I’m just really tired of the parroted and reactionary “blockchain/AI bad” comments because they often have no nuance. It’s not the implementation that’s “bad”, it’s seemingly that they used the tech at all.

Agreed on that, too.

There was this one instance of a remastered” TV show, partially processed with GANs, a long time ago. I pointed this out (as apparently this little detail was forgotten with time), and I got chewed out. Reddit commenters either claimed I was lying (when I helped work on it), or declared it was now awful and intolerable just because it’s “AI”… something they had loved for years, way before the LLM bubble.

Of course it can be discussed…

I’m really into (open weights) genAI myself, have been for years, but at the same time I’m under no illusion the space is clean. The vast majority of services are scams, many open source AI projects are autogenerated slop from someone with AI psychosis (if not outright Tech Bro scams), and that’s not even touching on what Big Tech is pushing.

What I’m asserting is that a fat slab of skepticism is healthy in this kind of space. Be an enthusiast, not a believer. I know much less about blockchain, so perhaps I was a little zealous in judgement, but something about this project just raised a lot of red flags in my head like scam-adjacent AI projects do.

Another thing is that the blockchain scams haven’t gone away, and in ten years they probably will still stubbornly persist. GenAI is going to be the same.

Hardly. Power costs are trivial to them at the moment, and a server hardware bottleneck would just consolidate power to the big few that can afford it (which is what they want).

To be fair, it’s a consistent red flag.

Blockchain is theoretically interesting. Very interesting, in certain niches. But 9 times out of 10, “blockchain-based” is code for “enshittified” or “a pyramid scheme scam from the start.” And in the cases where its implementation is altruistic, it’s still questionably sustainable or creates considerable overhead.

To add to what others said:

LPDDRX is used in some inference hardware. The same stuff you find in laptops and smartphones.

Also, the servers need a whole lot of regular CPU DIMMs since they’re still mostly EPYC/Xeon severs with 8 GPUs in each. And why are they “wasting” so much RAM on CPU RAM that isn’t really needed, you ask? Same reason as a lot of AI: it’s immediately accessible, already targeted by devs, and AI dev is way more conservative and wasteful than you’d think.

Same for SSDs. Regular old servers (including AI servers) need it too. In a perfect world they’d use centralized storage for images/weights with near-“diskless” inference/training servers. Some AI servers do this, but most don’t.

Basically, the waste is tremendous, for the same reason they use cheap gas generators on-site: it’s faster-to-market.

Adding to what others said:

Mobile browsers are very performance sensitive, compared to desktop. Adblocking extensions (in my experience) slurp battery, but native implementations use much less, hence other mobile-focused browsers (like Orion and Cromite) already tend to use native adblockers.

But it probably doesn’t matter as much on desktop.

The title is misleading. It’s using Brave’s open library without any of Brave’s nonsense.

This is fine. It’s like how Cromite lifted ABP, or Helium ships UBO themselves.

“With search ads enabled by default” just means it’s whitelisting StartPage’s minimal text-only ads. That kind of whitelisting is what I try to configure anyway.

Gaming is the best commercial inroad I’ve seen, and exploding.

But I think the “kernel anticheat” thing is going to be a hard wall until Valve works it out. Unfortunately, big OEMs don’t want to ship a “gaming PC” that can’t run Fortnite.