Requirements for running locally aren’t related to what the company uses, they’re servicing thousands/tens of thousands of images every minute, you’re not.

You can run Stable Diffusion locally at fairly high resolution and equally high quality models off pretty much any modern graphics card.

The bar exams recycle the same questions every year, there’s very little original about them. Its a test of pure memorization

Exactly, which if anything makes it even more poignant. Depoliticization of the population is a driving strength of the worlds most powerful authoritarian regimes. While I’m sure they’d love to have everyone take their party line, it’s enough to sow doubt that anything whatsoever is actually true. Depoliticized people will still pay taxes and they’re a lot less likely to get funny idealistic ideas about revolution than patriots.

It’s absolutely not, there are no politics in the western sense present, the absence of which is the entire point of the novel. The Party is a faceless monolith with no real ideology, despite its communist roots, beyond self-preservation. Politics implies internal conflict, and the Party would never allow such to exist in any visible sense. Probably the best analogue is the CCP.

Instead, the emphasis is on manipulation of truth, and the horrific abuses such control can enable and require. Oceania’s design as, essentially, Stalinist allows it to act as an indictment of both left and right wing governments and the only “politics” present, Ie the war/alliance with Eurasia is purposefully absurd and shown to demonstrate that politics themselves are a fraud.

The book isn’t about the world or its politics, if you expect more than random out-of-context snippets of dubious veracity you’re in for a disappointment.