I just watched this and had to pin! WHO KNEW you could download LLMs to your own computer and use them offline? I love this and wanted to share. Thanks Andrew! :)
Well the upside on the jobs front is that there are still tens of millions of illegals, visa holders, and other foreigners holding jobs in America. There are hundreds of thousands of trucking jobs alone being taken from Americans. There are entire industries (small hotels, gas stations, etc.) that have been handed to foreigners via SBA loans (a practice now finally ending). There are thousands of foreigners teaching in our universities. Working at resorts. Teaching yoga. Working in restaurants. Doing construction. Delivering food. On and on it goes.
There are still a LOT of jobs for Americans, if we just got rid of the foreigners who have taken these jobs. Team Trump should be moving far faster to clean up this mess.
Send them home. Or prison in their countries. However, I notice pickup trucks around my town are not boldly flying huge Mexican flags up and down the streets anymore. Or on big flag poles as well.
What’s sad is they are gatekeeping the data/knowledge and only the wealthy will be able to afford access. We know what happens after that. It’s a form of censorship.
When they are allowed to create their own electricity as Trump is encouraging/enabling, it should take the pressure off of the cost, not just for access but also for our own residential electric needs.
As a material minimalist I do my best to live without excessive 'stuff', but I think I need to revisit the notion of building up a private library. You know, where you buy the knowledge once and, like... own it forever?
We are racing gleefully into a dystopian future like excited canines running onto a busy freeway to chase cars...
We have a library. Granted the majority of the books are history based (my husband is a huge history buff) and a lot are non-fiction opinion books, but they're books. Now when we go to the yearly library book sale (awesome deals - hardcover books are $2 and they have 10's of thousands available every year!), we look for reference type books (well, and books for pleasure reading). I immediately check the gardening and cook book section. This year I'm going to specifically search for a container gardening book. If your library system hosts these, definitely check them out.
I am blessed to live in a small town that has a library book sale every Thursday. The basement is packed with thousands of books, arranged by category, so you can find whatever you want.
Once upon a time, only the powerful could read and write... and not too long ago, it was illegal for a certain segment of the population to learn to read and write, because reading and writing are powerful skills... The Myans were right... the world and everything in it is circular.
“If artificial intelligence becomes as fundamental to the economy as electricity, it’s not hard to imagine governments stepping in.”
Of course not! The Federal gubmint never met an idea, a utility, a licensure, etc. it couldn’t wait to tax the shit out of! All in name of safety or “ensuring competition” of course. You can betyerass that a robust % of the fee you pay for AI will be a tax to Uncle Scam or <insert name of poorly run state here>. Dolla, dolla, dolla bills y’all!
I use AI to ask stupid questions like "who is the actor voicing the 'whatever' commercial?" because the voice sounds familiar to me. So yeah - not a big deal if they start charging - I don't REALLY need to know who's voicing that commercial.
My daughter has told me that people on her team at work often encourage her to use AI for parts of their jobs. She keeps telling them that they're crazy to do that. She refuses to use it for anything. She sees it for what it is - if she lets AI do her job for her, then SHE'S NOT NEEDED IN HER JOB! Hello? Common sense? Glad to see my daughter has it (she's 28).
My son is a junior in high school. We're looking at colleges. He's carefully considering his major - is it something that can be replaced with AI. He refuses to major in anything that can be. Smart kid.
Our son is a junior in high school and wants to work with his hands on physical projects, probably carpentry.
He’s a brilliant academic but refuses the “traditional” college model because he knows where the real work (and money) will be available in the near future.
The time has come…I was using Clawbot for free…great assistant. Reviewed and organized spreadsheets, helped with workflow, all kinds off good stuff! Then it crashed. Why? Because it is no longer free. It is now subscription based PLUS tokens. I’d rather hire a real live person, TBH. So it’s back to my paltry staff of three (me, myself and I) because I CANNOT afford an assistant. We had a good thing going while it lasted…
The company gets the profit, the government gets the taxes,( left over after AI corporation lawyers and politicians take their cut) and we get the unemployment line staffed by Ai bots.
Because I don't trust AI, I checked "gift to mankind." I was annoyed when it began to be used to summarize my email chains and even write responses. This is not good for my grandchildren. It produces laziness and mindlessness which leads to all manner of adverse repercussions. Now my kids can say to them: "nope, we're not paying for that. Go to the library. You can figure it out."
I’m not sure where all of this is going, but I’m pretty sure that the world isn’t any better or happier as a result. I do take advantage of a lot of technology, but there comes a point when we start to lose our humanity.
Which begs the question of whether or not simulated intelligence will save us time from non-intelligent work to enable us to spend more time doing humanity related activities and thinking.
Unfortunately expected and will be catastrophic for our society in more ways than one.
The government has already stepped in announced Project Stargate with Larry Ellison to the tune of $500 billion tax payer dollars. Those AI databases will be used to track and control all of us while we knowingly and unknowingly give away all of our information.
Simulated Intelligence summary of Jenna's article (for those that don't want to read so much):
Core Argument The article argues that the era of free, ad-supported AI is ending. Instead, AI is transitioning into a metered utility model similar to electricity or water, where users pay based on usage ("tokens") rather than a flat subscription or data harvesting.
The Silver Lining: The author suggests that charging for AI might force humanity to rediscover critical thinking, creativity, and the value of doing things ourselves (writing, researching, problem-solving) rather than outsourcing everything to algorithms.
"Remember when we thought the internet would charge us per email like a snail-mail scam? Turns out, Big Tech just decided to harvest our data instead. Crisis averted! But hold onto your hats, folks—AI is about to pull the same trick, but with a twist: you’re going to pay for it."
"But hey, there’s a silver lining! Maybe charging for AI will force us to use our actual brains again. Imagine that! Reading a news article instead of asking Gemini to summarize it. Writing a birthday message for Aunt Carol instead of prompting a bot. Doing your own homework. Shocking, I know."
"In conclusion: The days of free AI are numbered. Soon, we’ll all be paying for intelligence like it’s a premium streaming service. And if you think that’s crazy, just wait until they start charging for wondering. 🤔💸"
Our library has self checkout, hastened in by Covid so the employees don’t have to deal with icky and soiled contaminated people. I worked at ours for 14 years until 2019. We were once knownas the friendliest library in our consortium. Now it’s a soulless deadly quiet place where soon I will know nobody.
I went to my library the other day and realized that they really have no books. I checked out the only two books about Alzheimer’s and one was written in 1996 and the other was copyrighted in 2002.
Like what are we paying for with our property taxes? Computers?
Our library has a great selection of old books, a smattering of new books (mostly Woke nonsense), and you can borrow ironing boards, garden tools, stew pots, and cheap prints of famous paintings.
Too many James Patterson books, IMO. One a week, it seems. My library is fairly good. But many areas very old. We can get books from 150 other libraries in a matter of a few days because mine is cash strapped like most. It’s a city boundary library. Those outside pay a fee because the library is on my tax bill. So very few close to town pay that reasonable fee . Our library trust has I million bucks in it however.
I was lectured by a former colleague I considered a friend and ordered to put my mask up over my nose one day. Then kicked out altogether by another colleague when I didn’t have a mask on at all. That killed the whole experience for me.
I loathe it in general. I'm forced to at least glance at the Google summary when I search, and occasionally that actually gives me enough information to answer my question. I knew they would eventually charge for it; remember when YouTube was free and didn't have any ads?
I might actually pay to NOT have Ai sticking its nose into my business at every turn. My email summarizes my messages for me, usually incorrectly. My phone tries to start a chat with me whenever I pick it up. The one question that Ai refuses to answer for me is; "How do I disable these Ai assistants?"
Ahhh, yes! I remember eons ago as a child looking at an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (going to its death on May 3, 2026 leaving the Burgh a newspaperless city) that had a cartoonish drawing of a television with rabbit ears and a collection box on top where you drop your coins in so you can watch a show. I asked my father what that meant and he said that some people think one day we will have to pay to watch TV. What a crazy thought when we had 4 great channels 2 (CBS), 4 (ABC), 11 (NBC) & 13 (PBS)! He said there might be more channels if you have to pay for it. Hmmmmm. Fast forward to today. Yes, we pay to watch TV. Yes, there’s a box but it’s not collecting coins. What is that box collecting anyway? I digress. We now have channel overload and my husband and I struggle to even find something decent to watch when we decide to take a shot at finding something. Catherine Austin Fitts, Naomi Wolf and others have cautioned us to keep using cash, to get bank statements mailed to you or print them out each month if mailing isn’t an option. Get hard copies of books even if you listen through an app. Inasmuch as possible hang on to analog. I am reminded of Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone episode The Obsolete Man. Better make sure you have a couple extra pairs of glasses as AI rolls in (or over us)!
Rick Beato had an interesting take on this recently, could be a solution:
https://youtu.be/YTLnnoZPALI
I just watched this and had to pin! WHO KNEW you could download LLMs to your own computer and use them offline? I love this and wanted to share. Thanks Andrew! :)
Well the upside on the jobs front is that there are still tens of millions of illegals, visa holders, and other foreigners holding jobs in America. There are hundreds of thousands of trucking jobs alone being taken from Americans. There are entire industries (small hotels, gas stations, etc.) that have been handed to foreigners via SBA loans (a practice now finally ending). There are thousands of foreigners teaching in our universities. Working at resorts. Teaching yoga. Working in restaurants. Doing construction. Delivering food. On and on it goes.
There are still a LOT of jobs for Americans, if we just got rid of the foreigners who have taken these jobs. Team Trump should be moving far faster to clean up this mess.
Send them home. Or prison in their countries. However, I notice pickup trucks around my town are not boldly flying huge Mexican flags up and down the streets anymore. Or on big flag poles as well.
How many jobs are being done by the
Foreigners that Americans wouldnt even consider ?
Picking crops ?can you find even one high schooler who would pick strawberries for any wage?
I watched my road being reconstructed
By the inch and not one worker was white?
Same for truck drivers? Men in America won’t leave their tv long enough to deliver anything?
Door dash is always
hiring ?
Age old reality. Privatize the profit—socialize the loss. Both sides do it.
100%
What’s sad is they are gatekeeping the data/knowledge and only the wealthy will be able to afford access. We know what happens after that. It’s a form of censorship.
When they are allowed to create their own electricity as Trump is encouraging/enabling, it should take the pressure off of the cost, not just for access but also for our own residential electric needs.
As a material minimalist I do my best to live without excessive 'stuff', but I think I need to revisit the notion of building up a private library. You know, where you buy the knowledge once and, like... own it forever?
We are racing gleefully into a dystopian future like excited canines running onto a busy freeway to chase cars...
We have a library. Granted the majority of the books are history based (my husband is a huge history buff) and a lot are non-fiction opinion books, but they're books. Now when we go to the yearly library book sale (awesome deals - hardcover books are $2 and they have 10's of thousands available every year!), we look for reference type books (well, and books for pleasure reading). I immediately check the gardening and cook book section. This year I'm going to specifically search for a container gardening book. If your library system hosts these, definitely check them out.
I am blessed to live in a small town that has a library book sale every Thursday. The basement is packed with thousands of books, arranged by category, so you can find whatever you want.
Once upon a time, only the powerful could read and write... and not too long ago, it was illegal for a certain segment of the population to learn to read and write, because reading and writing are powerful skills... The Myans were right... the world and everything in it is circular.
That is an intriguing thought! Will the future bring governments attempting to control *who* is allowed to learn and think?
We seem to have already destroyed the ability to write (in many of the younger generation).
Personal libraries are awesome!
It's not as fast as querying a simulated intelligence application, but the extra thought and pondering of doing research yourself is very rewarding.
The challenge is when you move. All those books are a lot of exercise to haul! (they take up a lot of space too... pushing toward larger homes)
Moving is a challenge in itself... the pleasure comes when one unpacks all of those books and relishes in their treasure.
That's why unpacking takes forever! Have you ever tried to *read* 1,000 books while you try to figure out which bookshelf to put them on?
And books are dust collectors. Sigh.....
The dust will fall off when you pick up the book and read it... ;)
Not until I've sneezed 4 or 5 times.
Creating jobs! Someone needs to employ the dust dusters! Oh wait, maybe I can get a robot to do that?
Our college library actually hired a woman to dust off our books (including the pages)!
Isn't that called "reading"? {grin} 😇
Maybe the college should get some actual students to read the books?
Can we emphasize the meme: "You ask it questions, and it confidently lies to you"?
That's simulated intelligence summed up in one short sentence!
“If artificial intelligence becomes as fundamental to the economy as electricity, it’s not hard to imagine governments stepping in.”
Of course not! The Federal gubmint never met an idea, a utility, a licensure, etc. it couldn’t wait to tax the shit out of! All in name of safety or “ensuring competition” of course. You can betyerass that a robust % of the fee you pay for AI will be a tax to Uncle Scam or <insert name of poorly run state here>. Dolla, dolla, dolla bills y’all!
Without a doubt the government will interfere and mess it up in the name of "protecting the children".
Thank goodness we're having fewer children!
I use AI to ask stupid questions like "who is the actor voicing the 'whatever' commercial?" because the voice sounds familiar to me. So yeah - not a big deal if they start charging - I don't REALLY need to know who's voicing that commercial.
My daughter has told me that people on her team at work often encourage her to use AI for parts of their jobs. She keeps telling them that they're crazy to do that. She refuses to use it for anything. She sees it for what it is - if she lets AI do her job for her, then SHE'S NOT NEEDED IN HER JOB! Hello? Common sense? Glad to see my daughter has it (she's 28).
My son is a junior in high school. We're looking at colleges. He's carefully considering his major - is it something that can be replaced with AI. He refuses to major in anything that can be. Smart kid.
It's CRAZY that kids have to think about that... heartbreaking, actually.
Our son is a junior in high school and wants to work with his hands on physical projects, probably carpentry.
He’s a brilliant academic but refuses the “traditional” college model because he knows where the real work (and money) will be available in the near future.
GenZ gets it.
-Ryan’s Wife
The time has come…I was using Clawbot for free…great assistant. Reviewed and organized spreadsheets, helped with workflow, all kinds off good stuff! Then it crashed. Why? Because it is no longer free. It is now subscription based PLUS tokens. I’d rather hire a real live person, TBH. So it’s back to my paltry staff of three (me, myself and I) because I CANNOT afford an assistant. We had a good thing going while it lasted…
Ah, the efficiency of a staff of three! Now are you more or less likely than Clawbot to erase your hard drive?
I used a back-up computer to host Clawbot…it had zero access to my real stuff lol! 😂
I think my hardrive is safe ;).
Uh oh! You used human intelligence to use software properly as a tool! Clever!
Maybe us humans aren't obsolete just yet?
One can only hope…
The company gets the profit, the government gets the taxes,( left over after AI corporation lawyers and politicians take their cut) and we get the unemployment line staffed by Ai bots.
Because I don't trust AI, I checked "gift to mankind." I was annoyed when it began to be used to summarize my email chains and even write responses. This is not good for my grandchildren. It produces laziness and mindlessness which leads to all manner of adverse repercussions. Now my kids can say to them: "nope, we're not paying for that. Go to the library. You can figure it out."
100%
I’m not sure where all of this is going, but I’m pretty sure that the world isn’t any better or happier as a result. I do take advantage of a lot of technology, but there comes a point when we start to lose our humanity.
Which begs the question of whether or not simulated intelligence will save us time from non-intelligent work to enable us to spend more time doing humanity related activities and thinking.
Hmmm….. good question. We’ll have to see. 🤞
Unfortunately expected and will be catastrophic for our society in more ways than one.
The government has already stepped in announced Project Stargate with Larry Ellison to the tune of $500 billion tax payer dollars. Those AI databases will be used to track and control all of us while we knowingly and unknowingly give away all of our information.
Stop the madness!!
Simulated Intelligence summary of Jenna's article (for those that don't want to read so much):
Core Argument The article argues that the era of free, ad-supported AI is ending. Instead, AI is transitioning into a metered utility model similar to electricity or water, where users pay based on usage ("tokens") rather than a flat subscription or data harvesting.
The Silver Lining: The author suggests that charging for AI might force humanity to rediscover critical thinking, creativity, and the value of doing things ourselves (writing, researching, problem-solving) rather than outsourcing everything to algorithms.
Wow; that’s a sad example of how much we need the real Jenna: because we want our information delivered with wit, sparkle and creativity!
Hmm... maybe I should have asked it to respond with a sense of humor?
Here is the humor version:
"Remember when we thought the internet would charge us per email like a snail-mail scam? Turns out, Big Tech just decided to harvest our data instead. Crisis averted! But hold onto your hats, folks—AI is about to pull the same trick, but with a twist: you’re going to pay for it."
"But hey, there’s a silver lining! Maybe charging for AI will force us to use our actual brains again. Imagine that! Reading a news article instead of asking Gemini to summarize it. Writing a birthday message for Aunt Carol instead of prompting a bot. Doing your own homework. Shocking, I know."
"In conclusion: The days of free AI are numbered. Soon, we’ll all be paying for intelligence like it’s a premium streaming service. And if you think that’s crazy, just wait until they start charging for wondering. 🤔💸"
*cringe* ;)
If that's AI's idea of humor, I think you're safe, Jenna!
"Hold onto your hats, folks!" Hahahahahaha
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Our library has self checkout, hastened in by Covid so the employees don’t have to deal with icky and soiled contaminated people. I worked at ours for 14 years until 2019. We were once knownas the friendliest library in our consortium. Now it’s a soulless deadly quiet place where soon I will know nobody.
I went to my library the other day and realized that they really have no books. I checked out the only two books about Alzheimer’s and one was written in 1996 and the other was copyrighted in 2002.
Like what are we paying for with our property taxes? Computers?
Likewise, my last visit to the library was disappointing. My home library is superior!
Our library has a great selection of old books, a smattering of new books (mostly Woke nonsense), and you can borrow ironing boards, garden tools, stew pots, and cheap prints of famous paintings.
Whatttttt???
IKR! But tis true. All it takes is your library card and you can enjoy the use of snow shovel for two weeks.
That would have come in handy in January. But at least my library lets us check out state park passes!
Wow! Soon they will be like Target where you can get anything!
Garden tools?
You can borrow paintings? (I like that idea - change up the décor of your house once a month!)
I have borrowed several Monet's over the years.
Cool! How long do you get to keep them? Two week check out would be far too short!
😭🙈
Too many James Patterson books, IMO. One a week, it seems. My library is fairly good. But many areas very old. We can get books from 150 other libraries in a matter of a few days because mine is cash strapped like most. It’s a city boundary library. Those outside pay a fee because the library is on my tax bill. So very few close to town pay that reasonable fee . Our library trust has I million bucks in it however.
Grift.
😢
I was lectured by a former colleague I considered a friend and ordered to put my mask up over my nose one day. Then kicked out altogether by another colleague when I didn’t have a mask on at all. That killed the whole experience for me.
Covid was a serious blow to humanity. For many of us it motivated us to no longer desire human company.
🎯
I loathe it in general. I'm forced to at least glance at the Google summary when I search, and occasionally that actually gives me enough information to answer my question. I knew they would eventually charge for it; remember when YouTube was free and didn't have any ads?
I might actually pay to NOT have Ai sticking its nose into my business at every turn. My email summarizes my messages for me, usually incorrectly. My phone tries to start a chat with me whenever I pick it up. The one question that Ai refuses to answer for me is; "How do I disable these Ai assistants?"
I don't know the answer to your question... but I do know that there will come a time when you can't.
Ahhh, yes! I remember eons ago as a child looking at an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (going to its death on May 3, 2026 leaving the Burgh a newspaperless city) that had a cartoonish drawing of a television with rabbit ears and a collection box on top where you drop your coins in so you can watch a show. I asked my father what that meant and he said that some people think one day we will have to pay to watch TV. What a crazy thought when we had 4 great channels 2 (CBS), 4 (ABC), 11 (NBC) & 13 (PBS)! He said there might be more channels if you have to pay for it. Hmmmmm. Fast forward to today. Yes, we pay to watch TV. Yes, there’s a box but it’s not collecting coins. What is that box collecting anyway? I digress. We now have channel overload and my husband and I struggle to even find something decent to watch when we decide to take a shot at finding something. Catherine Austin Fitts, Naomi Wolf and others have cautioned us to keep using cash, to get bank statements mailed to you or print them out each month if mailing isn’t an option. Get hard copies of books even if you listen through an app. Inasmuch as possible hang on to analog. I am reminded of Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone episode The Obsolete Man. Better make sure you have a couple extra pairs of glasses as AI rolls in (or over us)!
It's a cautionary reminder that there is more than one way to burn books.