A well taken care of lathe lasts 70+ years, so the $50k you spend on it now pays dividends for as long as you keep it, and you can sell it used when you upgrade. The money on AI tooling is just gone. No machine shop would rent that lathe at $25k/yr

Yeah, somebody let slip that out larger organization is blowing $300k/mo on AI a while back when somebody else complained that our smaller section bought a nice server with a bunch of GPU for $50k. We get along just fine with our one-time purchase and really don't see the need to rent servers.

We ran into something similar where we were looking at the cloud compute cost for a project that we could buy a better server every month for the price we were paying and had a bunch of folks trying to keep us in the cloud. At the end of the day it always boils down to that they don't want to have employees to maintain the physical infrastructure and it's mind-blowing how much people are willing to blow on renting this stuff.

Why bother? Just ask an LLM to jailbreak it.

It sounds like the problem is that the second "disruption" is being excited about winning.

He's a writer/journalist (yes).

It's always the engineer's fault when you are making reverse centaurs.

I put together a prototype that allows you to use containerized Debian packages a few years back: debexec However, folks didn't seem interested in it. I personally think that moving further away from package management is a mistake and that we should be making packages better instead.

The omnibus gitlab install isn't hard to administer, it only gets tricky if you're trying to run different pieces of the system on different servers.

LLMs: The JPEG of Knowledge is worth a read.

They're not dumb, they're _intentionally_ socializing the cost of using OSS so that they don't have to fix the problems they "find" that affect them.

When War for the Over world first came out I sent them stack traces for some crashes and they really seemed to appreciate that. I can't remember if it was them or someone else, but somebody said something like "Linux users may be 1% of your users, but they provide 99% of your actionable bug reports".

It's called a "win-win" scenario, either you make your work go faster or they can fire you. Either way they win.

They broke the unattended upgrade facility and didn't seem to care, so "yes".

If you are running 32-bit wine then you can run 16-bit programs, though they are working on bringing 16-bit support to 64-bit wine.

Be careful what you wish for, an executive order against "subversive research" would not be totally unexpected given how things are going right now. But I don't know that it would throw the people you want in jail...

Well, when you have all your code generated by an AI code generator, reviewed by an AI code analyzer, and approved by an AI manager then what exactly do you expect?