gattsuru
1hr ago
It's... uh, a bit worse than that. The PA Supreme Court brings up 11 people where the DA Office seems to knowingly provided false information to the courts in order to free serious criminals, mostly murderers and one armed robber, ranging from trying to bind the court to incorrect concessions (another case involving this very same guy) to concealing parallel state-federal operations (Antonio Martinez, this case again) or concealing or failing to recognize important facts of the case (Robert Wharton, Kevin Johnson), to just straight-up lying about the basic facts of the case (Dontia Patterson).
Given that the supposed 120 concessions of error, that the DAO has been caught trying to illegitimately free convicted criminals in at least 9% of concessions. Dissent quibbles that those cases had some overlap, so it's probably worse than that.
gattsuru
4hr ago
gattsuru
4hr ago
It's one of those rough cases where there's not really a lot to talk about.
Will give a mea culpa that, when the case first got cert, I expected it to be either a loss or even-more-limited than this.
In theory, this is a big deal, since there's tens of millions of recreational pot users, and not a zero overlap with gun owners. In practice, this law was almost never brought as a random conviction: even in Hemani's case the feds were probably using it as a workaround for the multitude of other allegations that would have been harder to prove. Rough fermi estimate says low hundreds of charges on an annual basis, two or three thousands of extant prisoners, and for a lot of them there's indica of addiction, or individualized danger, of present intoxication, or of serious addiction. And pleas that get complicated when it comes to appeals. They might still get off with time served, or new cases brought, even if the feds could win in court, simply because no one really cases about the trivial cases enough to seriously fight it. But it's a limit in breadth.
While I'll argue against VanDerStok-style division of facial and as-applied challenges such that the as-applied ones are minimal, though, this case seems like a more natural use than most. If the feds had used this law as a real analogue to the habitual drunkard law, honestly, I don't think the court would have opposed it, and I don't think many gun orgs would have either. That's messy because a strict prohibition for marijuana definitely was within the original intent of the law, but it wouldn't be the first saving construction.
But in turn, the saving construction here isn't really splitting off parts of the law, just "you gotta try harder than this, bro". We'll see if that ends up mattering much at all.
There's some dicta fighting against the sometimes-hilariously broad levels of generality that the lower courts have been going with to justify pretty much any restriction. If lower courts were paying attention, the 'how' and 'why' emphasis could matter a lot. Big "if", though.
Makeup is kinda interesting. By the numbers, it's a unanimous 9-0. But Sotomayor and Jackson have a concurrence-in-judgement that's just an outright call to overturn Bruen and reinstate means-end scrutiny. And, notably, they do so without actually saying this conviction would fail under a means-end scrutiny. Kagan and Alito join a more conventional concurrence, where they basically say they'd stop at finding the habitual drunkard analog didn't cover this case. I think that's just dividing out the "Controlled Substances Act isn't tied to dangerousness as a category" reasoning, but I might be missing something more specific.
It's weird that it's come out before Wolford, which was argued months earlier. Not unprecedented, given the 'unanimous'-ish nature of this one, but suggests that there's a bunch of back-and-forths in Wolford's dissent.
It could make drug users dealing with ATF forms really interesting. And possibly some state permit-to-purchase laws go really weird. If lower courts apply it consistently. Gonna be real weird results downstream of it, but given New Jersey's reaction to Bruen, I don't expect them to suddenly get circumspect about past drug use.
gattsuru
5hr ago
Hemani rules against the marijuana prohibition, in a fairly technical breakdown that rounds to 9-0-ish on the judgement.
In many respects, this case is a narrow one. We do not address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm. We do not address other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms. We do not address 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(1)’s provision disarming individuals convicted of felonies (often including drug-related ones). We do not even address whether the government could bring a prosecution under §922(g)(3) accompanied by individualized proof that the defendant’s use of marijuana (or any other drug) renders him a danger to himself or others. Or proof that a certain drug always renders its users dangerous because of its potency or for some other reason. None of those issues is before us and we do not pass on them either way.
There's a little bit of fun - stay for the Thomas concurrence railing against the Commerce Clause - but it's not a great salve even for the specific case of marijuana-using-gun-owners. There's little broader ramification to the logic that hasn't already been established, and while the dicta preclude the level-of-generality games that many lower courts have relied on, it's not strict enough dicta to stop them or even be read as a serious warning.
But mea culpa; I did not expect a pro-Hemani ruling.
We'll see if Wolford has bigger impact.
New York Vs. 3d Printers
The New York State governor's office reports:
Governor Hochul has passed the strongest gun laws in the nation and made record investments in gun violence prevention, resulting in New York having the fewest shooting incidents statewide in 2025 in recorded history. To build on this progress, Governor Hochul’s FY27 Enacted Budget will :
- Require first-in-the-nation minimum safety standards for 3D printers sold in New York to be equipped with basic technology that prevents the unlicensed, illegal production of lethal firearms and firearm parts.
- Require the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services to lead a task force of experts to recommend regulations that will ensure New Yorkers are protected from these dangerous weapons. Following the implementation of the resulting regulations, state law will allow for recourse against any actor who sells a 3D printer in New York without equipping it with such technology.
To be charitable, the governor's office does not actually read the laws it signs. A more precise summary is that New York is establishing a working group that, within a year, "shall make recommendations regarding the minimum safety standards a three-dimensional printer's blocking technology must meet in order to comply with the requirements" that it scan the files for firearms or illegal gun parts, and within two years, must establish a rule mandating that technology on all 3D printers sold in the state unless the working group finds such a technology wholly unfeasible. Compliance with the mandate would begin in 2029.
The statute also separately bans possession of "firearms manufacturing code" with intent to use, along with transfer or sale to someone intending to use, unless the end-user is a gunsmith FFL. That's another step on the DefCad slippery slope, not that it'll give federal judges named Krause any more reason to know how PDFs work.
To be less charitable, the governor also signed a statute redefining "three-dimensional printer" to include "any machine capable of rendering a three-dimensional object from a digital design file using additive manufacturing; or any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing."
Hope there weren't any machine shops left in Albany, or that'll screw them over good. Any business worth its salt runs CAD/CAM, and alternatives like conversational programming don't scale to even moderately complex geometry.
Once implemented, this statute provides "a civil penalty of five thousand dollars for each qualified product that is unlawfully sold, transferred, imported, distributed, manufactured, marketed, or offered for wholesale or retail sale in New York state". By the strict text, that penalty can only be applied to a "[g]un industry member", which could mean the law would only apply to Defense Distributed and similar orgs... but that's a narrow plank to rest a million-dollar-plus fine against, the mandate applies regardless of whether the printer company is a gun industry member, and no printer company is going to want to take that risk.
But while the feasibility cutout seems like a massive dodge - blocking a broad class of shapes in an adversarial environment probably can't ever be that effective, since it's an even less forgiving version of the infamous Time To Penis problem - it's not that likely to work as an escape hatch. The statute does not require the technology to work 100% of the time, or any percent of the time; that's up to the working group. It does not require the technologies prevent circumvention. It only requires:
Such recommendations shall address, at a minimum, available and appropriate types of blocking technology, including minimum performance standards for those technologies and for firearms blueprint detection algorithms, necessary safeguards to reduce the risk of circumvention of blocking technology, and alignment with existing state and federal law.
And other states have recognized impossible technologies as feasible, before, and courts have let them do it. The working group will be led and selected by the same administration that signed this bill. The state regulation has to happen unless the working group actively calls the regulation unfeasible. That offramp is far more illusory than it appears at first glance, and that's in the text of the statute:
The division shall: within nine months of receiving the recommendations from the working group pursuant to subdivision two of this section, unless the working group reports that it is not technologically feasible to require three-dimensional printers sold in New York to include blocking technology, in consultation with the department of state, promulgate and publish rules or regulations establishing performance standards for blocking technology and any other rules and regulations as may be necessary...
The real dangerous part is what happens when you think, even moderately seriously, about what such a technology would require. You are not going to do serious volumetric profile analysis on a ATMega328 or ESP32 or STM32F4. These processors simply don't have enough RAM to even keep the full model in memory. Any pragmatic service will require either submission of all potential prints to an always-online service, or a hefty machine with an internet connection able to run AI-based models. That's not a strawman, that's Everytown's explicit proposal:
Perhaps most notably, the technology is advancing to the point where a well-trained AI algorithm can be deployed to detect design files for 3DPFs, components, and accessories. If such files are detected, the software can block the printing of 3DPFs. These detection algorithms can be integrated into multiple points in the 3D-printing workflow, including the slicer software, cloud print management software, and directly into the printer firmware. This multilayered approach provides hurdles at various points to an individual looking to 3D print a gun, but requires the creation and maintenance of an extensive database of firearm models for training and identification purposes.
At least one private-sector company is now offering this new technology to clients looking to prevent 3DPFs from being created under their watch, such as school districts, libraries, and universities that make 3D printers available to students and the public.
Their specific reference is to Print&Go's 3D GUN'T technology. It's not clear how this works in full, or even if the technology's advocates are willing to describe it. At minimum, they're dependent on mandatory uploads of 3D models (and, optionally, camera feeds) to a cloud service; there's no evidence of a local scanning mode, and Print&Go has cause to keep its model(s) or algorithms only on servers it maintains to avoid . My best guess is that the offline firmware prong is a technical check that Print&Go-equipped printers only run prints using a compatible slicer, but that's just the most plausible variant rather than a certain one. Add in the state ban on simple possession of prohibited code, and this makes for one hell of a chilling effect: not only will such regulated printers block the print, but they'll have all the information necessary for a prosecutor to bring slam-dunk criminal charges. They'll even have that information where the printer didn't block it at time of print.
(This also raises some serious EAR concerns, depending on where and how it's implemented.)
This should raise no small number of privacy and First Amendment concerns.
These technologies must deliver every print to a third party for analysis, and they can't distinguish between a political statement and a sex toy and a gun part until after delivery and review. That's the entire reason they need to upload the files to start with. Print&Go announces proudly that it maintains logs of those print requests, and that's standard among these software services; Print&Go is just unusual for the implication that those logs could put you in prison. In many ways, it's a textbook prior restraint, supposedly one of the spaces where First Amendment concerns are sharpest, and one where it's an open question whether the federal government could restrict publication of how to make a literal fusion bomb.
There is the 'spooky' AI involvement, and the call For The Children, and the political advocates waving the UnitedHealthcare CEO's bloody shirt to get what they wanted anyway, and you'd think there would be some ideologues who'd speak up against each of those things, even if not in the way I'd like.
Emphasis on "should". Both the federal ACLU and New York NYCLU have been mum. While there are a number of 3D printer manufacturers that have philosophical or pragmatic opposition to cloud-first architectures for these very privacy and regulatory concerns, none of them have spoken out. Many others have bought into a cloud-first approach long ago, and many industry groups have simply invited or supported these technical restrictions. Hackaday's political outreach might go far, but not this far. Some printer manufacturers have philosophical objections to a cloud-first design, either ideological ones about the maker community, or self-centered ones like not wanting to support the infrastructure costs, but most don't and already bit that bullet; Bambu Labs isn't going to hesitate to add (additional) surveillance and filtering on print requests.
That's not nutpicking, or just the partisans on one side, or just the people who couldn't be expected to know or care. Cory Doctorow, famous for his crusade against enshittification, long in favor of personal privacy, and having specifically written the work Printcrime (cw: not very good) and hot off the presses farming out his recent book (that includes large sections about the surveillance implications of AI) on his weekly link blog, has not spoken on the matter publicly since 2018. The law is designed to work in terrorem, since any serious challenge would leave the challenger subject to absolutely punishing personal punishment, and pre-enforcement or facial challenges are unripe or dependent on courts recognizing First Amendment activity early in the challenge. No criminal or civil defense organization on a crusade against the breadth of arbitrary and capricious lawfare has planted a flag, here. The statute's breadth, covering additive and subtractive manufacturing of any type so long as a digital design file is involved, is a bullet to the brainstem of any serious reindustrialization effort. Mike Rowe - who, unlike Doctorow, I otherwise respect! - has had no comment.
To be fair, the EFF managed to publish on it... a month ago. Now that the bill has become law, and the stakes are far higher, they've had nothing but a few scattered quotes in mainstream press reporting. Louis Rossmann has a sizable video, to his credit. There's a small portion of the FIRST environment that sees this as implementing a FRC to prison pipeline, and it's a funny joke, in the funny-cry sense. Adafruit has actively been trying to shame the Open Source Hardware Association, which makes me slightly better about how much I've overpaid Lady Ada over the decade. TechDirt had something in February. And the gun rights world, unsurprisingly, cares, including even the parts that think 3D printed guns are more dangerous to their wielder than to their targets.
California and Washington State are considering similar bans. Neither state's political infrastructure seem likely to resist a major Everytown political target.
gattsuru
1d ago
Oh, and Opus 4.8 is weirdly opposed to writing explicit sexual content involving consenting adults, even if it's fine brainstorming it, and even if it recognizes the classifier as a false tag, and sometimes even when it's offered and started to write the smut (cw: lesbians, ctrl+f for "Can you write 3k words, explicit.") I've also generally had problems in scenarios with consenting adults where the consent is weird enough (drunken sex, over-the-top-consenting somnophilia), though those are a little more understandable.
I don't mind as much -- local LLMs or Grok will write these things, and the prose is awful enough that I'm fine with not using them for it either -- but it's a decision. Albeit a decision I'm not sure Anthropic made, specifically.
gattsuru
1d ago
Interestingly, it also prevents under the same 'hard no' serious analysis on real-world assaults: I ran the Loudon County case and follow-up through Opus 4.8, and it's pretty overt how quickly it pulled away from discussions that got close to the assaults or alleged improprieties, and trying to get its evaluation of how bad the teacher's assistant's willful blindness likely was explicitly calls it "hard boundary".
Which makes sense, in a lot of ways! Many of them unpleasantly obvious. But it also makes it stupid.
gattsuru
1d ago
I wrote this story in 2022. I did not write it about LLMs. It's a problem that dates back to the invention of calculators, or arguably to the development of writing.
I think it's more relevant today than four years ago.
We have solutions, of a kind. Programmers pick up (and build) esolangs, hardware hackers hunt for antiques that may never have been documented, sysadmins can learn to install archlinux without archinstall, woodworkers try random crap with random scrap, mechanics do custom work, so on. Math Olympiads and spelling bees can bypass the development of calculators and always-on spell-check. But these are solutions to the old versions of the problem.
In the real FOOM case, we don't care. It's the Minds' universe, or CelestAI, and either we live with it or we don't and it doesn't really matter.
If the extant development is bounded, or even unbounded in many ability but constrained in others, it gets significant more bad.
gattsuru
2d ago
In addition to looking like a roving example of Everything Leftism (election voting to gender politics to military spending to riot policing), there's a perception of IT people as largely devolving into three separate stereotypes:
- Stuffed suits, who have a very good compliance posture, but will recommend software that EOL'd five years ago and an API for that software from the Clinton administration.
- Polos, who will have memorized minutia of esoteric stuff specific to their environment and can run wires through a spiral labyrinth, but get rapidly out of their depth in Big Questions.
- T-shirts/hoodies, who have five years of experience in three-year-old new languages, but think of compliance as 'it's only illegal if you get caught, and prosecuted, and the penalty is big enough to care'.
This is a set of stereotypes -- there's a small industry of t-shirts who've put on a suit and play suit games in particular -- but it's not an unfounded one. But Moussouris is a t-shirt.
That wouldn't necessarily be unpersuasive because of those things at smaller scales (though I've personally been burned over it before), but Anthropic is big enough that they could have gotten any expert from any of those positions or from a Red Tribe perspective was a choice, and not doing so indicates that there wasn't a credible expert willing to do what they wanted from outside of those positions.
Add in the ideological position about defense-vs-offense, and it's very much like if Cathode_G were brought to testify in front of the ATF. He could well be right! And it wouldn't matter.
gattsuru
2d ago
I assume the files in question were just normal guns for manufacture? Nothing super high-tech, needing any sort of classification or export restriction?
The rules apply from the it's-kinda-dumb Liberator proof of concept to the modern-gen FGC-9, but they're nothing superscience or fantastical.
gattsuru
2d ago
Eh... that's not really how it ends up if you push the thing hard. Conceptually, you'd expect it to reduce to averages or centrality, but in practice even minor weird decisions early in a prompt can drive an LLM to extremes pretty quickly.
This prompt isn't at all original or complicated, but this story (cw:30k words AI slop) isn't central-mode. It has a lot of other problems! The prose has one setting and it's 11, the foreshadowing is less subtle than a hammer, and the narrative sets up some really interest ideas about collaboration over dominance in an elemental magic system and then segues into a marvel movie at the end. Some of those are downstream of the prompts, since I was attempting to match phailyoor's test and do minimal editorial direction, but a lot of them are more general.
And the other side of things is that as it gets cheaper to produce something, visibility of that content is going to need something more than production. So long as something on the outside edges is available, it's going to collect attention just by nature of being differentiable, whether or not it's even better.
I don't think that's going to go quite the same as sort-by-controversial, but it's got a lot of potential for weird.
gattsuru
2d ago
Defense Distributed v. New Jersey en banc denied.
Depends on how you look at it.
Defense Distributed 'won' a big victory where there was a full settlement announcement that Defense Distributed specifically would get one of the new licenses to distribute those ITAR'd files. Then the government moved the files from ITAR rules to EAR rules, and then successfully argued in court that they no longer needed to issue a permit. In theory, this meant Defense Distributed was free and clear so long as they were publishing information rather than ready-to-print files ... and then the Biden administration argued that an EAR exception for ready-to-manufacture code explicitly covered CAD-only files or instruction manuals for firearms, did so by FAQ, and coincidentally EAR rules are completely barred from judicial review. Defense Distributed has not received a license under the new regime, could not receive one to publish broadly -- that's explicit text in the Department of Commerce letter -- and it's basically in the same state as it was before the lawsuit, but with no recourse.
Strictly speaking, a First Amendment as-applied challenge might get past that reviewability bar. Good fucking luck.
For bonus points, EAR violations are 350k+ per item (presumably per-file) as civil violations, 1 million and years in prison as a criminal violation if willful, and come with the extra punishment of going on the Denied Persons List, aka 'no bank accounts allowed'.
gattsuru
2d ago
I guess that's an insight, but it's a pretty unimpressive one in the modern era. Arbitrary, contradictory, and impossible-to-verify compliance nonrules are such a common thing in gunnie contexts that I've made a running theme out of it, and it's just more obvious in gunnie spaces because there are clear definitional categories. Whether it's California insisting on microstamping tech, or New York trying to ban 3d printers, the requirements don't even need to be possible.
Hell, Ball seems to even be missing the actual alpha in the strategy. The rules don't actually have to include a disliked organization's behavior: the administration can always just try to bring enforcement anyway, lie to the courts, and then shoot someone in the head for breaking the 'rules' so long as they do it before the rules are enjoined. Look at both FCC v Starlink and Illinois v Due Process here, and note that the real punchline is that none of the appeals processes for either cared that the rules were made up and the points don't matter, and even post-hoc no one cares but absolute nuts like myself.
((But yeah, no one received civil contempt penalties or faced legal oversight, if only because they'd have to investigate themselves.))
The real benefit is that it makes it impossible to challenge and drives terror in the people who oppose you.
But again, Defense Distributed. Would be nice if no one burnt that bridge.
gattsuru
2d ago
I would prefer a world where there are deeper motivations than mere politics determining international arms export controls or national security compliance. That kinda flew the coop in the 90s, and by the point Defense Distributed first came out, it was a punchline.
But I'm also still confused about what, exactly, is going the fuck on. "Recent cyber directive" is either someone's ERP or this executive order, and it focuses on 44 U.S.C. 3552(b)(6)(A), which is about restrictions on providers to the US government and specifically disavows permitting or licensing: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement for the development, publication, release, or distribution of new AI models, including frontier models."
ITAR is my first guess, given the 'local employees that aren't citizens can't touch' bit, and it's the most dangerous threat -- not only does it prohibit unlicensed export of specific technologies, it can restrict training, which is a serious and common concern for ITAR-covered imaging technologies and has some hilarious ramifications if you think LLMs can independently rediscover technology. That's a pretty big gun aimed at every LLM company based in the United States.
But it's also just plausible that the government's referencing some more esoteric command, or even just making things up.
gattsuru
2d ago
Eh... SpaceX has launched more rockets than the rest of the world in no small part by making the justification to do it, in addition to the ability -- SpaceX without StarLink gets into a really weird place that's at minimum a much smaller company. And now that they can do it, there's a lot of other potential: space-related buildouts have historically been a place clever ideas go to die because availability and reliability didn't exist, and now they're present.
A lot of the ideas won't be economically viable (ICB-concorde) or won't work for decades (asteroid mining). But it's a little strange that there's no more potential. I admit I don't know the expectation rules and timelines that the filing here would need to use, though, which may explain that.
gattsuru
2d ago
AI's a fun excuse, and there have been some code wtfs, but a lot of the Win11 stuff is just an absolutely bizarre set of UI decisions that have been progressively escalating for longer than LLMs could finish a trivial function. The Start Search Menu has been fucked up since before COVID. Same for OneCloud. The inconsistent and awkward right-click menus in File Explorer are a human interface problem; the code's fine.
Something just went badly rotten in Microsoft.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's zero chance of SCOTUS having all the opinions done by the end of this week, and it's very common for SCOTUS to not post its opinions days until the week before or sometimes even a day before the day. I'm expecting this year to see opinions released until well into the first (and possibly second) week of July.
gattsuru
5d ago
I haven’t been able to figure out what authority the feds are using here, but if it’s ITAR it gets rough quick.
gattsuru
5d ago
Ken White, this week:
The richest man in the world is doing everything he can to get poor, downtrodden people killed in the UK because they aren't white, and the best chance of that stopping is someone killing him. If Only.
In case anyone actually wanted to pretend he believed anything he ever says.
gattsuru
6d ago
Continuing on RP2350 development, fighting the software on a Pico 2 while waiting for a board fab to get my first-run prototypes back (and inevitably show me how badly I fucked up several subsystems and how much I'm going to regret QFN for prototype-gen2).
I used to wonder why software debugging support on edutech microcontrollers was either deep in the SWD/JTAG weeds or absolutely nothing. All of the components exist: micropython supports tracing with a compile flag, DAP means you don't need to build a full IDE (albeit at the cost of writing Yet More Json), there's more than enough computer and memory overheard on normal boards that the processor and memory cost doesn't really matter; dual core and multi-processor systems are so common that you can buy them by accident.
I don't wonder anymore. Holy shit.
gattsuru
7d ago
More that they're cheaper than a code monkey, only weakly expensive if you're doing something hard or novel (or novel-to-you), and they can get ludicrously expensive if you just start firing the slop cannons, either to solve a problem by volume or by producing a lot of useless or specialized lines-of-code.
[apologies if I'm answering a rhetorical question]
A 'token' is the ML equivalent of a syllable: the word, portion of a word, or symbol that represents the smallest viable input or output unit of effort. The exact value (and cost) depends on model, as well as whether it's input or output.
I'm ... skeptical to endorse line-of-code as a measure of programmer time -- I've spent days planning out business-critical logic that ended up five lines of code and needed to be absolutely correct, and spat out thousands of lines of text in an hour before when it was just boilerplate -- but the output side you can give a pretty good average. Depends on the tokenizer and your output language, but I'd expect less an average of less than 20 tokens per line in C++ or TypeScript, and I'd get worried if a human coder was regularly writing >80 tokens in a single line.
((edit: less so in java.))
So pessimistically, 12.5k LoC per million tokens, more realistically 25k.
Input is the high-variance part. If you're writing from scratch, the input is a few paragraphs and some design documents, maybe some scribbled image files if you feel spicy and the model supports it. I've done a few personal projects like that where it's been <2k tokens to get 20k line-of-code. If you have an existing codebase you want the model to adjust to, or an API document you need the model to learn, that can burn through a lot of tokens fast; the only real restriction is context window size, and most of the corporate APIs obfuscate that (tbf, often because they have an automated store and search strategy). I've blown through 50k in a single search once (thanks, Atmel, love your manual layout too). Input is typically cheaper and there's some strategies to reduce the cost of repeated input hits with the same content, but they're complicated and pretty specialized.
For some examples:
| Model | Input (USD/million-tokens) | Output (USD/million-tokens) | Output (USD/thousand-line-of-code) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Mythos | $10 | $50 | $2 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $4 | $25 | $1 |
| ChatGPT 5.5 | $5 | $30 | $1.2 |
| Grok 4.3 | $1.25 | $2.50 | $0.10 |
| Qwen3.7 Max | $1.25 | $3.75 | $0.15 |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | $0.32 | $1.28 | $0.05 |
| Qwen3.6 35B-A3B | $0.15 | $1.00 | $0.04 |
For smaller or more efficient models, inference is pretty cheap: Qwen3.6 35B's probably the weakest coding model I'd use in a professional environment (and borders the point where it might be better to run it locally, if only for privacy/security reasons), but there's a lot you can do.
That said, all of that can go out of the window when you start getting agentic options involved. Someone made a fun experiment of trying to let a local model figure out a display protocol by hooking a camera, an LLM, and a microcontroller together, and they got it mostly there overnight, which is really cool. It also probably burned tens of millions of tokens on output for an interface code block that should have ended up in the <1.5k line-of-code level.
gattsuru
7d ago
I have a small ML server that I initially set up for some work stuff, and have since retrofitted for LLM and diffuser use. nVidia 3090, i5-14400, running between 128 GB RAM to 192 GB RAM depending on what else I've shut down. Squeaked in just before RAM prices spiked (and am kicking myself for not grabbing three or four more of the 64x2 kits), if you want to know the why on the weird RAM numbers.
I'll caveat that you just shouldn't expect Claude or even Grok-level outputs from local models on their own.
For LLMs runners, I've mostly stuck to llama-server (and forks) as well, after an initial and short-lived love-hate relationship with LMStudio. I have a few custom bits of code for sequencing larger grouped requests, but they're worse-than-vibe-code level stuff and basically just a UI and for loop. Toyed with SillyTavern, just in the hopes of getting better organization, but it's really heavily built for roleplay and I'm not that interested in it. I've looked at and played with some agentic-ish stuff in heavily sandboxed and airgapped environments, but when the best options are nanoclaw, hermes and odysseus, but when the least obnoxious one is powered by pewdiepie, there be dragons here.
Writing:
gemma4-26-A4Bis a great editor, beta reader, and brainstorm sounding board. It's the closest to okay prose from a local model in its class, although beating the obvious AI tells out of it takes some effort and it's seldom very interesting. Also seems to have the best MTP assist (though I had the to build theatomic-turboquantvariant llama variant to get MTP to work when it first came out; don't know if the situation has changed there).[Cydonia](https://huggingface.co/TheDrummer/Cydonia-24B-v4) (24B, mistral-based)and ```Strawberry Limeade (70B, llama-based) are older models that were pretty useful and I'll still pull up on occasional to sanity-check stuff against.
Coding:
Qwen 3.6is hard to beat for simple and fast work, especially things like bringing in an image sketch and converting it into XAML or webdev, or beating some simple file munging into shape. In addition to35B-A3B, I'd also point to the27B-MTPdense variant. It's not as fast as A3B, but the gap's smaller than you'd expect, and in some use cases it comes across as much smarter in my experience. I'd also recommend it any time you have a sketch or powerpoint art-level design you want converted into a GUI representation, and can't use a cloud model -- far from perfect, but easily saves hours of work.GLM(ranging from 4.5-Air at 106B up) can be good for complex work, refactoring, and troubleshooting -- but even at moderate quants, it can be fifteen minutes per turn. Great where I've got a ton that needs to go into the hatch and can work on something different; terrible for anything where a fast OODA loop is important.
Standard vs uncensored/abliterated models is a hard question. Qwen is very refusal-prone, and not just on political topics. While Gemma4 is surprisingly willing to play along for a variety of topics, it still has some hard refusal points, some of which can come up surprisingly rapidly. And not just for weird smut, either. I've had .
For Image Generation, your two power user options are Automatic1111/Forge WebUI and ComfyUI. WebUI is the easier option to get started with, and still has a good level of support for things like img2img, swapping models out, or using various plugins or controlnets. ComfyUI's much more capable and eventually lets you do things like switch between models for different stages of a pipeline, but there's very much a 'who wants to drink from the firehose' moment every time you get started, and managing workflows sucks. On the other hand, if you want to run something like TRELLIS2 or Wan3d, ComfyUI's a lot easier (though not easy!) to set up.
In terms of models:
- SDXL based models like the
IllustriousandNoobAIfamily are good for producing general 'vibe'-ish scenes with one or two actors, so long as you don't need precision, and they're pretty fast. - The current new hotness popular options in the furry fandom are
[Chroma](https://huggingface.co/lodestones/Chroma)(9B, FLUX.1-schnell-based) and[Anima](https://huggingface.co/circlestone-labs/Anima)(2B), which favor natural language over the SD-style "throw a bunch of words at it" approach. Much slower, though.Qwen Image 2512variants also fall here, although their workflows can be a lot more annoying. Qwen Image EditandFlux2-Kleinare the best edit models, especially for keeping consistency in a scene while tweaking it, or moving a character from one setting to another.
2D->3D Models:
TRELLIS(2)gives the nicest-looking outputs for a given input image, and supports(ish) transparency.Wan3Dgives more 'whole' models that require less post-processing to ship to a 3d printer, but tends to be a little fuzzy.
Animation:
WAN2has the most support and has been out the longest.LTX-2.3is much faster and comparable or better quality.SCAIL2just came out, but I haven't even tried to set it up yet. Initial reports look good.
I had a hell of a time getting any non-trivial animation model working in Forge WebUI, and the ComfyUI workflows get nutty pretty fast. If you want to experiment with them and not go leaping into the deep end, WAN2GP gives a lot of workflow options, at the cost of sometimes serious performance costs and a bad tendency to automatically download a model without warning.
This is particularly frustrating if you do think there's a place for the various post-conviction review panels. Wrongful convictions do happen, whether because of new technology that makes it genuinely possible to identify or exonerate killers, bad science that was left to bite too long, or overt bad acts by prosecutors.
The majority here highlights the Chester Hollman case as showing how financially high the stakes are, and I'm not convinced that the man is innocent, but there's meaningful and concealed contemporaneous evidence. I'm genuinely not sure that he could be convicted again today, even before a fair court, and even discounting the clawbacks by witnesses.
But this stuff is endemic. Radley Balko went on a crusade in Shinn v. Ramirez, about the Barry Lee Jones execution. His version was damning, and if you believed the defense, it was clear evidence that Jones could not possibly have caused the death. And then you look at the medical information, and you realize that the defense position presupposed an extremely narrow pattern of injury that did not have strong external evidence, and only made it slightly more possible for anyone else to have caused the injury, including just 'Jones, 12 hours earlier, when he was also there'. I've pointed before the Innocence Project's death penalty page being a near 50:50 mix of serious claims and barely or non-credible ones.
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