That would only be a problem if there were still rule of law in the US. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be able to run all those gas turbines either.

More competition is better than less. It is that simple. Your argument is just either nihilistic or an excuse to support a duopoly.

European data is an option too.

Yes I think Strix Halo makes sense when low power use is a requirement. I built a custom fanless Strix Halo system for the fun of it and I guess there aren’t too many out there running Gemma 4 31B Q8 without a single fan, anywhere.

And for MoE models that need 60-80GB + context it is perfect. Those are decently fast then as well.

PS: If VRAM is all you care about the maxed out Mac Studio is fascinating. 512GB unified memory for around 10K EUR (pre crazy bubble prices) That should be able to run pretty large MoE models but dense models of that size would probably run glacially.

That fails the point. Wero is good because it breaks open a duopoly and mitigates the risk that the US can bring the European economy to a halt via Visa/Mastercard.

More comoetition is good, monopolies aren’t. Nor would a Wero monopoly be.

From a strategic view Wero is extremely important for Europe. You are looking from a cery different view on the topic but that does not invalidate that other view per se.

My own views are that we need a balance of control and chaos. Both extremes have substantual downsides.

My system runs at 100W TDP though. That is maybe 140W at the power outlet, incl. monitor and everything.

This is also the dense 27B model at Q8. But yeah, it is not terribly fast. I think the best use case is on MoE models. GPT-OSS-120B runs on it for example and at 50T/s speed is not a n issue anymore either. (I could get it to run even on just 64GB but the new llama.cpp might need a tiny bit more memory which pushed it just across the limit. yeah I know, for seriously using it you’d need the 128GB version)

At Q8 it is around 35-40GB I think + memory for required context.

I have a Framework desktop. It gets you you around 6t/s. Not suitable for professional use but for personal use I think it is fine. I do prefer Gemma 4 though, but that comes with similar reqirements.

I am pretty negative on AI but there is a point there. I tried the open weight local model Gemma 4 31B and while it likely cannot compete with the best Claude has to offer today, it might be on par with Claude from a year ago, at least for certain applications. With a local model the data stays on your system and you are in control of the costs (no sudden price hikes). But local models aren’t for free either they still guzzle compute, merely on your own hardware (or rented hardware)

There is a difference between the fight for free systems and fighting against everything else. Your opposition against Wero is the latter. That is not keeping it simple, that is the opposite of it, and making it much harder to support the free systems as one is then looking like a radical without consideration of reality (where any complete remodeling of payment systems needs rather a decade, unless one aims for high economic damage) trying to impose one kind of system on everyone else.

Wero is no currency and there is nothing “national” about it either. At least have a basic idea of what you are criticising.

Wero has also nothing to do with your ability to use Crypto or whatever. It is basically just a wrapper banks are offering to make the existing European instant bank transfer system more accessible and easier to use and a competitive alternative to credit cards.

Extending the fight to basically anything isn’t keeping it simple. Are you also fighting against classic bank transfers and credit cards or are you only fighting against Wero? If so why?

I guess the US will have to become more dependent on European earth and climate observation systems then, because a lot of industries actually need those. (unless they prefer other foreign services of course)

Visa doesn’t hold the keys to the WERO infrastructure. WERO is basically a facilitator to the system of real time bank transfers that already exists anyway on European infrastructure. It is not a credit card system in that sense, because the money goes immediately from one account to another, but so what?

Ah, so the good old nationalist argument. If the EU exploded tomorrow, none of these problems would go away. But we would cement the control of third country services, totally out of our the control. Generally, given how decentralised power is on EU level it is often less hard to fight these things on EU level than on national level where the executive is often much more powerful and just steamrolls through with much higher success rate.

The fight against the surveillance state is something we have to face in any case, no matter the framework. A look at the Sunny Uplands in the UK should make that obvious.

Spain is not a third country, as an EU member state it is bound by the same fundamental rights charter that also applies to the EU level as well as to Germany. If that doesn’t cut it, then having everything purely national won’t make a difference either.

Needless to say that your comment does not even have anything to do with the Wero system to begin with, yet apparently it is a duck.

How do you then make a decision on which online services to use?

The EU wallet is not about financial transactions, is it?

Also there are two systems in the making, one is the public Digital Euro, the other is the private Wero. Sure, accounts could be frozen but neither a single company nor the US could freeze out people out of their financial life.

Got anything to say? Or do you prefer vague accusations that could mean anything?

It is about time for Wero and Digital Euro do get fully implemented across the EU. Until then, there are at least IBAN bank transfer that can secure a minimum viability of financial needs. That is at least for the EU, Brazil, India, China etc have alternatives in place already anyway.

So are you suggesting to use no online services (how are you doing web searches?) or make completely uninformed choices on online services (because you can’t know anyway)?

Where do you have the 3000 L of water for 1 kg almonds from? It is not in that paper. I read about 10000-15000L per kg almonds (here: https://berlin.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/oekologisch-leben/essen-und-trinken/32632.html) but that was admittedly not a scientific publication.

Just because datacenters are terrible with questionable use, doesn’t mean that combustion engine cars aren’t really bad either. Especially in urban areas traffic is causing a massive decrease in air quality and as a consequence are certainly the cause for respiratorial issues. It can’t happen soon enough to relegate these cars into museums. But of course, EVs are just solving the engine emission problem, they don’t solvbe all the other issues cars bring with them.