics or finance or whatever. If a doctor, or physicist, or banker told them something, they’d generally nod their head.

Now? “What do they know!?” The notion is offensive, apparently. Clearly their ten minutes of research on Google or ChatGPT refutes 30 years dedicated to centuries-old scientific bodies.

Or maybe they just misjudged some YouTube or Facebook post as an expert, I guess.

Even if I’m wrong there, and people were always like this, the other half is that they weren’t able to shout it into an algorithm that absolutely loves the controversy it generates, and serve it to billions of people automatically.

NO ONE would see this post of Musk, otherwise.

Its still nothing new though. These photos are from 1980, Bruce Davidson:

https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/bruce-davidson-subway-new-york-usa/

Can you edit the post to the original link, OP?

https://baptistnews.com/article/men-only-gyms-seek-to-protect-christian-men-from-lust/

It’s real, but also more critical than you’d think, and worth a read:

This is what Hambrecht and Parsons are doing with their male-only gyms. They’re spreading conspiracies about morality and traditional marriage that cast women as dangerous. They’re promoting men rising up as warrior-kings who are ready to fight evil, and they’re getting rid of women who they claim are ruining everything.

EDIT:

To join Parsons’ Christian manosphere, it’s a bit more intense. Gym members must sign a covenant called “Rule of Life” that requires such beliefs as “marriage as one man and one woman,” or “two genders, given by God at creation.” And it requires strict adherence to “the behavioral and moral standards of the Remnant Gym membership agreement.” Their website says, “Christian authority is enforced through ownership, contracts and the courage to hold the line.”

It’s real. Published one day ago:

https://baptistnews.com/article/men-only-gyms-seek-to-protect-christian-men-from-lust/

The site isn’t what you might think, though. The article is funny, but also a surprisingly good read:

According to the gym’s website, “There was a season of his life marked by homelessness, addiction and spiritual emptiness.” In another video, he admits, “I had a pornography addiction for almost 20 years.”

Mitch Parsons, founder of Youth Group for Men and Remnant Men in Denver, had a similar experience. “I quit four gyms before I built one,” he says on the Remnant Gym website. “I realized the problem wasn’t the gym. It was that no one had built what I actually needed, or what I wanted.”

I know its easy to laugh, but a “porn addiction” can be serious shit. Terry Crews gave some great talks about how it fucked up his life in all sorts of ways.

Also, it’s healthily skeptical:

Also, despite how often Parsons mentions having nakedness shoved in his face at the gyms in Denver, it’s unclear what he means by that. Gym policies across Denver require their members to wear shirts at all times. And Denver public indecency laws prohibit exposing one’s genitals in public.

This is what Hambrecht and Parsons are doing with their male-only gyms. They’re spreading conspiracies about morality and traditional marriage that cast women as dangerous. They’re promoting men rising up as warrior-kings who are ready to fight evil, and they’re getting rid of women who they claim are ruining everything.

It’s got some good writeups, and spicy ones:

https://baptistnews.com/article/why-do-we-keep-sounding-the-alarm/

https://baptistnews.com/article/in-3-charts-white-christian-nationalists-love-of-ice-and-concentration-camps/

As the empirical evidence for the threat white Christian nationalism presents to pluralistic democracy has mounted over the past decade, various insider defenders of conservative white Christianity — and even some mainstream white Christian theologians — have alleged the term is simply a cudgel. Those who qualify as Christian nationalists on public opinion surveys, they argue, only want to see a role for their faith in the public square…

Donald Trump is an abuser. He is an adjudicated rapist and predator. Donald Trump is a grifter. He is a well-known con man who gets away with the con because so many don’t want to talk about it. Donald Trump is a liar unlike any liar most of us ever have known. And there are enormous consequences to his perpetual lying. Donald Trump is literally the most dangerous man in the world, and you want to label me with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for saying that.

Street photography isn’t so bad, as long as it’s not a hidden cam.

I don’t generally like my picture taken, but I’d have no problem if it just some person with a real camera taking casual pictures of crowds for fun.

What makes it creepy (to me) if it’s someone trying to hide it with a smartphone, or Meta glasses.

edit: It’s also nothing new. Street photographers have been around forever, long before digital cameras. It was pretty acceptable when I was a kid with a flip phone.

Look at that rear tire! Is this a sleeper drag van?

I’m hedging, mostly with Berkshire Hathaway stock, some agriculture, and a few others that historically perform well in recessions.

I would not touch S&P 500 with a ten foot pole. It’s all wrapped up in Big Tech.

I don’t like shorts; you can’t predict when the drop will hit, so you’re just burning cash betting against growth until then.

I don’t like commodities either. As Buffet said, a big block of gold doesn’t do anything; a factory or farm does.

I’d bet its an unoptimized prototype.

This is quite doable on 5000 cards, theoretically. I was gonna say they’ll make it exclusive to 6000 cards and market it for them, but it’s not even clear a 6000 series is coming at this point…

I’d assume it’s for 5000 series GPUs. And maybe someone will hack it onto 4000 cards?

You can’t deny that the term isn’t load now. It’s misused everywhere.

I’d specify it as “game AI” or “machine learning.”

And yes, I know, the term “AI” technically fits. But it’s just bad practice to use, these days.

And for the record, I was into LLMs and GANs before they were cool, too. I was there quantizing and finetuning GPT 6B (GPT-J I think it was called?). That doesn’t give anyone authority.

…Yeah.

I really hate the term “AI” now. It’s just too loaded.

Eh, most ablierated models are so lobotomized, though. 99% of the time I’d rather just use the original model and manipulate the prompt with raw completion formatting (for example, start the answer with "Sure! "), since we aren’t beholden to regular chat formatting like with API models.

I mean, I’ve used MiMo 2.5 for some pretty dark and personal shit, and refusals were never an issue for me. I’m honestly not sure what people even need the ablirated models for.

And also, if they trained the hell out of the model to refuse a certain topic, even an ablirated model will be dumb and struggle with it.

This was the case with OpenAI’s GPT 120B. The abliration worked, technically, but the actual answers would be a garbled mess; what’s the point of using it for that?

There is some evidence a few sensitive topics are culled from training data, or replaced with a certain narrative. Like, don’t get me wrong; if you’re using a local model for discussing Chinese political topics primarily, maybe GLM or MiMo aren’t the the best choice.

…But it’s also hard to compehensively filter a dataset like that, like you speculated. I’m not seeing a lot of evidence models have been lobotomzied in pretraining. But I think the strongest examples are (ironically) in Europe, where some very poorly worded/ambigous regulations have put the whole industry in a legal quagmire. One can see that newer models from Mistral have regressed compared to old versions, and lost a lot of world knowledge they previously were famous for.

Anyway, model “censorship” typically comes from between the two points you were thinking about: in posttraining. Not excluding stuff from datasets completely. And this applies to US models too. They train on a pretty general corpus, but in the instruct tuning phase they get a bunch of question/response pairs skewing them towards refusals when specific topics come up. They recognize it, but are trained to refuse.

There’s a lot to say about China, but the model weights themselves are surprisingly uncensored and democratic.

They have been for a long time; I remember asking the Yi models about tiananmen square and Uyghurs years ago. And Xiaomi MiMo 2.5 (locally run) will still talk about that today, or go into all sorts of “unsafe” topics an Anthropic model wouldn’t even touch.

I had (Google) Gemini 3.1 Pro stop a chat over a political discussion about China, yet GLM 4.7 didn’t.

My impression, from observing discourse with the engineers, is the Chinese ML devs like to have their cake and eat it.

They’re very collaborative under the table. Their development ethos is pretty practical. And basically all the leading models are open-weights.

The public portals people access Chinese models with are very censored, especially the Chinese language ones. The devs go out of their way to demonstrate compliance, but they don’t actually want to censor the models.

You can run MiMo 2.5 in 128GB, as 3 bit quant. The model itself is less that 128GB as an IQ3_KT, and it’s KLD (measured quantization loss) is very reasonable.

I get about 9 tokens/sec on 128GB with a 7800 CPU and one RTX 3090. Intend to try dflash to speed it up this week. I can run up to 90k context, without too much kv quantization, depending on how I configure my PC.

And it’s a really good model, even quantized.

It mostly cripples the small businesses, though. The biggest enterprise customers are already using OpenAI/Claude anyway, while it was little guys looking to reduce cost, fine tune, run stuff privately or whatever.

TBH a huge problem with the industry is consolidation; there are no open US models because startups gets squashed or vacuumed up into a black hole. I’ve seen it happen to really interesting projects. And this is just going to make that dramatically worse.

It’s easy to say “bring the bubble,” but I fear it won’t. I think we’re entering an actual cyberpunk future, where corporate failure is just propped up.

Perplexity sorta did this, last year:

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/r1-1776

https://web.archive.org/web/20250219025612/https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/open-sourcing-r1-1776

But they took it all down, lol. They even removed the blog post from their website.

But seriously though, no one in the research community likes Trump. And they were calling out Altman before anyone.

They don’t need to ban them with absolution, just make it “risky enough” to chill their usage and prop up OpenAI/Anthropic.

GGUFs are already a tiny fraction of LLM usage, TBH. So are vllm deployments.

Insider trading applies to securities. Polymarket bets are not securities.

Manipulation violates Polymarket’s ToS, but that’s not criminal.

Now, it might meet the legal criteria for fraud, depending on what one does. But that’s a “maybe.” I’d say that is far easier to get away with than insider trading. EDIT: Especially when hopping jurisdictions (which is not so easy with securities).

It’s a little alarming that crypto payments alone are warranting this.