Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.

More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.

War department is Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth doing their fascist circle-jerk.

What can go wrong?

I wonder if the control room technicians will be allowed bathroom breaks...

It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.

I don't know what you mean. Look at the improvement in hiring when you can advertise an open position on LinkedIn and get maybe 100x as many applicants as before! OK, probably 99% of them will be completely unqualified for the role and barely capable of pushing the instant application button, but how is that a problem, really? Surely hiring managers can easily filter them out and no qualified applicant will ever get lost in the noise?

It's like a video I saw on YouTube the other week. Someone was talking all about "skills" for their AI agents and how they'd automated so much of their workflow using them. They started the video by kicking off four different tasks for separate agents to show how productive it was to have all this stuff happening in parallel and how it was so quick and easy to organise.

One of the tasks involved producing an infographic about a certain topic, and the AI duly produced one based on a one-liner prompt, taking only a few seconds of the presenter's time and with no further input from them about the content. The infographic had exactly the level of quality you'd expect from this: a load of boxes and arrows (with some of those arrows starting or finishing floating in space without connecting anything) and some words (a few of which might have been related to the topic mentioned in the prompt).

That infographic was the only substantial output from the whole exercise. It was the worst kind of AI slop imaginable, generated with literally no thought or oversight from the presenter beyond a couple of words about the topic as part of that one-liner prompt. This was probably about the average level of the LinkedIn posts I used to see before I left as well. As you said, I'm not sure you can be a "thought leader" without doing any thinking.

I stopped using LinkedIn when they seemingly decided my account wasn't about me (despite having obvious and publicly verifiable details right there in the description) and wanted me to verify my ID using one of the US-based services with a questionable reputation to get my access back. That's not going to happen, so I just don't use the site any longer.

As far as I can tell, that has made zero difference to my career, and it's one fewer drain on my time. The only thing I have missed is seeing the occasional good news story where a past colleague has been promoted or the like, but I'm not giving up my government-issued credentials to the US-based data harvesting industry for that.

...in the hands of a competent, careful and passionate programmer like Linux Torvalds.

What I worry about is when Bob in the junior software dev team, who does his job to put food on the table, and just good enough to keep his job, uses it to vibe-code company data as his day job.

Google says that patent expired in September of 2025, as it was filed in 2005. Yes, we are getting old.

Personally, I prefer the old rectangular Thinkpad charging connectors.

I'm still impressed that the Teams web client can't edit a message with an emoji in it without messing up the keyboard controls and often corrupting the message and losing data. It's had this bug for years. It's literally a messaging app where you can't reliably send messages.

He would be serving time.

Why hasn't Sam Altman been arrested yet?
Why is OpenAI allowed to continue to operate?
Clearly it's a criminal organization.

Honestly... Since when reshuffling in a company's upper management is of any interest to anybody other than the people working for that individual at that company?

What next? They're gonna replace Bob at accounting because he didn't use AI to format his Excel sheets?

a doozie to debug

You are entirely correct. I took another look at what the law actually required and I am definitely crying wolf (at this point). Thanks for taking the time to point this out to me.

There is definitely a slippery slope there, but I agree with you, California is far enough away from the event horizon of that slope that my histrionics are not warranted. Not only that, but the carve out for Linux actually is helpful. Thanks once again.

The companies in question are going to get in serious legal trouble if they fail to comply in verifying the ages of their users. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all going to give these companies an API that will move that burden from themselves to the makers of the operating system. Discord, to use an example, will be able to say that they asked Microsoft, Google, and Apple to verify ages, and then that they relied on the information that they were given. What's more these companies actually want to know the age of their users. This information is valuable, and they will be able to use it to target their customers with advertising.

What's more, every bad actor is going to try and target this exception. Linux traffic will end up in the same bucket as bots, predators, and any other malicious traffic. There is nothing in the current exception that requires companies to work with Free Software. My guess is that if your operating system can't do age verification that is blessed by Microsoft, Google, or Apple that most sites will simply block your traffic.

This is going to end up being a huge step backwards for Free Software clients.