How would a national government (not TLAs) target particular individuals in a large number of users and what information can they gather given e.g. https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy ? So perhaps not quite as easily as ordering a tap.

My national government has no business knowing which protocols I use to contact which endpoints and tamper with that traffic. Wrapping up that information in a tunnel is a good first protection layer.

You forget that nation-states control your ISP. And of course you can choose your VPN provider or run your own.

The provider and national TLAs will see all traffic that is in cleartext and meta traffic which is even more valuable. It can also actively tamper with that traffic. So you’re technically incorrect and you assume your threat model is universal. It’s not. And, of course, there are use cases for Tor, whether with or without VPN.

Nobody is using MMF these days even for local runs. As to sfp, check https://fs.com and pick a matching pair that is cheapest. These days it makes sense to use 10G or 25G rather than 1G. Some people run 100G for their homelab, but even used it’s pricy and noisy.

A free running cellular automaton (CA) approach in hardware would work, but each cell would be a much souped up SRAM cell, the interactions would be all local and 2D. Considering Cerebras is 40 G SRAM on the 300 mm WSI and is about at the cooling limit I’m afraid you do not have 5 orders of magnitude. Perhaps reversible spintronics can help with the power draw, but you still have to splat a higher dimensional network so not just local interactions into a 2D array.

You seem to trust Nvidia. I don’t.

Yes orders of magnitude, but not too many of them. The real estate of a 300 mm wafer is limited, the structure shrink is saturating and you can’t get too many layers. You still need a packet switched network on the wafer even if the rest is mostly analog. Perhaps spintronics can limit the power requirements too.

There are diminishing returns in semiconductor photolitho. Moore scaling is long over, absolute real estate see WSI with Cerebras, DC costs and power envelope are all sending a clear message. Quantization is there, so you can go from digital multipliers to analog and go spiking networks, but transformers and Co have little power there.

Also, the kind of economy that can carry Gen AI as business model is not a given, long term.

Neat. At 750 Wp I wonder what the EROEI of the installation is.

Interesting, wasn’t aware. It remains illegal in Germany then, as long as you seed. Notice in Germany you will receive a nastygram in any case as long as you’ve been identified as a member in a swarm, even if you do not seed. It would be interesting if someone would contest that, though you will likely lose since technical details don’t matter in most courts.

No port mapping, no upload, so technically legal where only sharing is penalized. IANAL.

Since most VPNs no longer have port mapping it’s a pure download which would make it technically legal e.g. in Germany.

Without VPN or Usenet subscription it’s going to be difficult and/or illegal.