“This is not the first time Musk has gone after the site. In December, he posted on X, “Stop donating to Wokepedia.” And that wasn’t even his first bad Wikipedia pun. “I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” he wrote, in an October, 2023, post.

You can’t buy it, but you can go create a conservative fork called whatever you want, and you can fund its operation. If people think that it’s better, they can choose to use it.

There’s a Conservapedia, which I would call pretty off-the-rails; people have tried this before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia

Conservapedia (/kənˌsɜː®vəˈpiːdiə/; kən-SU®-və-PEE-di-ə) is an English-language, wiki-based, online encyclopedia written from a self-described American conservative[2] and fundamentalist Christian[3] point of view. The website was established in 2006 by American attorney and activist Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly,[4][5] to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias on Wikipedia.[6][7] It uses editorials and a wiki-based system for content generation.

Examples of Conservapedia’s ideology include its accusations against and strong criticism of former US president Barack Obama—including advocacy of Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories[8]—along with criticisms of atheism, feminism, homosexuality, the Democratic Party, and evolution. Conservapedia views Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity as promoting moral relativism,[9] claims that abortion increases risk of breast cancer, praises Republican politicians, supports celebrities and artistic works it believes represent moral standards in line with Christian family values, and espouses fundamentalist Christian doctrines such as Young Earth creationism.[10][11] Conservapedia’s “Conservative Bible Project” is a crowd-sourced retranslation of the English-language Bible which the site says to be “free of corruption by liberal untruths.”[12]

It sounds like the issue is the bytes that come before the data it wants, rather than after.

Could probably search for it, if one could determine from a snippet of the content whether-or-not one is too far.

I suppose that more automated testing could help catch some of these before releases.

Hmm. Do they accept an HTTP Range-Request?

Facts are not copyrightable, just their presentation. So I don’t think that it’s possible to say that it’s impossible to summarize material. A court is going to say that some form of summary is legal.

On the other hand, simply taking material and passing it through an AI and producing the same material as the source — which would be an extreme case — is definitely copyright infringement. So there’s no way that a court is going to just say that any output from an AI is legal.

We already have criteria for what’s infringing, whether a work is “derivative” or not.

My bet is that a court is going to tell Brave “no”, and that it’s up to Brave to make sure that any given work it produces isn’t derivative, using existing case law. Like, that’s a pain for AI summary generators, but it kind of comes with the field.

Maybe it’s possible to ask a court for clearer and harder criteria for what makes a work derivative or not, if we expect to be bumping up against the line, but my guess is that summary generators aren’t very impacted by this compared to most AI and non-AI uses. If the criteria get shifted to be a little bit more permissive (“you can have six consecutive words identical to the source material”, say) or less permissive (“you can have three consecutive words identical to the source material”), my guess is that it’s relatively easy for summary generators to update and change their behavior, since I doubt that people are keeping these summaries around.

That’s a common problem with these local models that lack company-provided guardrails. They could expose people to any manner of things.

Generated locally with ComfyUI and a Flux-based model:

A red ball balancing on a white ball with a blue ball balancing on top.

since 2015

Honestly, I’d say that a lot of Trumpism’s stuff is more-or-less in line with the stuff that the John Birch Society has promoted, and that goes waaaaay back. I mean, Trump talking about annexing Canada/Panama/whatever, no — in fact, that’s one of the few cases that I think that they’d take a dead-opposite position on, since they’ve a horror of the North American Union. But there’s a lot of overlap outside that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

The John Birch Society from its start opposed collectivism as a “cancer” and by extension communism and big government.[29][30] JBS publications referred to the fight against Communism as a spiritual war against the devil.[25]: iv, 156–157  Allegations that so-called “Insiders” have conspired to control the United States through communism and world government are a recurring theme of JBS publications.[31] The organization and its founder, Robert W. Welch Jr., promoted Americanism as “the philosophical antithesis of Communism.”[32] It contended that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and argued that states’ rights should supersede those of the federal government.[33] Welch infused constitutionalist and classical liberal principles, in addition to his conspiracy theories, into the JBS’s ideology and rhetoric.[34] In 1983, Congressman Larry McDonald, then the society’s newly appointed chairman, characterized the JBS as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.[35] The society opposes “one world government”, the United Nations (UN),[36] the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. It argues the U.S. Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization. It has cited the existence of the former Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.[37][38] The JBS has sought immigration reduction.

The JBS opposed the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.[16][39][40] It has campaigned for state nullification.[41][42] It opposes efforts to call an Article V convention to amend the U.S. Constitution,[43][44] and it has been influential at promoting opposition to it among Republican legislators.[45] The JBS also supports auditing and eventually dismantling the Federal Reserve System.[46][non-primary source needed] The JBS holds that the United States Constitution gives only Congress the ability to coin money, and does not permit it to delegate this power, or to transform the dollar into a fiat currency not backed by gold or silver.[non-primary source needed]

If you look at the article, it was only ever possible to do local processing with certain devices and only in English. I assume that those are the ones with enough compute capacity to do local processing, which probably made them cost more, and that the hardware probably isn’t capable of running whatever models Amazon’s running remotely.

I think that there’s a broader problem than Amazon and voice recognition for people who want self-hosted stuff. That is, throwing loads of parallel hardware at something isn’t cheap. It’s worse if you stick it on every device. Companies — even aside from not wanting someone to pirate their model running on the device — are going to have a hard time selling devices with big, costly, power-hungry parallel compute processors.

What they can take advantage of is that for a lot of tasks, the compute demand is only intermittent. So if you buy a parallel compute card, the cost can be spread over many users.

I have a fancy GPU that I got to run LLM stuff that ran about $1000. Say I’m doing AI image generation with it 3% of the time. It’d be possible to do that compute on a shared system off in the Internet, and my actual hardware costs would be about $33. That’s a heckofa big improvement.

And the situation that they’re dealing with is even larger, since there might be multiple devices in a household that want to do parallel-compute-requiring tasks. So now you’re talking about maybe $1k in hardware for each of them, not to mention the supporting hardware like a beefy power supply.

This isn’t specific to Amazon. Like, this is true of all devices that want to take advantage of heavyweight parallel compute.

I think that one thing that it might be worth considering for the self-hosted world is the creation of a hardened network parallel compute node that exposes its services over the network. So, in a scenario like that, you would have one (well, or more, but could just have one) device that provides generic parallel compute services. Then your smaller, weaker, lower-power devices — phones, Alexa-type speakers, whatever — make use of it over your network, using a generic API. There are some issues that come with this. It needs to be hardened, can’t leak information from one device to another. Some tasks require storing a lot of state — like, AI image generation requires uploading a large model, and you want to cache that. If you have, say, two parallel compute cards/servers, you want to use them intelligently, keep the model loaded on one of them insofar as is reasonable, to avoid needing to reload it. Some devices are very latency-sensitive — like voice recognition — and some, like image generation, are amenable to batch use, so some kind of priority system is probably warranted. So there are some technical problems to solve.

But otherwise, the only real option for heavy parallel compute is going to be sending your data out to the cloud. And even if you don’t care about the privacy implications or the possibility of a company going under, as I saw some home automation person once point out, you don’t want your light switches to stop working just because your Internet connection is out.

Having per-household self-hosted parallel compute on one node is still probably more-costly than sharing parallel compute among users. But it’s cheaper than putting parallel compute on every device.

Linux has some highly-isolated computing environments like seccomp that might be appropriate for implementing the compute portion of such a server, though I don’t know whether it’s too-restrictive to permit running parallel compute tasks.

In such a scenario, you’d have a “household parallel compute server”, in much the way that one might have a “household music player” hooked up to a house-wide speaker system running something like mpd or a “household media server” providing storage of media, or suchlike.

Everything you say to your Echo…

I don’t have an Echo.

Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister on March 14, declaring “We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the US,” rejecting Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

Carney won the Liberal leadership with 85.9% of the vote despite having no elected experience.

In recent weeks, the Liberals have reversed a political freefall, sharply rebounding to such a degree that a previously expected Conservative majority in the next general election looks increasingly unlikely. The shift in the polls has been so dramatic that pollsters have struggled to find any historical precedent.

A newly released poll from Abacus Data showed the Conservative support had shrunk to 38%, with 34% going to the incumbent Liberals.

I don’t know what impact the Trump administration is having on the likelihood of conservatives having political power in the US in the future, but it sure isn’t having a positive effect on conservatives in Canada.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a broad range of unorthodox views on medicine.

A survey of over 100,000 Germans revealed that 94% won’t buy a Tesla vehicle.

Ehhh…

So, normally, you want a random sample in polls, which is very unlikely to not be representative of the population as a whole. If they have 100k people, it very probably isn’t a random sample, because you only normally take something like 1k to 2k people for randomly-sampled polls; there’s a rapidly-declining value above that. If the sample set is self-selected rather than randomly-selected, you can get results that are pretty different from the population as a whole.

fires up Google Translate

While I can’t seem to get the survey page to load, the domain it’s on is apparently t-online.de; it sounds like it’s a reader survey, which won’t be random.

The nerds lost the internet.

I mean, there wasn’t a shift in control or anything. This is just part of the business plan.

Reddit, like many B2C online services, intentionally operated at a loss for years in order to grow.

1. Get capital.

2. Spend capital providing a service that is as appealing as possible, even if you have to lose money to do it. This builds your userbase. This is especially important with services that experience network effect, like social media, since the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users. This is the “growth phase” of the company.

3. At some point, either capital becomes unavailable, too expensive (e.g. in the interest rate hikes after COVID-19), or you saturate available markets. At that point, you shift into the “monetization phrase” – you have to generate a return using that userbase you built. Could be ads, charging for the service or some premium features, harvesting data, whatever. Because interest rates shot up after COVID-19, a lot of Internet service companies were forced to rapidly transition into their monetization phase at the same time. But point is, your concern isn’t growing the service as much as it is making a return then, and it’s virtually certain that in some way, the service will become less-desirable, since the service is shifting to having a priority on making a return above being desirable to draw new users. That transition from growth to monetization phase is what Cory Doctrow called “enshittification”, though some people around here kind of misuse the term to refer to any change that they don’t like.

Investors were not going to simply shovel money into Reddit forever with no return — they always did so expecting some kind of return, even if it took a long time to build to that return. I hoped that that changes when they moved into a monetization phase were changes that I could live with. In the end, they weren’t — I wasn’t willing to give up third party clients, if there was an alternative. But it’s possible that they could have come up with some sort of monetization that I was okay with.

If you don’t mean the transition from growth to monetization at Reddit, but the creation of Reddit at all…

The main predecessor to Reddit was, I suppose, Usenet. That was a federated system, and while it wasn’t grown with that kind of business model, it wasn’t free — but typically it was a service that was bundled into the bill when one got service from an ISP, along with email and sometimes a small amount of webhosting. Over time, ISPs that provided bundled Usenet service stopped providing it (since it increased their subscription fees and made their actual Internet service uncompetitive for people who didn’t use Usenet service), and because so many people used it to pirate large binaries, the costs of running a full-feed Usenet server increased. Users today that use Usenet typically pay a subscription to some commercial service. You can still get Usenet service now, if that’s what you want – but you’ll pay for it a la carte rather than having it bundled, and the last time I was trying to use it for actual discussion, it had real problems with spam.

But it’s a world-renowned Kentucky product, bourbon, that’s become a prime target for retaliation. In Canada, some liquor stores have cleared American spirits from their shelves. Across the Atlantic, the EU will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon and motorcycles, peanut butter and jeans.

Those are targeted tariffs aimed at creating political pressure on Trump to stop the trade war.

If I drank Kentucky bourbon here in the US, I’d stop too. I mean, sucks for the bourbon guys — while some manufacturers no doubt wanted tariffs, those guys won’t have — but I want the tariffs stopped too, and given that elections are some time away, that’s really my only available near-term input on the tariff conflict.

I guess I eat beef, chicken and peanut butter. Can probably live without that for the duration; probably possible to get non-US-originating stuff, do my bit to increase pressure. Can probably get non-US-originating jeans. :-/

I wish that the Canucks would put up recommended alternatives.

goes hunting

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=imported+peanut+butter&i=grocery

Okay “imported peanut butter” seems to provide hits from Canada and the Netherlands.

I have no idea on jeans.

I doubt that it’s possible to easily get non-US-originating chicken in the US. The US is globally-competitive in chicken production, and it’s expensive to ship. Probably just need to eat an alternative.

EDIT: It sounds like most jeans manufacture moved out of the US some time ago, so if you’re getting jeans in the US, unless you’re going out of your way to get domestically-manufactured ones, they’re probably imports anyway.

https://toddshelton.com/blog/about-todd-shelton/made-in-america/best-jeans-made-in-usa

No more household names like Levi’s, Wrangler, or Lee

The Big 3: Levi’s, Wrangler, and Lee no longer make jeans in America. A few years ago, Levi’s and Wrangler sold a Made in USA jean for over $200—but a recent search shows both have been discontinued.

Even well-known brands like AG Jeans and Lucky, which still have a reputation for USA made jeans, no longer make jeans here.

People looking to buy American made jeans will need to be willing to get familiar with a new brand, because there are no more household names making jeans in America.

Adjusting to what an American-made jean should cost

For many readers who want to buy made in America jeans, adjusting to the higher prices will be a challenge.

Keep in mind, Levi’s and Wrangler sold made in USA jeans a few years ago and were priced at $250 and $275, respectively. Neither brand is known for high prices, but each did the math for what their American-made jean should cost—and both came up with a similar number.

The prices are higher because American labor and overhead are higher, and the scale that can reduce cost is no longer available for American factories.

The ones that they do list that still make jeans in the US are niche brands that I’ve never purchased from in the first place:

• Todd Shelton
• Raleigh Denim Workshop
• Shockoe Atelier
• Railcar Fine Goods
• Dearborn Denim
• Round House Jeans
• Glenn’s Denim
• Blue Delta

So probably I don’t need to do anything different there.

Treason is an extremely-rare charge in the US, and the conditions for it are very narrow.

They are much narrower than “doing things that are detrimental to the country”.

I am confident that RFK Jr. would not meet the bar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_laws_in_the_United_States

In the United States, there are both federal and state laws prohibiting treason.[1] Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as “only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, “adhering to the enemies” of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court.[2] Fewer than 30 people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.[3]

If we can’t have independent Executive Branch agencies, then Congress is probably going to have to create some under Congress. They do have some bureaucracy of their own, like the Congressional Research Service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Research_Service

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a public policy research institute of the United States Congress. Operating within the Library of Congress, it works primarily and directly for members of Congress and their committees and staff on a confidential, nonpartisan basis. CRS is sometimes known as Congress’ think tank due to its broad mandate of providing research and analysis on all matters relevant to national policymaking.[4]

CRS is one of three major legislative agencies that support Congress, along with the Congressional Budget Office (which provides Congress with budget-related information, reports on fiscal, budgetary, and programmatic issues, and analyses of budget policy options, costs, and effects) and the Government Accountability Office (which assists Congress in reviewing and monitoring the activities of government by conducting independent audits, investigations, and evaluations of federal programs). Collectively, the three agencies employ more than 4,000 people.[5]

The whole federal government is about three million people, so that’s a tiny fraction of it. But it is a thing – the Legislative Branch can have its own bureaucracy.

I mean, you cannot stick stuff related to oversight of the Executive Branch within the Executive Branch if it doesn’t have independence.

Maybe the Irish will increase taxation on it to make him happy.

Musk did some crazy brand management with Twitter, but the Tesla/Trump stuff has got to be unparalleled in the history of branding. He built a product that was an identity-broadcasting thing for liberals and then pulled a 180 and drove as hard as one could possibly imagine in the other direction.

Even if he had some idea of selling to conservatives, become the only EV manufacturer selling to that segment, he could have put out a different brand, which lots of manufacturers do, and mitigate losses to the original brand.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-sale-big-losses-second-hand-value-plunge-elon-musk-2025-3

Tesla owners offloading their cars over Elon Musk backlash are in for a nasty surprise

• Some Tesla owners are considering selling their cars as backlash against Elon Musk and DOGE grows.

• They may have to take a serious haircut, with prices for used Teslas plummeting in recent years.

• The average price of a pre-owned Tesla is now $30,000, nearly $10,000 less than a non-Tesla EV.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-gaining-republicans-loses-traction-democrats-stifel/

Stifel’s Think Tank Group data has shown that Democrats’ net favorability of Tesla fell to -15% from 7% since February 2024, while Republicans’ rose to 27% from 11%. Democrats’ net purchase consideration for Tesla vehicles also dropped to -42% from -31% since Musk endorsed Trump in August, while Republicans’ improved to -13% from -26% in the same period, per Stifel.

“There is a clear negative shift from Democrats, while Republicans willingness to buy a Tesla is rising… This backlash has surfaced anecdotally and on social media (people placing bumper stickers on their Tesla’s claiming they love the car, but not Elon, and other variations),” the analyst noted.