Freedom tech is what keeps me hopeful for the world/future. Maybe lead them into a discussion about that? It might help them feel better :-)

It's about a 12-year-old boy who was told to remove a Gadsden flag patch from his backpack at school. It's the "Don't Tread on Me" flag. It's a symbol of freedom and the brave little boy isn't backing down from that fight.

Oh, now I see what the crypto.com payment method is. One needs a crypto.com account. Can't seem to be able to pay on Runpod with bitcoin without that account. I thought it was like bitpay (which is bad enough) but it's even worse. Oh well.

The search continues.

Thank you for that reference. I looked them up and looked at their Terms of Service. First time for me : you can't even copy-paste from their ToS page and the source of the webpage also doesn't show the text. (Print as pdf did create a file I could play with though).

Clause 2 related to intellectual property says we can't use the "Content" (whatever that means) for commercial purposes, only personal purposes. More importantly, it seems to say the Content is theirs (and so presumably what would be created in response to our questions and prompts?). I'm not sure what that all would mean when using an LLM.

I didn't even know crypto.com was still a thing. I thought they were toast! And I never knew there was such a thing as crypto.com payments. Presumably they're like a bitpay? I'll look at it a little bit more.

Lunanode not only accepts bitcoin, they do so through btcpayserver and they accept lightning. I love that service. I wish they also offered GPUs!

The search for a GPU-renting, bitcoin-accepting, friendly ToS-offering service provider continues...

Oh, looking forward to listening to it!

Do you also address how non-portuguese can join? Trying to look into it online right now, I see Madeira seems to want to hold on to its Golden visa program while the central government wants to end it?

I couldn't get it to load yesterday and right now it's working for me. I alternate between snort.social and coracle.social because some things work better for me on one and other things work better on the other.

I like 5 and 6, they're more stylish. Probably like 5 the most. 3 and 4 look too much like dollar signs for my taste.

Mostly in agreement, however : "bitching" about something can be rebranded/reinterpreted as "sharing information" about something. Sharing information is often useful.

I tried and, for the love of me, I can't get the download to work. It fetches the info and I think it sends it all over, but where is the option for the download?

If you're interested in a long term relationship, you can certainly try other countries as well. An international relationship can be very intellectually stimulating if you have an interest in foreign languages/cultures.

Absolutely will not trust it. The only AI I'm interested in is the open sourced kind. The kind I can install myself on a computer I at least trust a little bit.

Just remove the laws that protect the nuclear industry from liability and remove State subsidies. That industry crumbles.

Until we have a nuclear industry that is willing to shoulder its potential liabilities and that can make plants that do not require constant cooling (for decades) to avoid exploding, and that do not create incredibly dangerous targets for bad actors, I'm out.

Plus, again, I can't do it in my backyard which means it just leaves me dependent on big corporations (and a good social credit score?)

That's another point I think freedom-loving people should keep in mind. Nuclear energy (at least for the forseeable future) means some kind of grid, which leads to some kind of matrix. I can't do nuclear energy in my backyard.

As a freedom-loving person, I'm interested in all energy technologies that I can use myself or within a small group of trusted people.

Has anybody found a cloud service provider that rents GPUs and accepts bitcoin?

I like the idea of installing it myself but I don't have the local power to use the more advanced models. So GPU rental seems the way to go.

Obviously I prefer to use Bitcoin for many reasons but one is for privacy. I could probably try using a prepaid credit card but I also know many providers refuse those. Or they may be usable only in some countries.

Lunanode is well known for accepting bitcoin but they don't offer GPU rentals.

The closest I've come is bitlaunch.io for a vultr.com instance (they do GPUs) but we can't freeze/shelve the instance between uses. Neither can we take a snapshot between uses to faciliate the next instance creation. I guess there's the option of leaving the instance on, but that would be in the thousands per month...

#AI

#opensource

#LLM

You're right!

Fascinating. I'm so out of my depth. How does this article square with the one a few months back (with one of those two authors) ? : https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

"Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI"

"While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us:We have no secret sauce. Our

best hope is to learn from and collaborate with what others are doing

outside Google. We should prioritize enabling 3P integrations.People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is.Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which

can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than

an afterthought, now that we know what is possible in the <20B

parameter regime."

This is a good reference : https://bitcoiner.guide/nokyconly/

The best is to buy from someone you know, in person.

Trading your products/services for bitcoin is another great way.

From the guide I mentioned above :

"How else can I get some no-KYC bitcoin?Earn itSell unwanted goods for itBuy it from a friend or at a local meetupProvide value to others and have a donations pagePay for dinner when out with friends and ask them to reimburse you via bitcoinMine it"

And then these :"

Hodl Hodl

Bisq

RoboSats

Local Coin Swap

Agora Desk

Peach Bitcoin"

I believe so. Whatever is owed, I think the legal tender concept would apply to it. So the difference I see is before the transaction vs after the transaction. For example, if an online website refuses to offer a certain service for cash, I'm not sure we can do anything against that. But once the service *has been* rendered and they come for payment, no matter what the agreement was ("card only", etc), I don't think they'd be able to refuse cash. They might refuse further transactions though; I think.

I love what that Gentleman did. But I'm personally more a fan of building a network of (local and online) people to deal with, outside of the Grid/Matrix.

Like Texas Slim was saying : shake a rancher's hand :-)

The only thing that comes to mind right now is :

the **Magic Webstore** :

https://magicwebstore.xyz/onboard.html

https://github.com/supertestnet/superstore

"With Magic Webstore, your entire store is contained in your magic string, like a genie in a lamp. You just need to save that one string (back it up and store it safely) and you can do everything you need: add products to your store, manage your inventory, track your income, and keep your money safe."

For lightning : "It connects to legend.lnbits.com by default for lightning payments. You can already connect it to your own node, instructions are available on the admin page."

Great! But please have some kind of protector under the laptop to cut down a little on the EMF, heat, etc. You can test it out with a simple analog AM radio (the dial all the way to the left or to the right) to hear the noise the EMF makes. It's nooooisy. I don't like having that on my lap, especially not for hours on end.

Just my two sats.