former developer | studying combined bsc in cs + health sciences | @speechunion member
United Kingdom
Joined December 2007
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rick.h retweeted
Own your intelligence.
Anyone that opposes this has something to sell you (perhaps your own intelligence back to you.)
Local models need to continue proliferating. The “absolute unit” massive models may be out of reach for now locally, so your best option is to, indeed, keep your options open. Own your harness, data, connections, runtime: your agents. Embrace open source.
With the way these companies have been acting recently, it's definitely time to use & support open source models where possible.
rick.h retweeted
🚨24 HOURS LEFT to stop "passports for the Internet."
Tomorrow, MPs will debate forcing online identity checks on everyone, just to use social media.
Don't let digital ID in through the backdoor. Use our speedy tool to email your MP now⤵️
bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campa…
rick.h retweeted
Join the FSU. They are literally saving our right to speak.
🚨 ISLAMIC BLASPHEMY LAW BY THE BACK DOOR 🚨
Kellie-Jay Keen (@ThePosieParker) has been charged with a criminal offence over posts criticising Islam, Muslim cultural practices and Islamism.
The Free Speech Union is proud to be defending her.
In a free society, no religion or cultural practice should be immune from criticism.
Since Labour came to power, the number of FSU cases involving people penalised for criticising Islam has doubled. It is now the single biggest category in our casework.
And now, with a state-approved definition of Islamophobia — rebranded as “anti-Muslim hostility” — things are only getting worse.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Communities Secretary Angela Rayner met Muslim community leaders in Downing Street. Burnham took a swipe at critics of Islam, saying “some of the language” opposition parties use “is unacceptable”, and told the leaders “we need to find ways with you to demonstrate that more and more”.
We now await Rayner’s appointment of an “Islamophobia tsar” who will help enforce the definition.
All five hand-picked members of the Working Group that drafted it have concerning links to Islamist organisations, as FSU Research and Policy Director @DavidRoseUK exposed in his report. We have little hope that the appointed tsar will be good news for free speech.
Meanwhile, the Government is refusing to say who submitted responses to the Working Group, so we cannot know which groups shaped the definition. Islamists may well have had a hand in its drafting.
Support the FSU’s campaign against an Islamic blasphemy law — and the people penalised under it 👇
rick.h retweeted
RAM for your computer costs about 7 times what it did a year and a half ago, and the CEO of OpenAI just said it's "quite terrible" that so much of it is sitting in your PC.
His company signed preliminary deals for up to 40% of the world's supply last year.
A basic 32GB kit was $59 in April 2025. The cheapest one in the US is over $400 today.
Sam said this on Stripe's Cheeky Pint podcast. He was pushing back on people who think open-source AI running at home means we won't need all these data centers. His answer was that from a "global allocation perspective," everyone keeping memory at home and using it 5% of the time is a bad deal for the world.
Which is a funny thing for him in particular to worry about.
When you run an AI model on your own machine, OpenAI never sees a dime. You don't pay a subscription or a usage fee, and every time a free open model gets better, the computer you already own gets more useful. That's the one competitor Sam can't undercut on price, and it runs on the exact memory he'd rather see in a server rack.
And the reason that memory got so expensive traces right back to the data centers. Back in October 2025, OpenAI signed letters of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 memory wafers a month for its Stargate project, which TrendForce figured was around 40% of everything the industry makes. Meanwhile the chipmakers have been shifting their factories toward the special high-bandwidth memory that AI chips use, since it pays way better. Samsung's average memory price jumped about 20% just last quarter, and TrendForce sees contract prices climbing another 10 to 20% this quarter.
Your phone is feeling it too. IDC says smartphone shipments fell 22% last quarter compared to a year ago, the biggest drop they've ever recorded, and they blamed memory costs that are up something like 350%.
I'll give Sam this much. A data center serving millions of people really does keep its memory busy around the clock, while your gaming PC sits there all night doing nothing. That's basically why the cloud exists.
The people building these rigs at home know all that and still pay $400 for 32GB, because it lets them run any model they like, offline, without anybody else setting the price.
Even if Sam's right that your PC only touches its RAM 5% of the time, a lot of people would rather own that 5% than rent it back from OpenAI by the token.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says it’s “quite terrible” that people have so much DRAM sitting in their own PCs instead of being used in data centers.
“Everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And be used 5% of the time,”
He argues that cloud data centers should make better use of limited memory supplies instead of people running AI models locally.
STOP MILL HOUSE!
Justice for James Ronayne
On 10 August 2024, James Leon Ronayne tragically lost his life following a fire at Mill House, Salters Lane, Faversham, Kent, ME13 8ND.
James was a much-loved son, brother and musician, affectionately known as Punky Jimm. His death has left a lasting impact on his family and those who knew him.
Since the fire, serious questions have arisen concerning the property’s historical HMO licensing arrangements, management responsibilities and fire-safety provisions.
Information obtained from Swale Borough Council through Freedom of Information requests has confirmed that no individual held the HMO licence at the time of the fire, that a new licence application was awaiting determination, and that an inspection during this licensing transition had not yet been undertaken.
These findings raise important questions about the oversight of the property, the responsibilities of those involved in its management, and the measures in place to protect residents.
We are not suggesting that these circumstances establish criminal wrongdoing or that any individual or organisation has been found responsible for James’s death. However, we believe the outstanding concerns warrant thorough examination and independent scrutiny.
With proposals to rebuild and potentially reopen Mill House as HMO accommodation, we are calling for appropriate safeguards to ensure that relevant licensing and safety concerns are properly addressed before future residents are placed at risk.
This petition is about seeking answers, ensuring accountability where failures are established, and protecting lives.
c.org/Y6NZhPykpS
If you're coming for my ancient ddr modules, you'll need to take them from my cold, dead hands
Since I'm ill right now, I decided to spend some time getting my local AI setup running - using Open WebUI on my Synology.
Open Web UI then connects to Ollama running on my workstation. Workstation is activated via wake-on-lan when required.
rick.h retweeted
I don't get the hate for this, running a service on a single machine is sufficient for the VAST amount of apps out there. If the service is non-critical, 5-10 minute of announced downtime every couple of months is a non-issue in my mind.
Any system built to support zero-downtime restarts/updates is vastly more complex architecturally. Now you need multiple nodes with load balancers, and even your database must be replicated to 2+ machines so you can forward all writes to one while the other reboots.
Ofc a way around this is to use some sort of managed cloud abstraction, but not everyone is interested in that.
Note: Tuta will be down for ~10 minutes
We need to restart the servers for updating them with a non-critical security patch. This will lead to a downtime of approx. ten minutes. You can check the availability of Tuta here: status.tuta.com
We apologize for the inconvenience and we try to keep the downtime as short as possible. Emails that arrive during the downtime will be queued and delivered later to your mailbox.
> video player application demolishes French politician
this is why X is still so great. this interaction simply couldn't happen anywhere else on the internet.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
What you said about Facebook and Insta and other social networks are not targeted because they are free, means you don’t understand the basics of economy. You don’t understand the difference between Revenue and Profit. Nor what is a non-profit.
You don’t understand anything about digital economy and digital business models.
You don’t understand anything about security and updates.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
The UK already had two primary methods used for child protection online, with a third system also being recommended:
1. cleanfeed (confidential, http only, no https, silent response, primarily for CSAM, recommendations provided by IWF, singular resources only - e.g. specific jpg files over http)
2. court order (public, entire domains, IPs, multiple URLs, wildcards, http and https, etc..)
Additionally, there were recommendations made on mandating parental filters by default for UK ISPs, which would have been far more effective than anything OSA has achieved (or ever will).
Ironically, by pursing OSA & social media bans, it's forced kids into VPNs, which bypass the existing protections that already existed - thus weakening the actual protection for children.
The problem is, that not only are the politicians in this country tech-illiterate, but as we've also seen recently, for example with the BBC tech editor didn't even know what PHP was - the tech editors at BBC, Sky, and other news organizations are also often very tech-illiterate. This has only worsened the underlying issue of how detached the politicians are from the reality of the system that they are proposing, or how to work with the existing systems.
Easy libertarian soundbite though this is, tearing down the social media ban and failing to offer an alternative is not only a shortsighted political move (parents overwhelmingly want action and parents are a constituency of millions); it also morally reprehensible.
If we were to tackle the hardware - smartphones rather than content - many of these issues fall away.
Additional note:
Cleanfeed and court order blocks already apply to all UK residential connections, and cannot be disabled.
ISP-level parental filtering operates by default on some mobile connections now, but since it isn't mandated, most residential ISPs do not enable it by default.
The best protection will have simply been to mandate ISP-level filtering systems that can be disabled by the billpayer, and ditching the outdated cleanfeed system. It'd have been far more effective than anything OSA can offer, since OSA does noting to prevent malicious actors from distributing content to children - the door is still wide open.
Just like the EU cookie legislations, the OSA is flawed from the ground up, developed by people that have minimal exposure to the internet beyond their iPad wielding interns.
Seems like the home office isn't happy with open rights groups raising concerns about data protection.
Tells you everything you need to know about this rotten, corrupt government.
NOW — The Home Office has released the list of social media posts its Standards and Compliance Unit observed about Prevent in 2024.
The department disclosed:
• A post of mine criticising a local-council training module that directed staff to report anyone sharing “anti-immigration views” to counter-terrorism police.
• A post from @Con_Tomlinson criticising the Home Office’s RICU unit and the fact Prevent designated Douglas Murray a far-right extremist.
Dozens of other public posts and articles are listed raising the same position, “Prevent training focuses heavily on the far-right while downplaying Islamist extremism.”
This unit, known as “StaCU” - is collecting and logging criticism of Prevent’s training bias.
The original request for this material was refused under national-security and health-and-safety exemptions.
Disclosure only happened after the applicant went to the ICO.
