Tootfinder

“Asking an AI chatbot a question consumes a great deal more energy than finding the answer via simple web search or calculator. It adds extra demand for no good reason... a bit like driving to the shops in an SUV instead of riding your bike.”
Or driving any kind of car. AI, like cars, aims to reconfigure everyday life in a way that’s vastly more energy-hungry and polluting… and profitable for a few.

Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, recalled asking "Silicon Valley" creator Mike Judge what he was really going for.
Judge answered, “I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.”
McNamee’s own read on things was less diplomatic:
“Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place.
…

The billionaires made a promise -- now some want out | TechCrunch
In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world's

I don’t know the answer to my original question, but maybe it’s as simple as “seize the means of repetition.”
/end

from my link log —
U 237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW is a symbol for azimuth.
https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html
saved 2026-03-11 …

We asked 100 UK IT leaders what one question they’d like answered about the quantum threat. Here are some pointers.
https://www.computing.co.uk/research/2026/a-post-quantum-q-a-yo…

A quantum risk Q&A - your questions answered
Quantum computing’s threat to encryption is - conceptually at least – very simple. One day, perhaps quite soon, a quantum computer may be able to ...

So to follow up on this, I've caught it in action. Models, when quantized a bit, just do a bit more poorly with short contexts. Even going from f32 (as trained) to bf16 (as usually run) to q8 tends to do okay for "normal" context windows. And q4 you start feeling like "this model is a little stupid and gets stuck sometimes” (it is! It's just that it's still mostly careening about in the space of "plausible" most of the time. Not good guesswork, but still in the zone). With long contexts, the probability of parameters collapsing to zero are higher, so the more context the more likelihood you are to see brokenness.
And then at Q2 (2 bits per parameter) or Q1, the model falls apart completely. Parameters collapse to zero easily. You start seeing "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” sorts of behavior, with intense and unscrutinized repetition, followed by a hard stop when it just stops working.
And quantization is a parameter that a model vendor can turn relatively easily. (they have to regenerate the model from the base with more quantization, but it's a data transformation on the order of running a terabyte through a straightforward and fast process, not like training).
If you have 1000 customers and enough equipment to handle the requests of 700, going from bf16 to q8 is a no-brainer. Suddenly you can handle the load and have a little spare capacity. They get worse results, probably pay the same per token (or they're on a subscription that hides the cost anyway so you are even freer to make trade-offs. There's a reason that subscription products are kinda poorly described.)
It's also possible for them to vary this across a day: use models during quieter periods? Maybe you get an instance running a bf16 quantization. If you use it during a high use period? You get a Q4 model.
Or intelligent routing is possible. No idea if anyone is doing this, but if they monitor what you send a bit, and you generally shoot for an expensive model for simple requests? They could totally substitute a highly quantized version of the model to answer the question.
There are •so many tricks• that can be pulled here. Some of them very reasonable to make, some of them treading into outright misleading or fraudulent, and it's weirdly hard to draw the line between them.

Why would a company pay you to come up with the same solutions generated by a chatbot?
The answer is, they don’t want to pay you! It’s that fucking simple!

Why has the world's first hydrogen double-decker fleet failed?
(Answer: battery EVs are much more economical, simpler, and do not rely on single complex refueling station.)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnv6e5l588jo

Why has the world's first hydrogen double-decker fleet failed?
The multi-million pound project in Aberdeen was meant to be the future of clean public transportation.

Just got these messages from @seengoals@mastodon.social, one of the members of Gaza Verified, basically accusing me of running a fundraiser for Gaza and keeping the proceeds (I have no fundraiser on any fundraising site anywhere) and extorting me to share his fundraiser or he’ll apparently go public with it.
So here’s what’s going to happening instead: Nabil has been removed Gaza Verified (