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@literate-ninja

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Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Oh, that's easy. It's a landlording scheme.
The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.
That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.
That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.
That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.
The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.
Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.
It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.
ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.
Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.
Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.
The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.
The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.
If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.
That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.
With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.
Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.
What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.
And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.
They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.
That's going to take one generation.
Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?
It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.
The tech has never been the conspiracy. It's the business model.
what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this
Whereas the reality is far more like
Was not expecting this many of you to resonate with Millennium Death Plinko
One of these days the horse is gonna come out of pinko with opposable thumbs, and then we're all in trouble.
*Scrolls past*
*reluctant sigh*
*scrolls back up*
*rebogs*

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Another day, another doggy you can’t pet. Meet the dhole (Cuon alpinus). Found widely across parts of Asia from India to China to Indonesia, this social canid typically lives in groups of up to 12 individuals. Sometimes it even socializes with other groups of dholes to form “super packs” of more than 30 members! Teamwork enables these hunters to take down prey ten times their size. And unlike many other species of canid, dholes allow their pups to feed first on kills. Their diet includes pigs, deer, and buffalo.
Photo: mihail1981, iStock
you're not supposed to wander around appalachia at night bc you'll fall off a sheer drop that you couldn't see coming. this is also a major risk during the day. you really have to watch out for the sheer drops that you don't see coming due to the undergrowth. I suspect 100% of spooky missing persons cases in appalachia have the spooky explanation of "sheer drop disguised by undergrowth"
really cannot overstate how many utterly invisible ravines we got here and also how big the woods are. they can't find people because the woods? are big
in seriousness you can learn about the isolated Appalachian communities that were up here until quite recently by checking out the foxfire books. it is true that there were many isolated communities that remained pretty separate from mainstream American life for a longish time but most of the last ones were my grandpa's generation. and they were regular? can't overstate how regular they were. just rural and isolated with their own culture. do check out the foxfire museum if you want to learn more about them and their lives! those books are based on real interviews conducted by local high schoolers and college students of the old folks in their communities and they are very interesting windows into day to day rural life up in the mountains in the early to mid 20th century.
I absolutely 100% do not mean this in a like derogatory city slickers way; I myself grew up mostly in a city and I think that it is morally neutral to not have experience with The Outdoors. having said that, I have noticed that a lot of people who do not have regular interactions with "landscape that can kill you" do seem to have an internalized idea that "landscape that can kill you" is something that only happens to other people, or not very often, or only under extreme circumstances. which I think often leads them to assume that there must be something else out here that can kill you. but I fear I must inform the people who wanna believe scary Appalachian woods monsters are real that it's Landscape. inclusive of the beasts that dwell there such as the cougars and bears. its Landscape! (GRASPING EVERYONE ON THE SPOOKY APPALACHIAN TRAIL SUBREDDITS) IT'S LANDSCAPE THAT KILLS YOU! ITS ALWAYS LANDSCAPE! Old Man Hidden Ravine and his best friend Exposure!
homunculus let out into the yard for a few minutes of recreational getting thrown from the roof time
Hooooooo my fucking god

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Chinese hanfu in Jianghu style by nono
“The concept is simple. Take a blank sheet with nothing but the basic outline of a pinup girl and illustrate a unique scene around her.”
holy FUCK.
I’ll probably always reblog this cuz it’s just mind-blowing, holy cow
Be careful princess 🌸
I just love that multiple people not only though “the black one is a princess and those are her bodyguards” but also came to the conclusion “they’re also, obviously, samurai.”
Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:
[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?
A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.
Q: Why did you need to be the victim?
A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]
From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

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“Edo Famous Dengeki Juroku Prince Fox Fire” by Hirokage Utagawa. 19th century