I watched the "Project Turntable" video, and that is unbelievably cool.

To work, the AI has to recognize what the drawing represents, figure out how to reverse-transform the 2D representation into a 3D object, and work out what the hidden parts should look like. It's amazing.

It's only a short step between this and working out walk cycles, matching mouth movements to dialogue, adding facial expressions, etc.

This will revolutionize 2D animation.

No. This hate of coddling just makes the ptsd worse. It's easy to sit in judgement, but hard to fix. Why aren't people dinging the employers for not proactively offering this training? Why are we letting them off so easily?

A few nits: He worked at CSRG which produced BSD, Berkeley Software Distribution. It wasn't the BSD movement, but the efforts to rewrite Unix to get rid of AT&T IP was started at CSRG after 4.3BSD was released, and Mike did a lot of work there. 2BSD did run on the PDP-11s, and 2.11BSD was the best release to run on larger PDP-11s. 3B2s never had BSD support: it was pure System Vr2 and later from AT&T (with a BSD networking stack ported later). Lately he had also been contributing a lot to FreeBSD and was going to be release engineer for our next release 13.4.

Unless you were at Krik McKusick's house, you never saw 4.5BSD :). It never existed.

Kirk, author of UFS and manager of CSRG for a time, has a listing on his bookshelf that's labeled "4.5BSD." However, it really really is a snapshot between 4BSD and what would become 4.1BSD. CSRG's follow on release to 4BSD was going to be 5BSD and this listing was half way to that. AT&T asked them not to do that (after this listing was produced and labeled), so they went with 4.1BSD for reasons to extensive to go into here. I'm sure Kirk keeps it as a conversation piece :). I know I asked him about it when I first noticed it.

CSRG, the computer group at Berkeley enhanced AT&T's 7th Edition Unix under contract to DARPA to make it faster and add networking. They distributed the results as the Berkeley Software Distribution. Mike was the release engineer for several of these releases, first on the PDP-11 (for 2.9BSD) and later for 4.3BSD, the interim releases and 4.4BSD. Most recently, he'd accepted the role of being release engineer for the next FreeBSD release (13.4) and was also active in improving Raspberry Pi5 support as well as all the low level moving parts of getting FreeBSD running on the M1 and friends. His whole career is too long to mention here.

He was an absolute joy. I always loved seeing him at different conferences, most recently at BSDcan 2024 just last week. I talked with him about a number of things, had dinner with him and hung out with him for a while at the after social party. I'm still in shock that he's gone.

As for wayland, you can run wayland on FreeBSD. Or X11. Or both with xwayland. FreeBSD runs the Linux drm drivers which helps a lot, as does mesa and vulkan integration.

As for systemd, meh. We've dealt with it in mostly ad-hoc ways to date. It's mostly a system administration problem, not a deeply embedded into programs problem for the most part.

Forgive my ironic chuckle at x11 is dying, though. I've heard FreeBSD is dying since the 90s. I'll believe it when I see it... though recent X release rates do tend to give me pause...

My daughter had to have a window laptop instead of a mac laptop once she discovered that macos had dropped 32-bit binary support. Without it, you couldn't play classic games, and that was it.

> The first Unix distributions I used, you had to build the OS yourself, hand compiling in, or out different options. I built a bunch of DNS servers, FTP servers, SMTP servers... sync sync reboot

The first unix distributions, back at Bell Labs, were tapes that you booted. These tapes had programs to initialize the disk, copy files from the tape that were disk images to the disk and/or restore other partitions from tar or its predecessors. These date back to V1 on the system which had you set the system console switches to a certain magic value to do the install. You didn't have to recompile anything, though you often did recompile the kernel to tune it to your system rather than run a generic version (most tapes had a generic version, and several copies of that with different major/minor numbers plugged into it so that different disks could be root). BSD improved this a bit by having a RAM disk that you'd copy to the swap partition and run out of that to do the initialization (fewer stand alone programs to run).

The first Linux distributions were not nearly this nice. You had a boot floppy that you could use for format the hard disk and a few other floppies that had other programs on them that you'd basically tar off (though early on the concept of floppy sets arose that was basically a multi-volume tar file under a different name). It took a couple of years before the CD isos appeared which made it a lot easier and the install process to get going....

So things have come a long way since then, but we're not longer installing this stuff on 4-8MB 386DX computers with 50-100MB hard drives either...

Once upon a time, AT&T said that if I read their proprietary sources to learn how Unix worked, my brain had been infected and I couldn't pass along that knowledge. That position lost in court. It sounds a bit like what FSF is saying here: Read GPL code, then the code you produce must be GPL'd.

I see it that we have evolved to the point where we can recognize the same flawed argument used to oppose one form of moral harm to when trotted out to oppose a different form of moral harm.

There is no need to try and force an equivalency on different types of moral harm; that's just another form of "whataboutism".

UBI makes a huge dent in the problems of homelessness and hunger - it does a lot more than that too, but just those two problems alone are major moral harms that deserve being addressed, if not solved outright. And while it is a comparison between apples and locomotives, I'll put "hunger" and "homelessness" on the same side of the moral scale as "slavery".

> you also need to talk mechanisms to keep it from snowballing out of control.

What's to snowball? UBI is fixed to population size - it is *universal* basic income, so everybody gets it. The US population is growing by 0.5% annually, so unless there is a dramatic increase in birth rate coupled to a dramatic decrease in death rate, this is a fixed cost.

That comes out to roughly $164 billion, or roughly 25% of the annual defense budget. Not only is that not "out of control", it is relatively cheap for what it buys you.

> The alternative to UBI isn't necessarily working, it could also be living in a homeless shelter.

That is an excellent point.

> You still get UBI while working

I thought this was more generally understood... but fair point that bears repeating.

My confidence in your ability to correctly identify "socialism" is not high.

When did Slashdot become the home of alt-right Nazi types?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Seems to me a similar argument was put forward vis a vis slavery - as in "we need slavery or the economy would collapse"

What the pearl-clutchers seem to not quite get is that the guy staying home and playing video games is still contributing to the economy. His UBI is buying food, rent , power, and video games. He almost certainly isn't *saving* any money, so 100% of that UBI goes back into the economy.

What he *isn't* doing is being a lazy, inefficient worker. He's not phoning it in on a manufacturing job, or a clerical job. He isn't making mistakes and lowering productivity. There is *value* in having that guy out of the workforce.