Let us all take a moment to reflect that this was a thinly-veiled proxy war on Linux started by Microsoft back in the day, and it went on for entirely too long. Let us also remember that FreeBSD was vetted against AT&T waaaaaaay back in 1994 and that, as they say, was that. No insanely long-tailed legal maneuvering. I can only hope that they keep Hell hot for the new round of greedy morons pushing this effort. Or, at the very least, they also get to endure two decades of value destruction in their own lives, dying broke and penniless in some locked senior ward somewhere.

I dropped Facebook several years ago (2022) when their "community standards" moderators went all douchy/Trumpy on me and I've never looked back. Best move I've ever made in my life for my own mental health. And any projects I take on in the future will explicitly avoid/deny/lock-out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other big social media just because I don't see any value there anymore, for anyone. The collective "we" burned that village down to the ground. Oh well. Moving on.

Negligent. Big Tech has been negligent in their characterizing AI, influencing business leaders, destroying jobs anyway because of the negative zeitgeist, and now they're saying that they may have been wrong. In the mean time we all know that AI isn't going to wash our cars or plant a garden or mow the lawn for the common man, nor is it necessarily the best solution for lots of jobs out there, but they're going to push it anyway. In the mean time the institutional investors are going to continue to push the AI hype so that they can foist off all of the so-far-accumulated debt to the smaller investors because the big boys already know that they want out. They're also starting to realize that spending millions of dollars on "AI tokens" may not have been the smartest move for their companies and clients, but they still want out, and they'll still lie through their teeth to make sure that someone else buys their AI "junk bonds" so that they can be made whole again. Garbage in, Sam Altman out. But my key point here is negligence. They have been negligent and they are still untrustworthy.

I was going to complain about the lack of a Claude Desktop for Linux, but I double checked before roasting them, and by gosh they've got a version in beta for Ubuntu and it'll work on any Debian offspring. When Anthropic says beta that means it's pretty darned good, they're cautious about putting stuff out.

I got a couple M1 Macs two years ago and the weight advantage pushed Linux off my desktop. Anthropic releases Mac first and I'm a Max subscriber so I've been at the head of the line. All my Linux these days is a Proxmox box in the living room and a Qubes 4.3 on my kitchen table that has been at install completion for two or three weeks, and I just don't have time to mess with it.

I'm looking at the stuff in my dock and all of these apps are on Linux. I guess my wish is ... maybe better integration on Mac file systems, so I can get a thumb drive from a pure Mac user and not have to do a bunch of gymnastics to get the data where I need it.

The Trump administration is cooking the books but they can't do it fast enough to head this off.

Even with the shell game the numbers are falling.

This is a post pandemic, starting to be AI era job market. Kinda looks like the pre-genocide Gaza strip, where one young person would support seven family members. This is my Signal chat today - two people overdrawn, one about to default on mortgage, a fourth who needs to move for safety's sake but can not afford.

This is a global phenomenon and the Hormuz "peace" where both sides keep shooting is NOT helping.

Years ago Republican pollster Frank Luntz, when asked how bad things might get, deadpanned "France. 1793."

We're not there yet, but you can faintly hear the thunk of falling guillotine blades, if you listen closely ...

BMW wants to charge you a monthly subscription for seat warmers for a car you already bought once. Maybe Meta can charge you for wearing pants as sort of a "protection racket". Zipper access will cost you an extra $7 per deployment when you need it though. "Nice pants you got there. It would be a SHAME if they were to get wet." -- Utterly ridiculous, decidedly unneeded and definitely unwanted.

The ENTIRE AI ECOSYSTEM is FOUNDED on MASSIVE COPYRIGHT THEFT AND FRAUD! How dare they?!? (That was satire for the humor-impared.)

And this is yet another example of why data sovereignty is so important for Europe, Australia, Japan, and pretty much the rest of the world. Even CloudFlare knows the AI leader-wannabees are less than reputable, less than honorable, and not worth trusting.

So..., pay three times as much for less capable brains that are assisted by AI for about the same tangible output than your regular software engineer? Sounds like The American Way. ...Or a crutch. But hey!, with AI around to assist all of those young minds in cheating on their exams, they won't know much about the network, the transactional layer, data structures, databases, or software engineering in general, so they won't mind cleaning the bathrooms part time either because, "hey, it's a job, man". (But their AI assistant won't be helping them clean the bathrooms. 'Pretty sure of that.)

I remember Volkswagen doing pretty much the same thing back in 1973-74 with the VW Thing. "Customize it. Make it your own." I hope it finds its niche.

Why can't Yves be more like Claude?

It was good while it lasted, but you can't "enshitify" any more efficiently or completely than the Fox brand enshitifies. I wonder how long it will take before I have to start buying different hardware?

Google says it won't be evil. Will renege later when it becomes too expensive to carry out their initial stated intentions....

Douchy BSA wonk doesn't like the EU guarding the golden goose a little bit more carefully these days. Problem is, they need to. Most American businesses are not trustworthy and dont subscribe to any sort of legal framework or ethos that MAKES them trustworthy, so here we are. You do you, EU.

American big tech is untrustworthy at its core. In the boardroom, in the back room, and in the data center. They have no guard rails, no good law (at the present) that makes them play nice. I think that not just Europe needs to be looking at digital sovereignty. Japan, Australia, Canada, are you listening? Most of the big tech companies CAN'T be trusted, so now it's time to start rolling your own, so to speak. Good luck.

...the same standard garbage that many, many companies before them have done to try to figure out where they can "add value" (meaning make more money doing exactly what they're doing now) without bothering to innovate again. Think AVG, Avira, MalwareBytes, Office, blah blah blah. More benign or useless features masquerading as a face lift while their memory footprint quadruples ...or worse. Microsoft has been re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic since Windows NT got a bump from v3.51 and Windows ME hit the scene. This is just another one of those. And I'll be turning most of that crap off so that the stupid thing is usable again because I don't want their "personalization". I'm surprised they haven't crowed about adding AI features yet.