Dammit. That popped up in my feed last night and I was going to scoop you this morning.

This is a long article, but it makes me think that the Apple/Android and Apple-MS/Linux analogies are the wrong way to think about this. 

It also makes me think that the whole concern over nuclear weapons in Iran may fade if open weight models with no guardrails let even smaller entities than the Iranian government turn out novel pathogens.

https://www.a16z.news/p/some-simple-economics-of-open-versus

Yes, the source comes with some caveats. Indint know how much Marc Andreesen influences the editorial direction of the blog, but in general I don't trust him.

I did partly win her heart with a custom fastener for ski brakes, dabbed out of aluminum stick because the production version didn't fit the binding at her foot size.

There you go. You can also ask it to generate a report or to be less verbose.

The real power is when you mix in documents that are not online.

But again, nothing I have uploaded is top secret

https://www.diyphotography.net/this-is-the-highest-resolution-image-ever-of-our-suns-surface/

Long promised from companies but never delivered. Now you can print your own. No more flats

https://www.yankodesign.com/2026/08/07/you-still-cant-buy-airless-tires-even-after-a-decade-but-you-can-3d-print-one/

As opposed to "Zuckerberg pervert glasses" of course.

https://www.creativebloq.com/tech/these-sold-out-normal-f-sunglasses-are-a-huge-middle-finger-to-meta

Quote from: Travoli on August 09, 2026, 11:19:11 PMI think ergo is on to something.

RC already anticipated all my points. He's just baiting me 😁

But if the fish never bite, the fisherman quits fishing.

"Silicon Valley startups are setting up open models, with some operating on shoestring budgets because of limited interest from VCs"

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-race-to-build-an-american-alternative-to-cheap-ai-from-china-2e99a28a

https://jamesoclaire.com/2026/06/25/the-unbearable-cheapness-of-open-weight-models/

See the graph in this article

https://thenewstack.io/open-weight-models-frontier-costs/

I think that's more where we are LM.

Kimi is close to Claude and 1/3 the price and other OW models (DeepSeek) are both less good and less expensive. Depending on the task, a model that matches Claude from a year ago might be enough.

https://www.together.ai/blog/kimi-k3-vs-claude-fable-5-on-deepswe-cost-and-coding
https://www.unsupervised.com/resources/what-agent-work-costs

They aren't "free" in either of the senses that Linux is free, but if you are talking about Linux from a TCO perspective, then it isn't free in the beer sense either.

> artificial sweeteners

QuoteStratified analyses indicated that the heightened risk of cognitive decline associated with high artificial sweetener consumption was particularly pronounced in adults younger than 60 years. In contrast, older adults did not demonstrate significant associations between sweetener tertiles and cognitive trajectories. Furthermore, diabetes status served as an important effect modifier. Among individuals with diabetes, high intake of total sweeteners, as well as individual agents such as aspartame, acesulfame k, and saccharin, was strongly associated with accelerated memory and global cognitive impairment.

Let's break that down.

The group that saw significant cognitive decline was under 60.

Question: what percentage of people experience significant cognitive decline before the age of 60?

Answer: not many.

So what that means is that if it just so happens that randomly a few of those people also ingested a lot of artificial sweetener, you might have a p-value low enough to say this is significant.

There was a study a few years back that got people freaked out about too much exercise. There were thousands of people and they looked at all-cause mortality. It turned out that above some very high number that almost nobody needs to worry about (something like 1000 minutes per week), death rates were higher than in the moderate category. The problem is that the denominator is tiny for that group and this was all cause mortality and it was based on three people. So if literally one person in the next category down (500 minutes say) had gotten hit by a bus, that would have flipped the curve.

So without seeing absolute numbers, this is meaningless to me (as a person who ingests almost no artificial sweetener, so I have no skin in this game).

> individuals with diabetes

But guess what? They did not get Type II diabetes from eating a lot of artificial sweetener. In most cases they got it from eating a lot of high-glycemic-index foods, lots of snacking and little activity. Now AFTER they got the diabetes diagnosis and had the fear of god put into them, they cut back on the sugared drinks and started drinking lots of artificial sweetener.

I know someone who fits that exact profile. Perhaps the most sedentary person I know, she was on a constant Mountain Dew drip. Then got diabetes and several other health issues. Now drinks large quantities of artificial sweetener.

My guess is that the causality runs in reverse: diabetes causes high consumption of artificial sweeteners.

Bah!

ICE is still 2/3 3/4* of the market. I wonder what that looks like if you take out the US

*p. 19: 21.9 out of 82.7 million

I'm leery of buying something with a 10 year life expectancy from a company that has not sold a vehicle yet.

Despite my wife's prodding and heckling to upgrade, I use an iPhone Xs that used to be hers. I'm just not the kind of person to buy the latest car from the latest company 😆