They're out of money. Oracle is selling stuff to cover commitments that can't physically be built for businesses that are losing billions of dollars, all on spec. NVidia is certainly wealthy, but even their pockets aren't deep enough prop up all the tents. The VC money doesn't exist anymore: their capitalization is one full order of magnitude smaller than the latest plays, where ultra wealthy Big Tech companies are capitalizing their own customers with hundreds of billions of dollars.

They're out of power. All the low hanging power sources are tapped. Where spare power exists, it's surrounded by a hostile population (see Stargate Michigan, failing simultaneously on two fronts: pushback from citizens and finance.) They flailing around, talking about building nuclear reactors in Elon Time, which is never going to happen.

They're out of hardware. Stargate Abilene is never going to make its build-out schedule: it was supposed to be running in 2026, but it won't be complete till 2027 or later unless some alien spacecraft unloads thousands of pallets of GB200 racks at some point in the next few months. It is physically impossible to build and deploy that much hardware on this planet at this time. Meanwhile, costs of every type of silicon they need is skyrocketing, blowing out costs.

They're running out of smoke. The banks that are funding all this leverage are getting nervous, asking questions, and pushing back. Despite suspending their brains for the last few years, they can actually do math, and the math says that there isn't really as much money in all this as they've allowed themselves to be led to believe. OpenAI is enshittfying their product with ads trying to come up with a revenue source, because their product is already a commodity: it works, but it's also not difficult to make (there are multiple competitors at parity now,) and eventually it will be cheap. So these huge investments and build-outs aren't ever going to pay off.

That is you, peering through the moral relativism glasses you were trained to wear, and blessing Belarus with a benefit of the doubt where none is warranted.

The third possibility, instinctually omitted from your list, as per your training: It's another tyrannical kleptocracy, LARPing as a workers paradise, busily cleansing itself of anyone with slightly more wit than the average bear. That's why Pol Pot determined that anyone with prescription glasses was a threat: they'd likely spent some time reading things. That's why Soviets purged doctors, engineers and other other professional classes, in addition to his peasantry, his military, and his own party. The least bit of counter-narrative effort will reveal exactly the same travesties under Mao, and nearly every other commie bastard you might name.

Remember: you'd die at the end of a rope, dreaming of "free" healthcare. That's the plan they have for you. Once you accept that as the metaphysical certitude that it is, you won't find yourself in public forums, flailing around for comforting rationales to ease the minor panics these headlines induce in you.

Why? Is there something unusual about intellectuals in commie hell-holes getting liquidated? Or are you futilely hunting for some comfortable rationalization, because allowing yourself to imagine that such evil might actually exist, and endure, is too disturbing?

Here is an uncomplicated way to deal with these troubling feelings: understand that if you lived there, you too would get put against the wall. They would find some rationale for why you amount to an Enemy Of The People and liquidate you, just like this sorry mope.

Once you manage to get your tender mind wrapped around that reality, and ultimately correct your worldview to inculcate it, you'll find you have far less trouble understanding difficult cases like this.

That's not a bad idea. There are significant parts of movies I've re-watched a few times that I always skip. A few times I've revisited a series and watched only specific parts: Chernobyl and Mindhunter an example of this. There is a lot of potential in this idea.

This blanket statement is off the mark. Open source isn't one thing; there is a lot of good open source work that values quality and isn't being actively destroyed by political activists LARPing as hero developers.

It is. When you voice any preference for X11 you're a "fascist maggot." That's the official term, anyhow. There is a Xorg fork called Xlibre. It exists mostly because there are X11 fans that want to continue and improve X11, but also because Xorg, Gnome and many other projects (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Alpine... the list is long,) have descended into full-on purity spiral ban-hammer tyranny, removing en-masse (banned from forums, commit privileges, leadership positions, etc.) anyone not sufficiently committed to DEI. Xlibre is explicitly apolitical for this reason. Being apolitical is tantamount to Nasi-ism now.

Some amazing walls of text for something so conceptually simple: use CO2 to spin turbines instead of water. It is claimed CO2 does this with substantially higher efficiency. For certain, the turbines are much smaller for the same power, and CO2 doesn't corrode everything it comes in contact with.

It deserved a couple mentions, but yeah, this "new" story is just recycled montage. Same thing happened on YouTube this week: the now two months old story suddenly appeared in my feed as if new, except it was literally the same news clips from November and December.

I'd love to know who is pulling the strings on this puppet, because they appear to be running both YouTube and Slashdot, at least.

There do appear to be a suspicious number of "influencers" dropping the CashyOS name.

However, if it's a choice between the perpetual dominance of Windows, and CashyOS and whatever marketing spend they have finally causing Linux to break out and capture significant normy desktops, I go with the latter.

One very good reason to care is interest. The widely cited figure for 2024 was $880 billion of interest, so 103% of the entire DOD. Abject clown world interest figures.

Apparently, that's not enough, so we need experts to develop helpful new rationalizations for why we can go on racking up more, and fund all our fabulous schemes, like helping refugees invest in real-estate in the country they supposedly escaped from, because that's what our virtue requires of us.

Intel has suffered from having fuck-you money since the 1980s. Such companies can suffer from accumulating faddish management and misallocating resources. Intel is a poster child example of this.

That's ended very recently. Intel's net income graphs since 2022 are astonishing: the wheels fell off entirely. We'll see if they get their poop back in a group with Panther Lake next week. It's looking pretty solid.

IRIX was the origin of XFS in Linux. The design and command line syntax of the LVM subsystem in Linux was modeled after the HP-UX LVM implementation: HP's LVM was a leading implementation at the time and it worked well: I used it on HP-UX servers for backing up Oracle volumes, among other things.

Itanium was the longest lived (25 years) of Intel's various failed attempts to kill x86. It obviously failed in this regard, but it was successful at killing other RISC CPU architectures, including PA-RISC and Alpha.

Previous attempts include iAPX 432, i960 and i860, all now consigned to the dustbin of history, along with IA-64 (Itanium,) although the i960 had some success in embedded IO controllers.

With the end of 2025, the last commercial support obligations for Itanium hardware have ended as well. Essentially, Itanium finally, officially died 4 days ago.

No, it is not. Andy Grove explained this to you and the rest of the Western world 15 years ago, with reasons and examples. Every word of what he wrote then was self-evident to any thinking person at the time, and has only become more so since.