Exactly this, the "spec" is almost always a very rough draft that is largely written and consumed by people that want to feel like they contribute to the project even though they don't understand the customer or the developer situation that well. You might reference it a bit in your first offering and then ignore it as the stakeholder sees what the spec produces and realizes the spec wasn't really what they wanted when they see it live.

Once upon a time more weight was given to design, but the industry largely realized that all that very careful effort just became a liability of sunk cost fallacy when they realized the resultant output was not desired, but so much work had gone into the spec we don't want to change.

Nowadays it's a way that PMP minded folks feel like they are core technical contributors without learning to code. This is of course the target audience. Spoke to an executive that sincerely believes the only thing of irreplaceable value is his 'insight' and over 90% of his employees are going to be dismissed since he can just do it all himself. In practice his is the *first* job that could go to LLM, as all he ever says is either obvious stuff or just confidently wrong and his business decisions amount to "all we need is more customers and for them to pay more for it and we will be profitable"... Genius.

Fun fact, there has been two Linux distributions officially certified as "UNIX". Inspur and Huawei for whatever reason bothered to get them officially certified.

On the flip side, there's an odd sentence in the XDG specification that explicitly qualifies the wording around filesystem feature requirements to apply only to Unix-like platforms. Clearly they had Unix in mind, but they explicitly bothered to give an implicit pass to any hypothetical non-Unix, non-Unix-like platforms.

It can be a viable strategy to lean into bad news perhaps even more than is warranted. When you proclaim in 3-4 months time that you've overcome that disadvantage, people find that marginally more credible, even if that is wrong.

When you speak *exclusively* in CEO optimism speak, at some point people just stop believing anything positive you say.

... I of course mean other citations than that quasi-fraudulent British lawsuit that started this nonsense myth back in the early 90ies or so.

If that CEO thinks the behaviors of the LLMs are "super smart", then I really wonder about his level of intelligence...

IT's certainly novel and different and can handle sorts of things that were formerly essentially out of reach of computers, but they are very much not "smart".

Processing that is dumb but with more human-like flexibility can certainly be useful, but don't expect people to be in awe of some super intelligence when they deal with something that seems to get basic things incorrect, asserts such incorrect things confidently, and doubles down on the same mistakes after being steered toward admitting the mistakes by interaction. I know, I also described how executives work too, but most of us aren't convinced that executives have human intelligence either.

... with a metric ton of salt, but on the demographics of China and their impact he seems spot on. And let's be honest, there's not that much you can get wrong here. It's quite simple math.

... within this decade. And he's been doing that for a while. And his reasoning sounds plausible.

Broadly speaking, a lot of the 'cloud native' stuff are complex solutions to potentially complex problems that fit within the parameters that those approaches can handle.

If you don't have those complex problems, then it's a premature optimization that is painful. If your use case is not the sort of use case resembling the bread and butter of the applications that instigated these approaches, then it's all pain, no gain.

There was a team that maintained a project that was broadly panned for not being good enough. The developers decided that the cure for what ails them would be changing to 'cloud native' approach, despite the complaints really being about limited functionality, not even about performance or scaling issues. Now on top of having the same functionality complaints *now* they have performance and reliability complaints too, and they have no idea what they are doing, they just arbitrarily carved their single fixed instance of software into a couple of dozen fixed instances of services (they can't figure out how to scale arbitrarily, so they still have exactly one instance of every component). Not one of them is capable of debugging the convoluted network situation they've created, and the logging information is just a mess.

The blender crew effing rocks, that's for sure. I sure hope Ton Roosendahl is enjoying his (part-time?) retirement!

I'm listed as a donator because I'm actually one of those rare few who bought a commercial license back when Blender still was closed source and was being sold as a commercial product by NaN. They went commercial for a year or so after blender was available as freeware. I paid 250 Euros and still have the color-printed receipt. I might frame it and hang it on the wall some day. :-)

You already had your turn in the late 2010s after big data and before AI. You don't get to come back to the hype line for seconds.

The infrastructure required to perpetually get decent to good quality petrol to where it's needed is insane. For electric you just need a battery, some solar cells and you're good to go. Petrol throughout south America is notoriously bad, often mixed with (bad) (m)ethanol and often a gable to fill in your tank. Its not uncommon for adventure bike riders to bring an extra spare piston and cylinder along in case you frag yours beyond repair and need to replace it somewhere in the ass-end of Patagonia.

That doorstep countries around the world are moving to solar and electric vehicles faster than developed countries makes perfect sense.

The line has muddied, as consoles went USB and console accessories started being PC compatible.

Once upon a time, you popped a game cartridge into a purpose built specialty thing with bespoke capabilities to do the things the game companies wanted, with proprietary connectors and instant boot up and what you get is what you have.

On the PC side, you futzed with config.sys/autoexec.bat to have just the right memory layout, depending on if you needed the maximum conventional memory, ems or xms, and environment variables to match your dip switches.

Now a game console is an x86 box that takes some time to boot to an OS then you select an app, which probably is a game, and good chance it's developed with a game engine that pretty much equally supports Nintendo, PS4, and Microsoft ecosystem.

The PC side you just plug in, often the exact same accessory, and things automatically go. The UI of Windows can be obnoxious, but this is a prime mindset for Valve to take advantage launching their PC that's 10-foot optimized out of the box.

Nintendo held on to console-ness longer, with their Wii and Wii-U gimmicks, and their switch admittedly isn't an x86 box, but it's basically a gaming tablet, which is the other big thing eating into the casual gamer market.

This is a detail many PC fanbois tend to overlook. And it's the reason consoles are so successful.

Point in case: I ditched hardcore PC gaming 25 years ago because it was becoming ridiculous with the constant hardware upgrades, fiddling with drivers and the mess that is M$ W1ndows. And I at one time had the most performant gaming PC available that costed roughly 5000$. I'm a computer expert but when even AMD went from one socket type to something like 5 different (Intel was already at roughly 10 different socket types back then) I got tired of keeping track, said f*ck it and left PC gaming alltogether. I just stopped the hardware upgrades, installed Linux for programming and the occasional Linux-native Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 session and left it at that. This was in the late 90ies. I don't have the kind of space, time and attention anymore that PC gaming needs.

Roughly 15 years later I had some cash left and was curious about the new games such as the Deus Ex reboot and some discounted FarCry title and got an XBox 360, the last iteration just at the end of that generation that could run on a regular monitor without hassle. With all kinks fixed and a large cheap library of budget-priced games as GOTY premium editions and an affordable box that I knew would run those games with zero config fuss I was all set.

I've been with XBox ever since, always lagging 1-2 generations for price and stability reasons. I'm still using a Xbox One X as my main gaming rigg and it's totally fine. Yeah, I do miss mouse and keyboard occasionally, but I also enjoy being prolific with the controller by now and just leaning back on the sofa doing Open World Looter-Shooters, (A)RPGs or the occasional Spaceflight game. Every once in a while I ponder getting back into PC gaming but when I l then look at the prices, the science involded and remember the hassle of dealing with shitty operating systems, drivers, flaky software, etc. I quickly drop that notion again.

I might look into that new Steam Box thing, but I still have 82 games for XBox One alone, not counting my 360 titles. Most of these games I haven't played yet, so I'm not too much in a hurry. I also love the fact that the XBox is backwards compatible, which is a huge plus, Kudos to M$ for doing this. M$ W1ndows sucks, but with XBox they're still the global underdog and behave accordingly. And have me, a prime-time Linux user for 25+ years, as a paying customer, believe it or not.

I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.