Posts by Czrly

Valve opens Steam Machine pre-orders with queue lottery and hefty prices amid AI squeeze

It is too expensive!

It is too expensive; it could NOT be sold for less.

There was surely a meeting during which the decision to ship with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM (instead of 16GB, logically) was settled and I can only imagine that basically everyone was unhappy about that choice but, ultimately, the alternatives numbered two: literally halve the potential number of products shipped or do not ship at all. I can't say I would have enjoyed being in that meeting.

Still: that's 8GB GDDR6, not some nonsense "unified" low-powered rubbish. That's something.

Valve say they're not sponsoring the hardware. That's good, too: the "resellers" are voracious and any sponsorship on the hardware price would only have been rational for Valve if they could expect it to drive sales on the Steam Store, which it wouldn't: it would make the scalpers richer.

Excepting some alternative reality in which Valve could rely on liquidity and stable pricing in the component markets, there are only worse ways in which this could have played out, in my opinion.

Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

What could possibly …

Wait one moment! Let me try to understand this: the Prompt API lets the *remote site* provide prompts to some *local* LLM running within the realm of the *local* browser.

Firstly: how is that in any way useful? Is the whole point of a remote site, accessed by the browser, not purely that it provides some kind of information, data, or 'content' to the user of the browser itself? Even if that 'content' to be shoveled in direction user must be LLM-generated slop, I cannot imagine any possible scenario where the superior technical option wouldn't be to generate it, and store it, remotely and to serve the slop instead. At the very least, that would allow for the same content to be served upon every request or allow the service, itself, to know and audit what their user was served.

But, when all is said and done, everything above and indeed everything I could have challenged would boil down to a rational argument about a totally irrational population of A.I.-pilled idiots and the outcome of such argumentation will never serve a purpose and, so, it is only left to instead wonder: …

The local LLM will operate within the realm of the *local* browser and, either deliberately or indirectly, it will have some kind of local data[^1], history, profile or fingerprint[^2] that somehow falls within its context window: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

[2]: I'd *bet* the answer to why this is supposedly useful goes something along the lines of giving the local LLM some user data or letting it track history or past interactions. This is possibly the only capability this has over remote 'content' emission – and I'm not rating that 'capability' as a good thing, though, personally.

[1]: Even the graphics APIs like WebGL and WebGPU – nay, even the high-precision timer! – play or have played a role in browser fingerprinting. There's absolutely ZERO chance that anything running on specialised hardware like an NPU and consuming any kind of random entropy, as the inference stage of these models does, is going to somehow be different.

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Sports-people Know!

Anyone who has ever trained in any sport – at any level where progress might be even a modicum measurable – knows without doubt that experience, knowledge and skill may well be ingested during practice but becomes useful or applicable *only* after one sleeps on it and internalises it.

If dreams play any role at all in human learning, one might reasonably speculate that this processing of the experience gained in practice occurs in dream, whether the sports-person recalls those dreams upon waking or not.

One might go further and speculate that this processing, itself, represents the solving of a singular problem: solving *how* the experience may be applied, practically.

I have trained in many sports. I know this categorically.

I am also a software developer and I can extend this to the kind of problem solving that development demands: every developer knows that, sometimes, despite hours and hours wasted in bashing one's head against a seemingly insoluble problem, simply stepping away and escaping for a night to dive and swim in the seas of slumber, gracing one's brain with a holiday trip to dreamland – be those reveries recalled or not – can reduce that problem to one so trivial that the solution pops into thought while sat upon the loo, in the morning, and implementing it becomes a mere matter of minutes at their keyboard, subsequently.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: What about Consent?

« If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools… » (TL;DR: no, I didn't.)

What about Consent?

This is so evil because the heart of the matter should be consent and not age. Age verification serves only to validate that a person is old enough to knowingly *grant* consent – that's why it's called the age of consent! Age verification only protects ONE (albeit extremely vulnerable) class of victim and this outcome does nothing to stem the vile tide of exploitation in general, in a wider sense.

In order for these sites to exist *at all*, ethically, they would need to be mandated (and forced) to prove genuine consent of every class of every category of person involved in the production and consumption of their bile: the users, the subjects in the prompts and every single human being featuring in their training data – none of whom are ever disclosed.

In reality: there simply is no way that this could be done properly and so the only outcome I find conscionable is the complete shut-down and blanket ban of such sites – not a pocket-change fine!

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain

Don't forget the Steam Frame!

Isn't Valve's new-fangled Steam Frame going to be Arm? That's going to run a build of SteamOS – as sure as eggs aren't spherical – and, so, at least *someone* has a card with "Linux portable device on Arm" up their sleeve. Of course, Valve will be targeting a single reference SoC of their choice and likely not a completely new part because they will want to have production running before their order-books open in the new year. And Valve are a behemoth compared to TUXEDO (I'm a fan of both companies but just being a realist) so I could well believe that Valve have resources that just might compensate for Qualcomm's ambivalence to the cause.

But, then again, Valve are also promising not only X86 emulation but also Windows-X86-on-Linux and promising that at gaming-grade performance and latency.

If Valve pull that off, they could change the landscape of user-side computing significantly. If Valve pull off this coup and Arm settles on any kind of stability in their platform so that Valve's work remains relevant for futures Arm SoCs – or variants of whatever comes in the Steam Frame – I wouldn't be surprised if TUXEDO revisit Arm laptops again in a few years – as would other vendors.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: 30 percent of Microsoft's code was now written by AI

Balls to that: it doesn't explain the vanishingly rare few that *do* work.

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

And A.I. wasn't even mentioned!

I think Valve read the room so well with this announcement. I am deeply encouraged that they didn't even allude to A.I. at all and, in fact, their CPU is an older Zen 4 architecture – relatively obsolete, as is some of the other componentry – evidence that A.I. is just no concern at all to them. This is strongly opposed to the "Copilot+"-like nonsense their antagonist – Microsoft – are pushing.

And the crowd went wild!

Anybody who looks at this and looks at the reception the announcement is receiving and fails to see it as unequivocal evidence that literally *nobody* wants A.I. is just blinded by their delusions or too deep into the hand to fold. We all just want good hardware that actually exposes its capabilities for use by the owner and the software they choose to run on it and nobody is wanting that software to be doing A.I. workloads.

As far as the obsolete status of the CPU: it's surely because this stuff has been in the works for a long time and Valve actually want to have production up and ready when the order books open, early next year. The optimisations and unification as a reference platform will surely more than make up for any lack of performance in all the games anyone would actually want to play. (The most popular new releases, this year, excluding the perennial crap that "AAA" churns out over and over and over, would run on a potato, already!)

Linux vendors are getting into Ubuntu – and Snap

Re: Oh, look, another systemd moment

OpenRC-based Gentoo does literally *everything* better than systemd in my own experience: that is to say it just works and doesn't get in my way, over here, unlike systemd which doesn't work at all – frequently – and breaks – frequently – in arbitrary and impossible to debug ways. (I think that the cause of something breaking on Linux should lie pretty close to the thing that's breaking and, in the systemd world, everything is uselessly and hopelessly interconnected for no damn reason and so breakage is often in an entire different universe from the symptoms, making it simply impossible for me to think through!)

Sound, camera, desktop, logging in, screen-sharing, streaming all of it – even Flatpak apps (I use Steam via Flatpak) – all work JUST FINE without systemd.

I'm not a "refusenik", I just see absolutely no value that systemd adds and, conversely, I *do* see all the trouble it causes – it's just a negative value proposition with needless complexity and attack footprint, to say nothing of the real problem of consolidation of the Linux operating system and ecosystem towards a single point of control, dependency and risk!

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

Indeed. Hibernation, today, is pretty much completely useless because the issues it causes are invariably going to take a LOT longer to resolve, over time, compared to just waiting all of six seconds for a cold-boot on modern hardware.

What *I* truly miss is *proper* suspend-to-RAM: S3. That's basically dead, too: what we have, now, is a sort of polished version of S2: suspend-to-idle. It is a lot better than S2 was, historically, but it is still nowhere near as nice as true S3 was when one got that actually working – which, admittedly, was basically never.

AI does a better job of ripping off the style of famous authors than MFA students do

Define "imitate"

The only reason your example holds at all is because "imitating" art badly doesn't result in material damage and kill bystanders like imitating driving – badly – is wont to do.

As a South African – having learned to drive on those roads – I can tell you that I see human drivers here in Bavaria, in Germany (in one of the places with some of the *best* road conditions in existence, certainly the best lane discipline and objectively good driving on average) who have absolutely the wrong reaction when anything even slightly untoward or unexpected occurs on the Autobahn simply because they've never seen the like before, they aren't expecting it and they aren't practiced in driving-improv as is sometimes demanded by emergent situations that don't fit the rules-of-the-road model. Different instincts are instilled in those who learn to drive in a country where you might be met by an unlit vehicle with some number fewer than four quasi-round wheels going the wrong way across an intersection that isn't marked, is potholed, and conceptually cannot actually exist (in the sense Douglas Adams might write) (There are also some number greater than four people on the back of the vehicle, standing, and a chicken or a goat – sometimes both, or alternatively a step-ladder (either wooden or extended if usually collapsible).)

Algorithms do not have a hope in hell of handling situations that do not fit the model they're trained on and history tells us that Silicon Valley trains for cost efficiency – that's why every AI-boosting article ever written cites making restaurant reservations as a use-case: easy model, zero risk of consequence.

As a musician, I think, perhaps, that AI can "imitate" music but so can the 555 in a 90's doorbell: I don't want to listen to that!

As a software architect with multiple decades of experience, I think that AI can (on a good day, barring insoluble hallucinations) "imitate" me implementing some kind of basic CRUD-capture form but so could your average teenager, equipped with Delphi or Visual Basic back when the century turned: there is no path from that kind of thing to wrangling with real-world, live, complex applications that carry legacy baggage, are used by people who never fit the "domain models", run over shoddy networks sustaining intermittent outages, and evolve over years based on moving and emerging demands intrinsic to the real world.

Hells, as a human born into living flesh, much of my behaviour could frankly be "imitated" by your average bonobo but there's no path from that to an appreciation of poetry, a lust for walking in high places and a wont to wax lyrical about my adventures thereupon, a taste for good wine, an innate understanding of calculus and complex numbers despite an absolute inability to grasp elementary arithmetic, a baffling hubris that leads me to think I "get" Quaternions, too, a fascination with how top-spin (or any spin!) causes a fluffy-yellow tennis ball to curve as it describes its flight through the air or – indeed – the corporeal wisdom instilled by the three decades since adolescence that bespell how that living flesh engages in other behaviours we humans share with apes!

The Study is Grossly Flawed

As much as I *want* to see a win for copyright – and more on that at the end of this post – I have to say that this entire study is pretty meaningless because it compares AI-emitted rubbish to that produced by recruited staff and "fan-fic" ain't made that way. By definition, "fan-fic" is the product of a fan who is invested into an original author's work, world or characters with sufficient passion to write their own stories based on it. In a way, "fan-fic" stems from precisely the same artistic intentionality that gives birth to original art. One does not become a "fan" by being recruited!

This study is as meaningless as one that would compare LLM-generated SEO-spam to that produced by minimum effort "content farms" we've been plagued with for decades before the AI bubble emerged: both of those are ripping off other, more worthy sources to steal clicks and both of them are invariably uninspired, inaccurate and vacuous.

On the matter of copyright: I want to see a win for copyright because I honestly believe that the end-game of the AI speculators is the complete eradication of copyright entirely – even their own! In a post-copyright world where everyone can emit whatever content they can pimp, regardless of the original sources – artistic, scientific or otherwise – in a market which has become addicted to minimal-effort, binge-consumption "content" (made-for-streaming stuff being the gateway drug, here) then thems wot's got the most GPUs and the fattest pipe to Teh Interwebs *literally* get everything and that means they get to write the next chapter of human culture! (At least in the "developed Western world". I'm pretty sure that Frikkie, out on his Plaas in the Karoo, doesn't care: he's got dark skies and the Milky Way to go oggle at when he needs eye-candy.)

And they don't give a damn because who needs copyright when all consumed media is also one-shot, produced on demand? At that point, the flow-rate is the only metric worth measuring!

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

Re: Cheer up.

Almost. The infrastructure isn't built, yet, and infrastructure projects are notorious for taking longer than they should so over-production of power in the medium to long term is hardly likely. But the bubble will burst though so I doubt tax payers will end up funding GPU power draw – not commonly or for very long, anyway.

The *real* question will be whether the tax payer ends up bailing out the speculators who find themselves holding the bag when the scam reaches its conclusion.

This could go either way. In any kind of just reality, this would be absurd. But it's almost certain that this will become yet another "too big to fail" scenario and we all know how those end: the rich get richer.

Is this scam perhaps the first that's "too big to bail"? You know: I fucking hope so!

OpenAI and AMD link arms for AI buildout: It's a power-for-equity swap

I Don't Care About Funny Money

I honestly don't care about this kind of corporate funny-money penny-share three-ring circus. I don't care that Altman is spending money he doesn't have on equipment he won't be able to use (when the bubble bursts) to till fields he doesn't own.

In fact: I'm a bit of a fan of AMD: I absolutely approve of their innovation to make lower-energy chips (both CPU & GPU – and all the gods of cake and Gluehwein know that neither Intel nor nVidia were ever going to lower that wattage drain!) and I adore their developer-focussed content (particularly in the Vulkan graphics space)

What I *do* care about, though, is that this represents 16 GIGAWATTS of wastage for the world we live in if you add the two chip-maker's power-draw.

I *do* care about the fact that my daughter – now two years old – is going to inherit the consequences of this frivolity for NOTHING or – arguably – for negative utility because the applications to which this waste will be turned are actively destructive to art and culture and literature and music and even software and science.

`btop` informs me that this developer laptop of mine (from which I post this rant) is currently drawing a little under 8 Watts from its battery. If GIGA is 10^9, the energy to feed all these GPUs could power similar laptops for a quarter of the global human population, enabling them to fulfill everyday tasks like operating their small businesses, libraries, bus services, doctor's offices, veterinarian's practices and schools OR to innovate, to create inspiring things, to write code, to learn and to do science.

There is no number of fingers you can draw on a hand that's worth that power sunk into LLMs!

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Re: Android is dead to me.

I can't. I can't unlock the bootloader because I'd need a key from Huawei and they won't give me one. Why use a Huawei device? Because that's the thing I have and there's no way in hell I'll throw good money after bad buying another phone until this brick no longer functions at all so that's it.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, even the battery still works and the OLED screen is glorious compared to just about any "cheap phone" I could replace it with. But that's the thing, isn't it? The hardware is GREAT but it is not mine. If it were mine, I would be able to run whatever, without needing a key from customer support to unlock the bootloader – the bootloader would never be locked in the first place.

Which brings us back to the article: how are Google going to implement this verification because the only way to do so would involve either a PKS approach where Google must sign *every* APK ever shipped or some kind of verification approach where devs sign their own APKs and Android won't run them until it has first asked Google whether the public key associated with the signature is valid for some verified developer and hasn't been revoked.

This – sure as eggs are eggs – makes Google the gatekeeper for *everything* you might ever want to run on Android hardware and that, in my mind, constitutes EVIL just like a locked bootloader or DRM.

Microsoft would like this power on the desktop if they could have it: that's what TPM 2 really is about. First, they get TPM 2 into every desktop by E.O.L. Windows 10 and get everyone to enable it; next: expect Windows >= 11 to have just this kind of "verification" feature as a hard requirement to run any software: either Microsoft has to sign it or the O.S. must ask for some kind of permission and the TPM 2 uniquely identifies the workstation so that authorisation cannot be transferred or shared. The TPM 2 also encrypts the request to run the software such that it cannot be modified and any response – allowing or denying – from Microsoft is useless on any other box.

Android is dead to me.

That's nothing new. I honestly cannot think of a single Android device that I considered to be a step forward from my very first: an HTC Desire circa 2010. Literally ever step or ratchet since that HTC has come across to me as a bad thing or a worse thing.

Ultimately, I use my mobile for calls and texts and the fact that it has a GPS sensor is convenient just as long as that sensor is only ever used based on my initiative to find my location and draw a dot on a map, showing it.

That venerable HTC Desire could do that. Technically, so could any Android device of today but the problem is what they CAN ALSO do, not what they can no longer do. Newer devices are much like newer cars: ruined by software and ruined by software nobody's wanting.

Facebook installed out the box and hard to remove. Automatic updates put all the bloat back. Locked bootloaders. First voice assistants (always listening, sometimes could be "disabled" but never properly or permanently and never actually removed) and now likely AI versions of the same.

My car (VW Golf) is the same: four wheels, engine, steering vaguely-circular-input-device – exactly like my Open Astra back in 2002. Yet the VW also slams on the brakes upon a whim on the open road for no reason. It beeps like it's going to go nuclear just to flash up massively bright red icon (too fast to see if your eyes are on the road) at random intervals without rhyme nor reason. It sends telemetry to VW with its built-in mobile SIM.

I learned to drive in Africa and I drive with my eyes on the road because I learned to drive in a place where *anything* could actually happen and being surprised was a slow way to react. Driving the VW is insanely triggering because it literally shreds my attention to notify me of something that's clearly unimportant because although I've been suffering with this behaviour for five years, now, I *still* haven't worked out what it is trying to tell me or why it's doing that. Service mechanic just waves it off as known-bad software.

Now, if you can't even sideload unapproved stuff or make a bad situation a little less bad by sourcing software from F-Droid, Android is even worse. This is just another ratchet, though.

The problem is that there isn't really another option.

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

I was really looking forward ...

... to shunning Microsoft by never booting Windows 10 on my development desktop ever again. Indeed: never booting another Microsoft operating system ever again. After this October cut-off.

But, a few weeks ago, I *move* my 9-year-old desktop workstation out of the corner in which it lived in order to thoroughly clean the room because we're trying to get out of this house and – yeah – BIOS beeps and error codes greeted me when I tried to set it up again; I think the motherboard finally died. (I spent about two days doing whatever triage I could without a test bench or any spares at all but, nope. It's dead. It was suspect for a while, though so I'm hardly shocked.)

I don't have any other Windows kit in the house or at work, now. I'm kind of sad that hardware end-of-life stole my chance to deliberately choose to shun Microsoft but there you have it: the outcome is the same.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Only One Bigger Problem

We *do* have one bigger problem: the amount of money any given company needs is defined as "as much as possible". That's it. That's the whole problem. And that's why the world's largest software company shoves toolbar ads: they represent earnings of *more* money and the existence of more implies that more is possible and so they need that. Hence: toolbar ads.

The corollary is the same: those ads do not have to work nor even represent exposure worth their cost to the channel partners – Microsoft only need to be able to *sell* those adds to the channel partners and they know how to land that sale. There does not have to be any value, just revenue, sales and movement of money. Hence: the A.I. bubble – only speculation and investing and bullish FOMO is needed and all the right rich people get richer and who cares about the future when the bubble bursts or the atmosphere ignites because the Earth can't sustain the heat-generation and carbon emissions?

Certainly not the speculators!

First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

Re: I'm gonna get mega-downvoted

Or OpenRC which I run on my development workstations and all my servers, without a single problem. Literally: I have *never* had a real problem that stemmed from the init system because that's literally all it is: an init system.

Sure: it sometimes inits something that is broken because sometimes other things don't work but that's not inits fault.

The reason systemd is a problem is purely because it is purportedly there to be one thing but, in reality, does a whole lot of other things that no significant audience is wanting. You can't mobilise an army of init experts to "solve systemd" because, at best, that army will produce the best possible init system which will entirely fail to gain traction because being the best init system isn't even the same game or competition. Similarly, there is no army of experts aiming to build the best kitchen sink to compete with systemd on its own terms because no experienced experts believe that a kitchen sink is good or even viable.

So, when industry comes along, they funnel funding, convention, norms, backing and popular vote into their own pet kitchen sink and systemd is what comes out the drain.

Re: Its a kitchen sink feature

Back in the day, they also worked – those little commands.

Need I mention my last run-in with systemd which ... er... broke `sudo`. Yes. It stopped `sudo` from working so I couldn't even fix it without booting from a live image, chroot, and then replacing the entire thing with Gentoo without systemd.

And, the WHOLE time, I was asking myself this question: WHY does anything have any reason, means or motivation to even be able to break `sudo` in the first place and, as a corollary, why should *I* need to know about its very existence?

Sure – there's a tonne of those old-back-in-the-day UNIX commands that I don't know and don't use – mostly, ones I've likely even forgotten I ever did know or did use because my memory's like that – but, if you don't call them, they do nothing. They do not break things that aren't in their realm and there is no requirement to learn about some facet of them because – surprise! – someone else made an executive decision that it should now break something you've always used, known, and relied upon.

(And, yes, it was `systemd-homed` that broke `sudo`!)

I got half way through this article and realised that I actually do not care to read about all the wide, sweeping, revolutionary changes. I do *not* want wide, sweeping, revolutionary changes on my Linux boxen and that's why I will not tolerate `systemd` on them, either. I just wish that more people in the Linux world would look at those massive piles of stuff that it's bringing to the table and ask: who wants that? Instead of 99,99% just going "systemd is everything" and swallowing it.

If anything ends the momentum of the Linux desktop, it isn't going to be nVIDIA's drivers, Wayland, Steam failing to bring gaming to Penguin-land, Microsoft indulging in anti-competitive malarkey or Linus pissing off one too many developer or contributor: it's going to be a complete collapse of the entire thing because nothing independent from systemd even exists any more and so the house of extremely inflammable cards not only grows but becomes more and more critical in the system. Any risk manager who's not jumping up and down about that should just buy macs for their server farm and office desks!

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

I have an "A.I. PC" on order! I *DO* see it as an opportunity.

I actually *DO* have an A.I. PC on order. It's a Tuxedo Computers laptop that I shall need as I embark on a prolonged chapter of intermittent international travelling since I don't particularly wish to lug my water-cooled development desktop around the world with me. It shall be A.I. capable and also contain the necessary TPM 2 and other bits to enable the running of Windows 11.

I do see it as a great opportunity to avoid running either A.I. workloads or Windows 11 on it at all costs. I actually relish the prospect.

Of course, I selected the new hardware because of its Vulkan 1.4 support which I need because I'm developing software the uses Vulkan 1.3 ~ 1.4 features and extensions. I'm sure I'll run KataGo on it at some point, too, since I'm a Go player, and that's OpenCL so I wouldn't be surprised if the "A.I. features" of the GPU do get employed at least for something at some point in their lifetime – at least, I know that the fp16 support will very likely be used.

And fp16 support is literally the only thing that this "new opportunity" has that I could even enumerate as a feature that isn't supported on that aforementioned water-cooled development desktop (i7 7700, GTX 1080) which I assembled in 2017~18 and haven't upgraded(*) even once, which does not have any kind of TPM, which does not have "AI cores", which runs KataGo and other OpenCL workloads "just fine" because even fp16 features are not at all a hard requirement, and – CRITICALLY – which also never ran Windows 11, nor shall it! (It could, with hacks, but I am not inclined to bother to hack it even for shits-and-giggles and I've even run Windows ME for laughs, in my time, so there you go!)

The new laptop is all-AMD so it should support Linux much better than the desktop. I've conquered nVIDIA's shitty drivers on the latter so that's also quite OK (as long as I enforce the use of xwayland for all the things that freak out when the status-quo is nVIDIA+Wayland – while nVIDIA's drivers have improved over recent years, there are still a lot of things that just don't work with them under Wayland.)

If it was not for the need to take my dev. environment with me on an aeroplane, I honestly wouldn't have upgraded or even seen a need to in the near future.

But, still: I am going to absolutely love toting a Windows-11- and fully-AI-capable relative super-notebook around, running Gentoo (or Arch if I lose my nerve before Autumn and conclude that trying to hack on Gentoo over third-world Internet is not likely to be "fun" of the pleasantly-forgettable kind and opt for a safer, binary distro, instead.)

(*): I moved houses without draining the reservoir, once, and the pump died – presumably because the ~800m altitude difference was significant enough to force it to ingest water from the filled and sealed system – so that's been switched out. That is literally the only maintenance I've ever had to do on it beyond topping up the coolant.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: IMaybe not a piano

I disagree. I actually think the reason my code never fails in production is because the action of my key-strokes used to enter it into the computer is informed by my knowledge of the sensation of flinging piano-hammers off the escapement with some modicum of skill and aptitude.

At least: I'll sell that line as hard as necessary in a job interview or salary discussion with no remorse. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story! ;)

I have thoughts. And das Keyboard.

Having typed a lot -- as a proper touch-typist -- and, of that, I've typed about 60% program code (in many programming languages) and 40% natural language, that latter split about 90% English, 10% German -- I have thoughts about keyboard design. I'm also a pianist.

I think the thing that makes mechanical keyboards seem noisy has nothing to do with the switch but rather with the way the key's action encourages the user to type and bottom-out the keys. It's the plastic cap hitting the back-plate that's loud, not the Cherry Blue switch (continuing the article's mention of that, the One True Switch) passing the activation point in the stroke but, simultaneously, the great mechanical positive reinforcement cycle of the Cherry Blue's action absolutely does feed-back to the human being at the keyboard and result in the kind of striking that results in an LTE: Loud Typing Event.

The solution is clearly apparent: designs should focus on key switches that have lots of physical feedback connected with their actual activation point and then deaden the noise by damping the bottom-out clack. Users then will learn to percieve the real actuation and not miss the lack of a clack.

Importantly, the dampener cannot be rubber and must not spring the key-cap back upwards because that feels "bouncy". It needs to be very thin, but accept just the right amount of deformation on impact to deaden the sound without feeling "squishy". (I'd guess cork would be GREAT, but far too pricey) I'd draw the response curve I'd want, personally, but not in ASCII art because I'm tying on a laptop keyboard, here, and I think we can be unanimous on declaiming those as the worst. (Also: I don't have spell-check, apparently. Thanks, Firefox.)

Unfortunately, though, there really is NO innovation in the keyboard world, alas, and what innovation there is is focussed on entirely the wrong things: RGB lighting and adding proprietary and useless extra features that don't work because the only way to use them is with the manufacturer's proprietary and non-functional "driver" bloatware: here we find the true realm of their innovation in excelling at making something as terrible as imaginable in some kind of sordid bid to be worst.

I have a keyboard in a cupboard that is also a mouse. The proprietary software thingy is also a mouse driver. Why? Because the keyboard has no pointing device features but, by using that bloatware, you can remape the scupper'd "mouse"'s "scroll wheel" to control your audio volume! Sometimes. On a good day, one ending in the letter ':qa!'

That brings me to my own personal favourite which I do carry with me like a gilded Morse key, to coding jobs: the das Keyboard 4. Personally, I find the Cherry Brown switches to be a nice near-equivalent to the Blue with just a little less activation feedback but enough to never create mis-strikes or suffer button bounce (I've used Razor stupid-premium "Optical" swiches that literally double-press themselves because of button bounce!) and the Brown are a little more socially acceptible, I find, from listening to the peanut gallery.

The das Keyboard's volume wheel sends scan codes for media volume up/down and works on every desktop OS, without any drivers. It has a bomber aluminium front-plate that makes it seem like you could drive a Panzer over it without worry. It uses only a single USB A port but has a built in USB 3.0 hub that literally is the best USB 3.0 hub I have ever used, ever! (To those in the know: I can connect to `adb` debugging on Android devices without needing to scrounge up the Specially Annointed USB cable when using my das Keyboard's hub. Any semi-decent cable will do. It's like magic!)

They don't like wine, tea or beer, though. Since I discovered the das Keyboard about ... er... well over a decade ago, I've killed three with those beverages, respectively. (One actually still works (mostly) but sometimes registers an extra right-shift when pressing many keys at once which leads to wierd surprises when coding, a lot.)

GitHub Copilot angles for promotion from assistant to agent

Re: Want to start a career in coding?

Nobody begins their career with a will to remain a junior and these stochastic-token-extruding-machines will never become the experts. Given a job of any complexity, they are USELESS. It's all very well to say that with some kind of accuracy rate and some kind of hallucination rate they can perform some simplistic, limited, exceedingly common tasks with some level of success but these models rapidly become totally incompetent in more nuanced situations or when the task needs to satisfy broader or grander requirements or objectives.

The industry has yet to realise that us grey-beards will not be replaced by these extruding-machines and, as a grey-beard, I -- for one -- would like to extend a welcome to anyone contemplating becoming a newbie and beginning their career, now.

We grey-beards largely do not care about the existence of these supposed-newbie-replacing-machines because they play no role in our more abstract and complex jobs. If you see an enraged grey-beard raging against the extruding-machines, it is nearly always because they resent wasting time fielding extruded issue reports, extruded pull requests, CVEs, code submissions and the like. Some idiot is using these things and wasting OUR time with the extrusions. Go away, you demons of stupidity!

What we *do* care about, however, is the fate of the newbies, themselves. We don't want to correct A.I. excretions. Fundamentally, we LOVE helping junior programmers because we want them to grow into better programmers who can help us, work with us and, one day, go on to become the grey-beard themselves.

We don't help juniors because we want the code they're submitting. Trust me: helping newbies usually takes longer than just doing the work, ourselves.

In the stochastic-rubbish-extruding-machines, we see junior-level near-competence (at the very, very best) along with a hopeless situation. Vetting the machine's output helps nobody. Even if, somehow, the model did learn from our correcting of its output, that would serve the corporation behind the model who owns the vast server-farms on which it can operate and our mentoring of such a thing would basically be futile and also to to our own detriment!

If you're a junior software engineer or thinking of becoming one: go find your nearest grey-beard and ask them whether they'd feel more amenable to mentoring, correcting and training you or whether they'd rather save your salary and pay that up to a mega-corpo for a hopeless model.

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

GitHub → whipper-team/whipper

You, sir, need to know about `whipper` (for Linux, GitHub → whipper-team/whipper).

I used to happily use DbPoweramp – bought and paid-for – for many years and only recently (in the last month) stumbled upon `whipper` and I can honestly say I'll never look back. Once it knows a few attributes of your disk drive (including the AccurateRip offset), ripping a disk is as easy as `whipper cd rip`: one command-line, drive emits spinny noises for some while and `.flac` files get written to some place in your home folder. If you're going through a stack of disks, each one after the second can be as easy as two keypresses. It is the epitome of a great "desktop"-but-command-line program.

Sure, one invariably needs to patch up the metadata on the files after they're ripped but that's nearly unavoidable and DbPoweramp was never the best interface for that in any case.

`whipper` employs `cdparanoia` properly and also checks AccurateRip. Everything about it instils confidence in the fidelity of the audio data.

On the first day I tried it, I spun up nine audio CDs pretty much back-to-back after the first and that proceeded so smoothly, it quelled all my inklings of impending-need-to-hack that new Linux desktop workflows often entail. That stack of disks had sat on my desk for 18 months before I finally got around to ripping them simply because I wasn't in the mood to fight if necessary. I used a relatively ancient LG blu-ray drive connected over USB and did this on Gentoo under a custom configured Kernel – you'll forgive that 18-month period of apprehension and appreciate *why* the easy time I had was so refreshing.

If it worked for my Gentoo desktop, I cannot imagine it being in any way obtuse under Linux Mint!

(Now: foobar2000, however, is something I have yet to replace under Linux. R.I.P.)

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

The Means were not Insecure

The channel was perfectly secure. The recipients at the end-points were erroneously selected. Theoretically, if the part of Signal had been played by some surely-over-priced, over-budget and long-delayed government, designed-by-committee, end-to-end chat software, there would be nothing preventing the accidental addition of a journalist as a recipient of the chat except the fact that journalists typically aren't added to such systems at all.

We need to be very, very clear about what happened and overly pedantic, here. I'm just waiting for the first numpty to start spouting that, look, Signal isn't all that "secure" because it just got "hacked" or man-in-the-middled or something and government secrets got "stolen", then twist that argument into one in favour of legislation enforcing backdoors in end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like Signal, compromising the academic argument that true end-to-end encryption cannot be secure if it has any backdoor at all.

If those sound like dumb arguments, that's because they are dumb arguments. But they'll likely suffice and any hints that Signal is somehow insecure will only make that likelihood greater.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: Hi ! We want to steal everything...

> Yes because paying for stuff is economically unfeasible...

Arguably, at the consumer level, paying for stuff is not only economically unfeasible, not only unfeasible in general, but impossible. I have a long list of books I would love to read but cannot, simply because I'm planning a move so I don't want to buy a hard-copy to add to my existing packing problems and buying those titles as DRM-free ebooks that will work on my Tolino (kobo variant) device is impossible in every way. They're newer titles with living authors who I support and I would love to pay those authors but I just cannot.

The rest of the world has a very simple counter to the AI bros: all they have to do is say that violation of copyright by US companies will result in international abandonment of copyright treaty – and, similarly, for patents. This would also include dropping international enforcement of DMCA section 1201 and refusing to respect US copyrights and enforce them against people not in the EU – even if their IP addresses appear in torrent swarms. Tit for tat.

Of course, this would only carry weight if the AI bros were in favour of copyright at all and they are not. Their end-game is the total rubbishing of copyright across the board because they are betting that it is obsolete. There is no need for copy protection for content that can be extruded at scale, on demand, without the need to pay creators to make it in the first place. Their bot-shit doesn't benefit from copyright protections because they are selling its excretion-as-a-service, not the artefacts excreted.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: Lots of Astroturf in this thread

This is par for the course wherever browsers are discussed. Indeed, the ubiquity and indomitability of the Brave astro-turf gang is alarmingly high – that, alone, would be enough to raise red flags, in my mind, even if I didn't know the sordid history of the Brave browser and how it has been associated with an awful number of "web 3" debacles, continues to push crypto-currency, tried to pull the affiliate-abuse trick that Honey would later (rightly) be lambasted for, and generally behaves appallingly in numerous ways – and there are archived links (wayback machine et al.) to prove it, whatever the gang spouts.

Brave earned their place in the untouchable-software-purveyor box and there's nothing they can or could do to redeem themselves in my opinion, just like Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Unity, Adobe and some others. All of these corpos earned their untouchability through numerous acts of bad-faith that were *not* mistakes – not single incidents but a history of scummy behaviour.

I feel like Mozilla have joined them in that box, now, and although this is a hot news headline, today, Mozilla were teetering on the brink of the abyss for a very long time, already.

EU plans to 'mobilize' €200B to invest in AI to catch up with US and China

Derisking is Abominable.

I find the very concept of "derisking" a cynical, speculative, multi-billion-Euro mega-corpo investment into a technology bubble optimised and designed to automate humanity in order to facilitate mundanity to be, in a word: abhorrent.

Out there – outside my house – on the streets, there's the run up to the German elections going on and I find a lot of that campaigning to be abhorrent, too. One poster reads: "freedom will not vote for itself," as if slavery is humanity's default state and not forced upon us by evil lords. Another says that the party behind it does not care about the climate disaster, only for people, as if people do not breath air or eat food or walk about beneath our atmosphere.

There is a striking common trend, however: every party – even the conservative CSU/CDU union – appears to be trying their damnedest to appeal to those with an appetite for drastic change. This includes those same parties who designed, built and instituted the status quo. They all perceive that people are not happy and are becoming ever more unhappy with the erosion of their safety, their freedoms, their prosperity and their way of life – even their menus for dinner as the cost of living creeps ever upwards.

I revile the AfD and abhor their dog-whistle politics. I don't get a vote. I live here. I pay taxes. I have lived and paid taxes in three "democracies", on three distinct continents, and I'm the most useless alternative-universe version of Jason Fucking Borne: no lack of citizenships and passports have I, just no vote that means anything at all. I would vote against the AfD as strongly as I would vote against the CSU/CDU or the FDP – or the Tories, in Britain, were I there.

But when I read that *my* tax money is being put up to "derisk" these corporations and their frivolous bets on an AI horse, I can absolutely understand why the people out there vote for an alternative.

If you can't decide whether to buy futures in AI or short-sell the obvious bubble, what do you do? You spend the tax-payer's money on it and take your cut under the table, of course!

Cloudflare hopes to rebuild the Web for the AI age - with itself in the middle

Hmm. But that's not what they're saying.

This is a message from Cloudflare to their investors. The intended purpose is to drive bullish attitudes amongst those investors. The content of the message is vague but it boils down to this: Cloudflare intend to find out where the profit is and position themselves to get their piece of the pie.

That's all. That's all that they're saying. They don't care about "content creators" or who should get to rip of the created content beyond finding out how Cloudflare can get a piece of the money. They're assuring their investors that they intend to find that piece of the money-pie.

Don't read anything else into this.

Incidentally, I have an anecdote to offer on the topic of Cloudflare's "benevolence": I'm writing this post from Windows 10 which I've booted for the very first time, this year, in order to run some `.exe` programs that I can't be bothered to port to Linux because I only need them once every few months. While those have been running, I've been browsing. Those obnoxious Cloudflare CAPTCHAs all over the Web which one is thwarted with, these days, for merely being so bold as to issue an HTTP GET request are all mysteriously completing themselves with no need for me to proove that I'm really human just to browse. That's in spite of the fact that my browser, here, is still Firefox ESR and uBlock Origin is still installed and I have the same filter lists in effect (thanks to uBlock0's great settings export feature) and the same Firefox settings thanks to `policies.json`. It is the same hardware -- the same physical box -- behind the same gateway with the same public IP address. The *only* difference is that I'm not currently browsing from Linux.

Do I think Cloudflare care for an open, free and independent Web that exists such that browsers can communicate with those with content on offer? Something makes me very reluctant to believe that Cloudflare are "good guys" out to protect that concept in the face of an AI-blighted "post Search" future.

They are a corpo, in it for the money, and they're telling their investors only that.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

How far we've come!

Oh how we look back with fondness on the days of yore, now that a "Let me google that for you" reply is no longer a cynical, obnoxious act but triggers, instead, some deep and fond nostalgia for the World Wide Web before enshittification and the Death of Search, when "googling" could justifiably be considered not only to actually be helpful but *so* helpful, indeed, that "googling" was considered by some to constitute due diligence before one could pretend to curiosity sufficient to pose a question in a comment thread!

A curious sarcastic commenter wants to know: *when* one "googles" for Torvalds' age, today, does one actually *find* it? Or does one find a verbosely worded essay on (among other things...) the history of the concept of age, why tracking the age of someone is useful, code-snippets showing how to do an age-adjacent thing in Javascript+React, and a stirring memorandum on how knowing an "age" can benefit YOUR business or your bottom line, followed by a link to a premium, for-profit tool for age tech and a sidebar in which an online webinar taking place right now, on embracing age and age-related cloud products with integrated age-AI models, is advertised as the only way to succeed in today's economic climate?

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Re: "You're driving towards a wall!" "No I'm not!" *smash*

Sometimes, I think we should just give up and stop trying to save ourselves – the effort would be better spent inventing ways to leave a legacy for the bonobos, the octopi and the dolphins and all other species that might one day evolve higher levels of intelligence so that we can warn them not to repeat our mistakes.

Sometimes, I think we should just sever our tubes and queue the music, start the party, go not gently into one glorious, hedonistic goodnight and let evolution run its course as soon as possible on evolutionary time-scales, for a more worthy species to rise to inherit the earth.

Certainly, our continued struggles aren't doing the bonobos and the octopi any favours!

But I accept that others have not given up the fight and I *will* continue to fight in solidarity with them. And, more and more, I'm thinking that fighting is going to be necessary because playing nicely is not working.

Destabilising and breaking things *is* the goal, not their failure state!

Chaos and craziness and flames and the demise of institutions is the very point. They're literally playing for the bullshit to flood all the channels and going for such absurdity that nobody will remember what sanity even looked like, what functional organs of state ever did or were or offered or what civil liberties and rights and safety meant at all.

They're burning it down to rule over the ashes.

They're also all sworn "longtermists" and utilitarians who will proffer some longtermist utilitarian solution once it's all gone to pieces. When nobody has health-care or food or education and only the gun-nuts have "safety" (and only as long as their ammo lasts, while they're eating out of tins and farting in their bunkers), do not fear: AI, blockchain and the metaverse will balance out all the wrong with immeasurably insignificant levels of "utility" accrued over some meaningless number of future virtual "souls" living in a simulation 10000 years from now, on Mars.

It is that dumb and they consider themselves altruistic because they're striving to bring about this future. I think that the cult of personality that they somehow never fail to dispel survives because, in some way, they do genuinely believe their own delusion that they are actually righteous in their cause.

With every passing day, fewer peaceful options to stop this madness remain on the table. "Democracy" has certainly failed to end it. They won't arrest their own trajectory into hell. We need to act.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Re: In the opinion of this Englishman

The connotations attributed to the adjective, "hot," would imply that a hot fluid was perceptibly warmer than a "tepid", "lukewarm" or "blood-warm" fluid which one might understand to be approximately body-temperature. Conclusively: "hot snot" would be distinct to "tepid snot" in the imaginations of most readers.

(I do hope I have not offended any reader's imaginations in my synopsis of these English-language facts.)

Re: In the opinion of this Englishman

No, no. It really isn't. And I'll state that as someone who usually hold *very stringent* requirements for a soft-boiled egg to be judged edible. But you've got to draw a line, somewhere, yeah?

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

I'm a hater.

Does it work? Who can say? What does it work *at*? If that question were simple, I – too – would honestly not care very much about it because I do not count "init systems" amongst my areas of interest, particularly. I do consider myself to be a systemd hater, however. I'll own it!

I can't answer the question of what systemd works *for* or at because it seems that systemd is trying to be everything: it is not just init. Every other news story about systemd concerns its creeping into yet another domain it has no reason to touch.

So, I ask: who can say it works? We can't even define what its scope is or what it will be, tomorrow, so who can define whether it is fit for purpose or not?

I hate it because I can't ignore it as long as I'm a Linux user. The way it creeps into every domain makes it necessary for me to know about it and care about whether it is fit for purpose or compromised. The more systems it touches, the more irreplaceable it becomes and the more I need to care about it.

I run Gentoo, on OpenRC, and don't even use systemd and yet, still, I have to care about it because of its outsized impact on the whole Linux ecosystem – that's why I hate it.

I don't know a damn thing about how sysvinit looks on the inside, or how OpenRC's upstream code-base truly is to hack on, but I do know that I can define their standard operating conditions and the job they're supposed to perform and I can answer that question: do they work? If I determine that either one is lacking, I can implement my own replacement to meet my needs because their scope is contained. It is nearly impossible to "replace systemd" in the ecosystem, today, and only becomes more difficult with every new development in this farce.

To judge that it works would require confidence that it succeeds at what it claims to do which I've argued is ineffable but it is easy to prove that it does NOT work because one only needs to find the stuff it breaks. I use Gentoo almost exclusively on desktops and servers, today, but I have used systemd-based distributions often enough to see it break, frequently, often rendering Linux mechanisms that should be 100% independent of init, like `sudo`, totally inoperable or introducing new supply-chain attacks, like the way the whole `xz` thing transpired.

Should the OpenSSH developers have cared about whether the supply-chain of `xz` should form part of their threat model because of how distro package maintainers at Debian might link things to satisfy the requirements of agent P's "init system"? That would be totally absurd but, yet, that actually happened. That actually came to pass. That is why I care. That is why I'm a raving, frothing lunatic with rage whenever I read about systemd. This situation *is* absurd.

… and it threatens our operating system: Linux. I actually like to be able to use computers that run a sane operating system.

Re: How many lines-of-code is OpenRC?

Agent P chose to compare the number of lines-of-code of systemd with that for glibc – an implementation of the C standard library and not actually an init system – or that of bash (a shell, not actually an init sytem) or wpa_supplicant (a wifi thing, also not an init system) and so some crazy, off-spec, non-conformist part of my brain wondered if, just maybe, a more interesting comparison would be to – you know! – another init system.

But maybe he was trying to suggest that systemd isn't actually an init either. I'm sure it contains a complete implementation of a C standard library, a shell and a wifi layer, too, by now. Maybe those are written in fewer lines of code, too, for all I know.

Actually, I do wonder why he's bothered that Cargo doesn't meet their requirements. That seems a little off-brand; I'd have expected him to just add an entire Rust build toolchain to systemd and roll with it.

How many lines-of-code is OpenRC?

I've been writing Rust, intensively, for the better part of a decade and I will be the first to agree that Cargo is not perfect. Don't even get me started on "features" – what they were, what they are, what they were intended to be and how people abuse them across the ecosystem. But the truth is that Cargo is actually bloody brilliant when one considers it, objectively, and thinks back to Autotools or CMake. Cargo works well enough right "out the box" and it works pretty much the same way for every project that applies it, correctly, on every supported platform. Rust is "nice" because you *can* just `git clone` most code-bases and Cargo will usually build them, run their tests and executables and their examples. You can edit those examples' `main.rs` source and start to hack right away and Cargo keeps running them so you can play. The on-boarding process to try out something in the Rust & Cargo ecosystem is easily the best I know by a million miles, chains, cables, furlongs or what-have-you.

But let's just take a step back: you're making an "init system". That is: a system that runs to spawn other processes, monitors them over their life-time, killing some and restarting others if they die. If the structure is, indeed, so convoluted that it can't be built with Cargo, you're inept or you're wildly out of scope and I wouldn't want to touch what you're making with a ten-foot pole.

I think the mention of Meson is apt, though. Meson is basically the systemd of build tools: it is extremely opinionated and hostile to every other build system, offering heavily begrudged support for integration with CMake out of necessity (because everything else either uses or supports CMake – it being the industry-standard incumbent) but holding the line that interoperability means "just port everything to Meson".

Do you want to link SDL in a Meson project? Great! You've got the flagship demo for that specific case. Oh: you want to use a version of the SDL that doesn't match the demo's current "wrap" version? Good luck, then, because SDL builds with CMake in a non-trivial way so you'll be patching the official demo "wrap" (and it is exceedingly verbose, being a complete reproduction of the SDL build mechanism), writing something entirely new or hacking together some very cursed solution that will never be supported because you're using Meson in a way that contravenes their "philosophy". Ditto for every other non-trivial dependency that doesn't coincide with an official "wrap": it's all just "port to Meson" because that is the only supported way. (Edit: citation: https://mesonbuild.com/Mixing-build-systems.html)

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

Eleven seconds. My development desktop, on Gentoo and OpenRC, boots from cold, hard power-off to a fully-operational KDE Plasma 6.2 desktop in eleven seconds.

I find this story intensely ironic.

My last conflict with anything `systemd` was when I ran in to repeated problems on my development desktop. The box kept falling over, at random intervals but `sudo` also ceased working. `sudo` was failing because `systemd-homed` was falling over and I couldn't fix anything because, yeah, `sudo` wasn't doing the `do` part at the end. THAT was the final straw. That pushed me to migrate my desktop to (really: "back to") Gentoo, on OpenRC, which is the same thing that runs on all my servers. Alpine runs in all my containers (none of them have an init but some had `tini` in the past) and no boxen I maintain use `systemd`, today.

Since that point in time, the `xz` Thing came and went and I watched on, bemused and amused. Schadenfreude is apparently a healthy and necessary part of our human psychology. I can't imagine handing `sudo`'s responsibilities to the same supply-chain that let the `xz` Thing happen. I certainly can't imagine replacing the Kernel's SUID mechanics with their crap.

Not only because `sudo` and SUID, in general, do a whole lot more than *just* run commands as user 0. There's a reason why `sudo` became ubiquitous and the fact that `root` passwords no longer need to be shared (or even be set at all!) is only the very beginning of the very tip of an iceberg-sized point.

I read the news about Shepherd 1.0 and I do sigh, a little, and wish more journalists were mentioning it as an alternative to OpenRC and Sys.V Init instead of holding it up to `systemd`, though. Both of the latter actually are init. systems (and stay in their lanes) and I'm sure that Shepherd is intended to be init., too, not some sprawling, redmondian behemoth that also does a spot of init. by-the-by. (I'd say `systemd` contains an init. system but it seems to contain multiple components that all do some init. stuff, along with multiple mini-inits. Inits-within-inits. It's truly an oroboros. I'd say it's a misguided, cynical attempt to make an Eierlegende Wollmilchsau if I didn't love that German phrase too much to sully it with the association.)

So, dear Register: can we anticipate a good technical deep-dive into Shepherd 1.0 in which you tell me how and why it might, or should, one day replace my perfectly-fine-thank-you scripts in `/etc/init.d`? Those perfectly-fine-thank-you scripts just sit there and do their thing at init. time. I haven't had to "maintain" a single one in ages -- at least, not since the last time Wayland fell over and I had to sort of wrangle some things to get dbus+kwin starting, again. I can't really see the appeal of porting them all to something new: they're prefectly fine, thank you.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

Maintaining some open source-code isn't supposed to carry a punishment. It is this sort of opinion that breaks that deal.

This is why I never publish my work as open-source and only ever push patches up to projects that I really, really love and trust to value my contributions. There are simply far too many who think that "maintainers" should just deal with the nasty side of open-source for whatever reason.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Replace all "Help" Menu Entries in Windows 3.1

Since they've backported (back-foisted) it upon Windows 10 (it hit me, again, yesterday) I ask this: why not go all the way and foist it right back on Windows 3.1, too?

Do you remember those "Help" menus from 3.1? If you don't, you should go and run that in an emulator, unplug your router and try to work out how to use it, offline, just from the help files that used to ship with programs, back then – accessible by help menus! They were often – albeit with exception – actually useful! They were references and sometimes even told you how to do Things with the software or the operating system.

Also: you'd be building up the user-base to validate my argument that there are surely many running 3.1, even in 2024, and they could be blighted with Copilot, too, just like the rest of us.

Bitwarden's FOSS halo slips as new SDK requirement locks down freedoms

The balance tipped.

This news should come as no surprise to anyone. This is the standard play for venture-capital (or private-equity) bought "Open Source."

What it means – simply – is that the balance has tipped: the suits have determined that the loss of goodwill from those who flee is less than the stakes to be gained by this change. That, in turn, is trivially easy to interpret: "we" – the users, developers and community – are worth less than the Dollars knocking on their door. That follows by definition.

Why would we trust them, then? They're demonstrating contempt for our worth, as a community, so only a fool would expect them to value us!

WordPress. Bitwarden. VSCode. GitHub. Redis. MySQL. (… and I haven't even started to 'think' to find examples, yet.)

Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard

Re: We need a User Agent that isn't Googled.

Pre-emptive response: "Source Available" does *not* cut it for a web browser, supposed to be a User Agent, with which human beings do things like Internet Banking, personal or intimate messaging and – on occasion – research which conflicts with the prevailing status-quo of the land in which they're living such as searching for certain bears that like honey or for clinics deplored by a certain political lobby for culture-war reasons.

You cannot fork a Source Available software if those who publish it change their behaviour in the future. Without the threat of being forked, the corporation behind the software faces no checks and balances from their user base and being morally upstanding holds no specific utility value. This means that morality necessarily ceases to be a dominant strategy as soon as the Dollar arrives at the door.

A Source Available software will have no long-term plans to maintain support for user-first standards like Manifest v2 because they know that user disagreement is impotent. Indeed: Vivaldi say they'll support v2 until some time next year – THAT'S NOT LONG-TERM and we can't just fork Vivaldi in 2025, either, should they neglect to extend that or even just forget that promise before June, 2025. (Vivaldi, to be fair, are in an unfortunate position because they surely don't want to maintain v2 in their own fork of Chromium. Again: the problem is in evidence.)

We need a User Agent that isn't Googled.

If it is not truly Open Source, it can never be a proper "User Agent". Also, it's Chromium so its very existence exacerbates the monoculture problem, no matter how honest their claims of privacy – which, I guess, we just have to trust because it isn't Open Source. It exacerbates the problems with EME and other Google-mandated "standards", too.

We need a proper User Agent that isn't controlled by Google – directly, or indirectly via their advertising-company proxy: Mozilla. Vivaldi is not that.

That said, this news did impart one positive and novel idea: after reading their response, beginning "Our Dashboard is quite different…", I no longer doubt that LLMs *can* actually replace many humans in the workplace.

Altman reportedly asks Biden to back a slew of multi-gigawatt-scale AI datacenters

It's Power.

For long and long, I've considered the connection between "crypto" and "A.I." to be the fact that both are bubbles of the most ephemeral kind but, today, I think I've been wrong about that: both are about consumption of power – Watts!

Precisely how the megalomaniacs are punting A.I. is pretty obvious but *why* they're so desperate to do so makes little sense. Is their really enough money to be made from rendering artists, authors and many others redundant? Maybe they're set on positioning themselves to capture "human culture" or something by flooding the channels with 'botshit' but even that seems a little too desperate to motivate the scale of the infrastructure investments. (It would also be too dystopian or nefarious: the megalomaniacs are not that inspired.)

But Watts of power? This is all a counter-move to the acceleration and expansion of green energy.

This is about keeping legacy power-plants operational. This is about keeping the oil-economy flowing and ensuring that green sources cannot hope to bring about the decommissioning of fossil-fuel sources in the short term. This is about keeping old establishments like OPEC relevant as puppeteers of the world economy.

This is also a cynical act but cynical, short-termism is right on-brand for the megalomaniac.

Perhaps they know that "A.I." is stupid and a bubble and hated by the masses and laughably prone to hallucinations and not fit for any purpose in the real world. They do not actually care because "A.I." – the entire industry – is just a "cost centre" to them. Bad press, loathing, even infrastructure wastes are just "costs" and their profit lies elsewhere: these maniacs are firmly rooted in traditional economic structures, investments, markets and capitalism and granting the oil-economy a final lease on life serves them, there. Keeping fossil-fuel chains alive keeps their lobby relevant in government and international institutions.

They're seeing Watts of green power becoming available on the grid and so they strive to sink as many Watts as possible into something: not crypto, now, but A.I.

For Satisfactory players, the TL;DR is this: A.I. is just the AWESOME Sink of real life.

WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk

Re: This just seems wrong

The other big question is why does the corpo have any influence on the actions of the .org, anyway?

I've always understood the split between corpo/.org for FOSS products to define the boundary between what the community retains (.org) in return for – you know – actually building the whole product, and the money-making entity to be set up as just one service provider to profit, employ a core team of developers, and, ostensibly, to sponsor that community.

It's supposed to be a hedge so that all the FOSS developers don't just immediately jump ship, fork, and refuse to ever touch the original code again – potentially turning directly to their lawyers to ask whether a corporate take-over is legal. FOSS devs understand that they're getting ripped off (in a way) but that the split is inevitable as soon as the projects becomes successful enough to demand a stable revenue stream coinciding with corporate profiteers looming, inexorably, anyway.

It seems to me that Automattic are proudly and loudly pronouncing the quiet bit: FOSS projects are basically suckers for this abuse. I don't particularly care one jot about Automattic, WPEngine or WordPress but I do care about FOSS (in general) and it seems to me that this story is relevant as a cautionary tale for the whole ecosystem.

Unity scraps hated runtime fees, hits devs with subscription hikes instead

Too Late.

This is irrelevant, now. Unity demonstrated to developers that they could and *would* unilateraly fiddle with the pricing model as and whenever they wanted to. This was the final straw and also served to accellerate interest in alternatives like Godot by orders of magnitude.

I did not dig into the details but I'm pretty sure that they have not relinquished their power to alter the deal again, unfavourably, as and whenever they want to.

Nobody trusts them and nobody should ever trust them.

Breaking the rules is in Big Tech's blood – now it's time to break the habit

Re: Open Source Licenses are already sufficient.

TL;DR: this whole palaver exists purely to precipitate a nonsense-fight in which the very concept of copyright is borked by collateral damage.