In what other industry can you say,
"We think our product is great/safe/reliable/... but no we absolutely won't stand behind it if anything goes wrong." and have that no impact the marketability.
I am not talking legal or anything like that, just purely from a sales and customer relationship perspective.

Just imagine a GM ad;

"The 2026 Silverado our most capable pickup ever!" - Read in deep dramatic voice
"Remember Chevrolote Silverado models are for entertainment purposely" -Read as the image fades to black in higher pitch at 2x speed.

  It would be scandal..but when Microsoft does it, hardly anyone even blinks.

Not really...

Almost all IoT devices work by phoning home. They call some remote server, and do some API stuff, send some message poll for new messages / instructions. They tend to have very little if anything listening.

If they do get onwd its because the infrastructure that supports them gets compromised, at which point its really the infrastructure that was hacked and not the device. The other thing that happens - all the gosh darn time - is what ever little web based interface they have for setting up wifi/IP settings/etc is some terrible CGI thing with some form of injection vulnerability. Again though if that gets pwnt, it is only after some ofther failure of your internal network security. That is a concern, I understand defense in depth, I get foothold and dwell time issues, However a newer kernel won't prevent that kind of compromise. Lack of shell escaping on calls to system() or bad choices around using eval() will get you popped on Linux 7.0 as easily as 2.0.

spending effort to maintain support for stuff nobody is using is not reasonable. Would you write a book, if you were certain nobody would ever read it or even want to?

Don't say "but what about a diary," even a private diary generally has one intended audience if it is the author themselves, for their own recollection.

writing software that no computer will ever run makes very little sense, even from an educational standpoint.

- as to the hidden breakage. Probably not much, because if you don't know about those 486s lurking out there, you are not updating the firmware/OS/other software on them either, and they will continue humming a long as they have until something else breaks.

This is a part everyone seems to miss when the get freaked out about Linux itself or some distribution dropping support for something 30 years old...

In 2026 if you are still using a computer older than mid-90s (and very more than likely even one from after the mid 90s) it is because it is part of some very specific process that almost certainly has you not making changes, which are almost certain to include software changes too.

Just because Linux 7.x can't be built for i486 any more does not stop you from grabbing any prior version and using that. Thinking about 486s specifically, I know there are actually a lot of odd things like hardened industrialized PCs and some routers and the like running licensed 486 cores and late manufacturing Intel parts; that are still in use. You can even still buy some new. It would not surprise me to learn people are running Linux on a good number of them, it would surprise me to learn people are running Linux newer than 5.10 or 5.15 on them. Even in the most exotic memory configurations a 486 is going to top out at 3.5GBs of memory, I guess you could do nearer to 4GB on a ISA only system (No PCI or VLB). You really going burn 16MB or more of that just on the kernel?

Let's be real if you are running a 468 you are probably using using Linux 2.0 - 2.6 already. Not being able to use 7 hardly affects you.

| And they get to do it because the FTC has been totally defanged. It has nothing to do with Trump or oil. Sheeple indeed.

In March 2025, Mr. Trump fired the two remaining Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, basically consolidating executive control over the agency. This action effectively ended the agency’s longstanding statutory and bipartisan independence.

So, basically, Mr. Trump defanged the FTC. Who's the sheeple now?

Depending on the study, from 30% to 44% of Vietnam vets came back with PTSD. The stereotype of the unhinged 'Nam vet was thus not just a leftist conspiracy. Today, Vietnam-era veterans remain disproportionately represented in the homeless population.

If we have a draft today the level of resistance will cripple the country. Nobody will tolerate the Government pulling that. That move could break the country.

I have to wonder if this is a first step to abandoning POWER. I can see IBM wanting to get out of the game of trying to build performance competitive CPUs they don't have many outside customers for any longer.

Especially when they could put commodity designs in their shiny black boxes and still charge super premium prices for them.

Speaking as someone who does think we need stronger age, and locality verification on the internet; I too find the whole thing unseemly.

There are plenty of good reasons to want know if someone is over the age of majority whatever that is defined to be wherever they are, and what laws the other party to your interaction may or may not be subject to in terms of jurisdiction.

I also believe this is achievable while preserving some degree of privacy/anonymity. States could as part of issuing IDs for example provide everyone with a set of certificates with various assertions - and you could select select the one you with the those you need to present. - but this a digression.

There are enough good arguments for age and locality verification that lobbing for it does not need to be done in secret. Especially because the broader public, seems to be somewhat receptive even if tech and geeks have their panties fully bunched. Which makes me assume Meta, OpenAI are not really interested in solving the real problems like endangerment of children, trafficking, terror funding, terror recruiting, all manor of contraband distribution, money laundering, structuring, AstroTurfing, public comment stuffing, etc - but are rather just seeking to create an environment that locks competitors out of the marketplace or otherwise creates a situation where they are allowed to occupy a short list of gatekeepers.

All of that is true but I think it is far more about barriers to entry. For all the talk about the need for these massive datacenters, a lot of, maybe most of, the use cases for the the frontier models that actually are worth $$ like code assistants etc rapidly falling into the range where what OpenAI is selling just isn't needed. Qwen is not as good as GPT but it is close, a Mac Studio maybe can't pump out tokens quite as fast as an API hosted on OpenAI's infrastructure but it is knocking on the door (for one human consumer, applications).

Is there going to be market for hosted models, of course not many are going to want to onprem the LLMs running the chat bot on their websites. A lot of companies will want to onprem their RAG tools and anything handling data they care about protecting.

At one point Microsoft people were saying workstations were over, that developers, engineers (not in the software sense), Architects (not in the software sense), were going to use Azure hosted VDIs...Yeah have not seen that, yes I know its possible and someone here will tell us how wonderful their thin-client virtual desktop experience is, but the lion's share of these professionals that I encounter anyway are still buying workstations (or near-workstations pro-line Mac). Point is people are going to want to run their GenAI work loads locally, and they very nearly can. The free and "Open" models combined with affordable performant hardware are going to eat OpenAI's lunch, in a huge slice of the market.

Unless - they could somehow make it impossible to distribute and bundle these things for compliance reasons....Then they'd have nice little moat that would be difficult to cross.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Or a supply chain attack!

Prove you compromised one bird! Then you say can do stuff to some unknown quantity of the others, not like anyone can go check. They have to either let you blackmail them or call your bluff.

Lol, I was thinking of this instead ;)

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

They said it's internal rather than a collision, so probably a failed COPV would be my guess.

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.