Oui

chop chop

High treason, I’m afraid. You’ll swing for that.

I don’t understand. So, if VLC was downloaded from Tucows or GitHub…who pays? Surely not VLC, because as I read it, this taxes “producers of digital data” but the measurement mechanism is ISPs counting bytes by sender IP.

So if a French user downloads VLC from Tucows, Sourceforge, or Akamai’s CDN, the bytes come from Tucows/Akamai’s IP, not VideoLAN’s. Under a strict sender-IP reading, Tucows pays, not VideoLAN.

Wat?

If in some crazy world this actually goes ahead as written, one of two things happen

1. Everyone on earth geoblocks French IPs
2. Everyone dumps everything onto mirrors and washes their hands of it.

Iirc shreddit lets you download all your posts before deleting them

I personally use RedReader (signed out) and “share to” Linkora to save useful threads.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.sakethh.linkora/

That works for now. If redreader stops working… 🤷 bye Felicia. I don’t visit Reddit much anyway.

I’ve replaced “sitting at PC, nothing to read” with neal.fun, Atlas Obscura, Smithsonian Smart News and Lemmy 🤣

PS: IIRC, you can download a good chunk of reddit as an archive to search against.

https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift

https://github.com/19-84/redd-archiver

I think the full pushshift reddit archive (to 2024?) was 4TB, but you can just grab smaller useful subsections. So it’s less of a workaround and more a “tube is out of the toothpaste, suck shit Spez”.

Actually, redd-archive (which is up to end of 2025) has an MCP, so you could point your local LLM at it and get it to find the info you need, all off line.

Last I checked, it even let you grab snapshots of particular subreddits of your choice, so you’re not grabbing multiple terabytes. 2026 snapshots aren’t out yet IIRC

Yes, quite a few, but it depends on what you’re trying to do with them. Any ideas?

They are the way to go, but hardware pricing makes it cost-prohibitive to match frontier capabilities, which makes decomp and recomp difficult. Or rather, they require more skill and take longer, introducing some barriers against the current floodgates being flung open.

We all know the eye-watering prices GPUs and RAM cost now, to say nothing of Unified Memory devices like the Strix. Most people just don’t have a spare $10K to throw at an inference box that can run (say) a 300B model at interactive (not batch) speeds.

Coming at this from another angle tho, I note that according to Steam stats, the most popular GPUs are in the 8GB and 16GB range…which is smack bang in the VRAM range of what a good MoE (say, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B) runs on (for 8GB) or arguably the best local dense coder (Qwen 3.8 27B) can live at. Which leaves us with a capable assistant and a capable coder.

I think there’s probably room for LLM improvement in the 8–16GB range too…and given that most consumer PCs and laptops live there, I’m sanguine the open-weight devs might make it happen.

But I also suspect the gatekeeping of high-end capacities is intentional.

We’re probably not going to have the ability to vibe code Mario into Elden Ring again…not without significantly more skill. Dunno.