As other comments have indicated, this is basically solved for all servers. All Poweredges and supermicros have come with increasingly sophisticated integrated remote management systems for the past 20+ years. I have some R610s and their drac is old but still quite good all things considered.
Once you hit a certain processing threshold, stripe underwrites you. The benefit is some people get better deals or get to skirt by rules just by being immaterial.
Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.
And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).
It's also a very lame definition. Intelligence - and humans - are more than just labor.
(You'll forgive me for conflating humanity and intelligence - we are homo spaiens, after all. Thinking man.)
I'm not _confused_ why these "AI" "Labs" are using that definition though. It's extremely clear they're trying to eliminate the need for the non-owner class. They're not selling LLMs (some companies are, but not these companies). These companies are selling the idea of labor without laborers to people who hate and fear laborers - and their utter dependence on them - more than anything else in their lives.
Really looking forward to the scam collapsing. Crypto wasn't very satisfying to me because too many of the victims were just idiots. This time, it's class warfare.
I don't think we understand consciousness, thought, and what we generally consider to be "intelligence" even nearly well enough that we can start getting hopeful that what works for us is going to work for a computer. Philosophers have been working on this for literally millennia and despite electron microscopy, MRIs, our entire standard model of physics, etc etc etc... we're basically no closer than the ancient Greeks, despite continuous opining on the topic.
Luckily for planetary overlord hopefuls, you probably don't need the whole package to become overlord. Just machines that can build machines.
I will remark that I don't really understand why any of the current idiot overlord hopefuls even want the job. The entire world is _already_ functionally their slaves. The only thing jeff bezos doesn't have that I can imagine he wants is the world to not think he's an asshole. But short of complete genocide of the human race, I don't think even overlord status will make progress on that. Might even be counterproductive.
What happens if the merchant folds or disappears? Stripe (or Visa or whoever) then are the bagholder. And if someone has a ton of chargebacks, it's not uncommon they're then difficult to collect from.
For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases. High enough that it messes with the credit and counterparty risk modeling that processors use. You can use your imagination to come up with many reasons these result in more chargebacks than normal purchases.
Theoretically, they could just split out "explicit" vs "normal" risk categories, but there's two top problems there: 1) it's just fundamentally a smaller-yet-way-more-annoying category than the rest of their payments, and 2) tons of your partners (banks etc etc) have blanket-banned for all of the above reasons.
This is the common explanation I see when this topic comes up, but it always made zero sense to me. It frustrates me that people fail to realize the amount of purchaseable things that could qualify as 'explicit'. This is Kickstarter. Do we really think that someone crowdfunding a risque board game or comic is as likely to ask for a chargeback as some middle-aged man trying to hastily cancel a subscription on some porn site?
And there's just so many more things you can pay for. Physical stuff. Art prints and comics. Game mods. Art commissions. Services that aren't just video platforms (social media, hookup apps and so on). There's so much more stuff out there that's not child-friendly, and I bet that all of these categories have different amounts of financial risk atrached to them.
So why are all these different things grouped under the widest net, with the worst offenders being used as reason to deny processing to the entire market segment? Why did they ban all explicit content and not just porn site subscriptions or whatever else has the most chargebacks?
This comment thread is confidently trying to steer around this topic, but there is ideology mixed up in this, and probably to a way larger extent than you think.
Note that, under my reading of these rules, Baldur's Gate 3 would not be allowed on Kickstarter. Nor would Mass Effect, since it has "sex acts or implied sex acts" (depending on what they mean by "implied").
Why are they casting such wide net? I’ve always wondered the same thing, my experience with adult content in the digital advertising world is that there’s a group dynamic that emerges and all but erases the “political will” that would cause certain businesses to make the first move in clearly defining what they carve out categories are, so it all backslides into fairly broad categories. It’s lot of heat in some scenarios and it paralyzes companies (motives varying depending on market position and situation of course)
When we're talking about the examples people bring up in this comment section to illustrate high chargeback rates ("Uncle Derek bought a $500 subscription in a stupor and his wife is about to find out"), the definition would be something like "live action video recordings of humans engaged in sexual activities". Explicit content is a superset of that, also including all the other examples I gave.
Note that I'm not saying we should ban that. I'm just saying that if the 'unbearably high chargeback' excuse had merit, they would've been precision-striking just those categories of sales, instead of opting to nuke everything that humans find sexual, regardless of medium, type of product/service, artistic merit, popularity and so on.
>For specifically sexually explicit stuff, it's because chargebacks are __significantly__ higher for these types of purchases.
This has always been a lie. I work preventing stolen credit cards from being used to buy gift cards.
Payment networks do not at all care about cutting you off for having chargeback heavy flow. They demonstrate their value to customers by supporting those chargebacks, they make $20 for every single one. If you have a large fraction of your payments causing chargebacks, they just charge you more money for the privilege. They won't cut you off unless you are obviously not doing anything to prevent credit card fraud or are party to the actual fraud itself. Payment networks don't even do that much to prevent fraud, because it doesn't hurt their business at all. Everyone knows you are protected when you use a credit card, and frequent demonstrations help that.
This has always come down to some fundamentalist "Christian" groups who keep spending big bucks suing anyone they can find who sells anything adult, and suing Visa and Mastercard as accessories. They are trying to ban porn, toys, adult content in general.
This is the group that drove Pornhub to delete 9/10ths of their library.
Compare their efforts to the australian group who got so much flak for demanding steam remove violently rapey games and yet are fine with steam still being full of sexually explicit games that aren't about simulating abuse.
I can't understand why people believe this lie. If it were true, you would not be able to buy a gift card over the internet at all.
> They are trying to ban porn, toys, adult content in general.
They see all LGBT stuff as porn. Which is why the current moral panic in US/UK involves transgender people. Once trans people are outlawed, the rest of the rainbow will be rounded up and eliminated.
The canonical example is person A buys some risque item, their partner sees the credit card statement says "what is this?", so then person A denies they made the purchase (because they are embarrassed), says it must be fraud, so then it gets charged back on the credit card.
They do not have SMS OTP confirmation for bank card purchases? It is much more difficult to deny anything when there is a record of delivered SMS message along with phone identifier and precise location.
User uses a credit card, either a legitimate one or a stolen one, to buy access to a site. They download all the content that their purchase gives them access to. Then they (or the card's legitimate owner) initiate a chargeback. They "lose access to" the site but they already have everything that's there for free, and they add it to their library of other stolen content.
I really struggle with realistic use cases for stablecoin payments (many are more gee-whiz party tricks or they are reinventing the problems of traditional finance but on a blockchain) but adult content / tipping is an interesting one... small transaction size + high chargeback rate, feels ripe for this
Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).
US federal laws mandate chargebacks as a consumer protection mechanism, primarily through the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) of 1974 and Regulation Z of the Truth in Lending Act (TILA)
The US doesn't really do bank transfers the way we do here.
There's CashApp / Venmo / Zelle, previously Paypal, for P2P transfers (paying your friend for a half of the pizza you both just ate), but that's largely an internet phenomenon. There are wire transfers, but those are expensive and largely for big-ticket items you don't buy that often, think cars or houses, not TVs. There are ACH transfers, which is how wages and bills often work. The fun part of ACH is that the person executing the transfer doesn't have to be the account owner, so businesses can just transfer bill payments from your account to theirs. And then there are the famous checks, which work when no other option is available.
Non-purchase person-to-business transaction are largely done via credit card, sometimes by check or ACH. Explicitly instructing your bank to send a transfer to an account number provided by the business, either through a form or through a "quick transfer" UI, is very rare on that side of the pond.
I think at its root, the general idea of shrinkflation is that some desirable attribute of a product - quantity or quality - is slowly eroded while keeping the price the same. As a way to either increase margins, or preserve the price point. With there being some insinuation of malice, where the company is theoretically (...probably fully intentionally...) hoping consumers don't notice, at least for a while, that the deal keeps getting altered.
I think that’s right, with the ire coming from the perception of being cheated somehow. There’s a fair group of people who think anything other than changing the price or the product name is deceptive, and they’ll keep talking about it that way even if other people don’t see it as worse than a price increase.
The ire comes from the actual deception. Why do companies make products worse rather than bumping the price? It's not because they think that's what people prefer. It's because they hope that at least some buyers won't notice the change. People think it's deceptive because it is.
No, you’re combining two different concepts. Shrinkflation is the price remaining constant when the quantity decreases. Enshittification is when the quality of service decreases while prices remain constant or rise.
See that's the thing people are upset about though - the fact that the documents you need are either an original certified copy of a thin sheet of paper from whatever random backwater you were born in's local government (birth cert), or an expensive time-consuming document that needs to be renewed on top of that (passport).
In general, the people against these kinds of things aren't against the simple extra check of something that's theoretically already true (registered to vote / ID at voting place, citizenship at banks, etc). They're against forcing people to provide arcane, asterisk-ridden (including married women! a large demographic!) documents.
If we just had a normal federal ID system like a normal country, where you just got one mailed to you when your kid was born just like their social security card manages to do, then this would all be much more fine. But noooo god forbid we be normal for once. Much better to keep using random bullshit in place of a national ID.
Having been through this in the UK, what people want is:
- a rigorous secure biometric identity system
- .. but not for citizens, only for immigrants.
(one of the weird consequences of this is that the final stage of naturalization was to send back / destroy your secure ID: https://www.gov.uk/biometric-residence-permits ; we now have a purely online "share code" system, which everyone is much more scared of because you have no way to contradict the computer)
Yeah the US should institute a normal federal ID system like a normal country. It might strictly be necessary to amend the constitution to do this, although plenty of other expansions of what the federal government does have happened without a formal amendment.
Many Americans think mandatory ID is some kind of dystopian measure. It's part of an irrational cultural obsession with "government control" that believe that if something could hypothetically be used for oppressive purposes, then it will be and must be resisted. Never mind that in practice, you very often need to have a state-issued ID of some kind of do things.
Mind you, I am not saying gov'ts cannot misbehave. I am merely saying that this categorical opposition is imprudent and irrational. It's like the idea that you shouldn't leave your basement, because bad things might happen to you outside. What kind of life is that? Yeah, something could, but you aren't living life by remaining cooped up. And news flash: you're going to die eventually.
The US cultural thing is really the opposite of cowering in your basement, at least in my generation and older.
We were steeped in propaganda about the "papers, please" police state in other parts of the world, versus our freedom to travel. It's this idea that you are not allowed to leave your basement without an exit visa which is horrifying.
There is also the religious angle, with some believing that a national ID would be the "mark of the beast" from the bible. Ironically, these days the US religious right seems excited by the prospects of fascist control, rather than rebelling against it. I'm honestly not sure if that is just hypocrisy or if, in their minds, they are gleefully accelerating us towards the "end times" now.
> The US cultural thing is really the opposite of cowering in your basement, at least in my generation and older.
That wasn't the purpose of my basement remark. The point is that you can't argue against something simply because it can be abused or simply because it can have bad effects. There is a thread running through American culture that is absolutely paranoid about the slightest possibility of abuse. What I think more people realize today is that gov't is easier to restrain than corporations, because of their officially public status and the attending constraints, while corporations are in many ways at greater liberty to do whatever they want and attain power and influence that gov'ts don't have.
> There is also the religious angle, with some believing that a national ID would be the "mark of the beast" from the bible.
I don't know how influential this religious element is where IDs are concerned, but I would agree that dispensationalist Evangelical nuttery - a blatant Christian heresy - is a danger to the US. However, I think it is a danger, because it is nuts.
We are actively seeing the current US government shift towards malevolence and fascism. These fears of government control were very rational, evidently, as the government is currently abusing every possible system it can. I mean, a lot of this stuff is really being pushed to its limits and beyond.
And, all of those "unspoken rules" and relationships, due diligence, etc are finally coming home to roost. We have put too many trust-based systems in place.
Also, the US has a long history of abusing government power. The last time we required ID for voting we did it to prevent black people from voting. So now, people are rightfully scared of voter ID. Um... whoops.
I mean one of the uses for something like this is to make it easier to de-bank people. That is, make it impossible for them to function financially. That sounds super dystopian to me and a power the government shouldn't have.
They call it 'collateral damage' so that it fall outside of the constitutional protection/requirement that all punishments need to stem from a conviction and then a judge's determination the punishment is directly proportional to the conviction so it's also un-American.
As a citizen of a small country with decently long democratic traditions, I've always found American attitudes like that weird. From my perspective, if you live in a free country, any government you have by definition reflects the will of the people. If you're afraid of what the government might do, you're really afraid of what your fellow citizens might do. Afraid that your fellow citizens don't share your values, or those of the constitution.
When it comes to de-banking, the bigger threat seems to come from the banks than from the government. Your bank might choose to de-bank you, because it doesn't like you. Because you are too risky or too unpleasant, or because the computer says so. So if you're afraid of de-banking, you might want to pass a law that makes it illegal for a bank to refuse to offer basic services to you, unless one of the exceptions listed in the law applies.
Our ancestors came to the US because our neighbors in Europe decided they should die for following the wrong religion, be it catholic irish/germans or non-catholic french/jewish.
So yes, our country is founded on not letting that happen, not letting your neighbors have that kind of power over your life, via the old world/European direct killing/starvation/exile from society or a modern world reimaged debanking that basically strangles you to death with the burden of just existing in the modern world without modern finance/electronic funds/card payment.
In the US there are strict banks and then there are immigrant/human friendly banks like US Bank. I can easily change banks. I can't exist in a right to life/liberty/happiness way with no bank, and the government can't take that right away unless I have been convicted and a judge ruled that in my circumstances specifically it should be taken away.
But what happens if your neighbors no longer believe in that? Does a constitution still matter, if its values are no longer the values of the people? Who will enforce the constitution, if the people who are supposed to do that no longer want to?
If you live in a free country, your neighbors become a problem before the government does. If they become a problem, the government will often follow, and then you may no longer be living in a free country.
That is why the US government is designed the way it is, with the electoral college, 2 senators per state, etc.
It is all designed to prevent European style tyranny of the majority or mob rule, yet also create a representational state. It's a tricky balance. But our ancestors were, again, murdered or forced to flee half way around the world, so a core concern/reality we work hard to avoid at the cost of slower government/less direct democracy that like you say can change on a whim or easily be directed as a weapon against ones neighbors. We prefer a slow out of touch government that protects freedom/peoples rights than a government that represents short term opinion happy to trample.
My point was that an oppressive government cannot appear out of nowhere in a free country. The citizens must abandon constitutional values first. If an oppressive government remains in power and maintains its popularity long enough, it will infiltrate all levels of the government and compromise checks and balances.
Then, with popular and institutional support, the government can do basically whatever it wants. Regardless of what powers it had before or what the constitution says.
You should not be afraid of giving the government new powers simply because it might go bad later. (There are other valid reasons, but that's not one of them.) If the government does go bad, it can take those powers on its own just fine. You should be afraid of your fellow citizens going bad and starting to think that their personal goals and values are more important than constitutional values. Because that's a prerequisite for the government going bad.
> Does a constitution still matter, if its values are no longer the values of the people?
Yes, otherwise the incumbents could pull stunts like opening the borders to flood the nation with foreigners, radically redefining who "the people" are in order to dictate what "our values" are.
The entire point of written law is to outlive the whims of human nature.
How does written law enforce itself if the police and the judges are compromised?
Everything is ultimately enforced by people. If people stop believing in something, the government will eventually follow suit. And not just the handful of top leaders elected or appointed for a few years, but most people from the top to the bottom in every branch of the government. Especially the ones with the power to make a difference.
The written law may say something, but people in power are very good at twisting its purpose and ignoring it. Especially when that's something everyone expects from you.
My view is that the American attitude is odd, because it is catastrophizing. The "will of the people" (whatever that means; it is usually curated by those with power anyway) is neither here nor there, and I have absolutely no concern for it. The truth is not decided by vote.
But I agree that private companies can debank much more easily than gov'ts can. I think more people are realizing that it is not a question of gov't or corporation, but of power. The gov't is your best defense against private malice.
> if you live in a free country, any government you have by definition reflects the will of the people.
There's no such definition, where did you get that from? The only definition is "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
> If you're afraid of what the government might do, you're really afraid of what your fellow citizens might do.
In non-fantasy land all power corrupts.
> you might want to pass a law that makes it illegal for a bank to refuse to offer basic services to you
We don't pass laws, our representatives do, we select reps from a pool of candidates but becoming a candidate outside of the established parties is subject to the regulations established by these parties... you get the idea.
> As a citizen of a small country with decently long democratic traditions, I've always found American attitudes like that weird.
There's bliss and then there's reality... which happens to be weird, unfortunately.
And sometimes it can't even handle it then. I was recently porting ruby web code to python. Agents were simultaneously surprisingly good (converting ActiveRecord to sqlalchemy ORM) and shockingly, incapably bad.
For example, ruby uses blocks a lot. Ruby blocks are curious little thingies because they are arguably just syntax sugar for a HOF, but man it's great syntax sugar. Python then has "yield" which is simultaneously the same keyword ruby uses for blocks, but works fundamentally differently (instead of just a HOF, it's for generating an iterator/generator) and while there are some decorators that can use yield's ability to "pause" execution in the function to send control flow back out of the function for a moment (@contextmanager) which feels _even more_ like ruby blocks, it's a rather limited trick and requires the decorator to adapt the Generator to a context manager and there's just no good way to generalize that.
Somehow this is the perfect storm to make LLMs completely incapable of converting ruby code that uses blocks for more than the basic iteration used in the stdlib. It will try to port to python code that is either nonsensical, or uses yield incorrectly and doesn't actually work (and in a way that type checkers can even spot). And furthermore, even if you can technically whack it with a hammer until it works with yield, it's often not at all the way to do it. Ruby devs use blocks not-uncommonly while python devs are not really going to be using yield often at all, perhaps outside of @contextmanager. So the right move is usually to just restructure control flow to not need to use blocks/HOFs (or double down and explicitly pass in a function). (Rubyists will cringe at this, and rightly so... Ruby is often extraordinarily expressive).
The fact that such a simple language feature trips them up so completely is pretty odd to me. I guess maybe their training data doesn't include a lot of ruby-to-python conversions. Maybe that's indicative of something, but I digress.
Quantization is important for me because it's the only way out I can see for a future of programming that doesn't involve going through a giant bigco who can run, as the article says, a machine with 2TB of memory. And not just memory, but my understanding is that for the model to be performant, it has to be VRAM to boot.
This comes as the latest concern of mine in a long line around "how software gets written" remaining free-as-in-freedom. I've always been really uneasy about how reliant many programming languages were on Jetbrains editors, only vaguely comforted by their "open-core" offering, which naturally only existed for languages with strong OSS competition for IDEs (so... java and python, really). "Intellisense" seemed very expensive to implement and was hugely helpful in writing programs without stopping every 4 seconds to look up whether removing whitespace at the end of a line is trim, strip, or something else in this language. I was naturally pleased to see language servers take off, even if it was much to my chagrin that it came from Microsoft, who clearly was out of open standards to EEE and decided to speed up the process by making some new ones.
Now LLMs are the next big worry of mine. It seems pretty bad for free and open software if the "2-person project, funded indirectly by the welfare state of a nordic or eastern-european nation" model that drives ridiculously important core libre/OSS libraries now is even less able to compete with trillion dollar corporations.
Open-weight, quantized, but still __good__ models seem like the only way out. I remain somewhat hopeful just from how far local models have come - they're significantly more usable than they were a year ago, and we've got more tools like LM Studio etc making running them easy. But there's still a good way to go.
I'll be sad if a "programming laptop" ends up going from "literally anything that can run debian" to "yeah you need an RTX 7090, 128GB of VRAM, and the 2kW wearable power supply backpack addon at a minimum".
I've been watching the drizzle of LLM papers come through, and I think we're going to hit a 1T param MoE on consumer hardware before this year is out. It'll still be behind the bigco models, but it'll be a force multiplier. Ideally, we'd get these models to run on a CPU. MS BitNet is one way to do this. You can already run ternary LLMs on consumer CPUs with a decent tps.
Can we still classify 5090s as consumer hardware given how expensive they are? They're £3k at the moment, and it looks like it's only going to get worse unless the AI bubble pops.
I got an Olares One system with a 24GB (consumer not 32GB) NVIDIA RTX 5090 for less than $3k at the Kickstarter price. It comes with Olares OS which for my purposes is not all that useful, I settled finally on a good Ubuntu 24.04 LTS configuration, but it was a good deal. I actually bought two.
I was thinking more in terms of 24GB of VRAM total. I started sketching the architecture for such a model this afternoon, nothing novel, just combining existing advancements in the field. It looks achievable.
You can still continue to master actual software engineering while others spend their time turning their minds into a palimpsest of tricks and lessons of how to convince one model after another after another after another into giving reasonable output. That you'd still have to vet yourself anyway.
While I think a lot of the AI hype is just hype - everyone saying most of these things have _hitherto untold riches_ levels of financial incentives to say them - I think it's also undeniable that LLMs speed up many aspects of coding.
I also think that AI might be the beginning of the end of copyright. While before, everyone with money clearly had tremendous incentive to keep copyright strong, now all of a sudden trillions of dollars are basically predicated on the idea that LLMs aren't violating copyright. Copyleft has been a major tool in the FOSS toolbox. If that's weakening, I don't ALSO want free software to be locked out of agentic programming too.
It's the corrupting nature of capitalism really laid bare. A net loss for so many of their constituents that politicians all over the world are falling over themselves to pave the way for foreign companies to exploit their constituents IP.
A true tragedy of the commons unfolding before us.
I get why, and I get why it's the only realistic choice, but it really is showing the weaknesses of modern politics.
I love AI because I love building things and it lets me build more things I like faster.
If anything it's anti-capitalist: For example I built a software bluetooth proxy for Docker that let me use the underlaying BT device for Home Assistant even though the HA docs said I'd have to buy a new device. There is no way I'd do that without AI.
And I've built many many random project that I'd never have thought about doing without AI.
You can rent compute from small companies to run the models. It's even cheaper if multiple people are able to use the same model at once that way you can pay for being included within a bigger batch as opposed to for the entire compute.
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