Some of us have been there since the start (and looking at your uid, I'm guessing you have too). My name is in kernel commits from around the 98, and I was using Linux before then of course. I was even a Minix user on my ST at university.

Torvalds was anti source control. Others weren't and yep - started using Bitkeeper. Linus considered this "problem solved - you use what you like, I don't have to". Then he started using it. Then the reverse engineering debacle and then the "Well I'm not using any of the others, I'll write my own then" thing with git.

It certainly isn't down to him that people then started using it as the "if all you've got is a hammer" answer to everything - he's completely blameless in that. But I'm talking about the same kind of people that overused the Design Patterns book (one of the authors of which I've also met, although to my shame I can't remember which one - this was a corporate course and lecture being given at IBM Watson), the same kind of people that turned the very simple agile principles into the corporate behemoth Agile process-ridden abomination it became...those kind. They used git because of the hype, not because of the use case.

I'm going back from before he used Bitkeeper. There was a long period of time he didn't want to use source control at all. Bitkeeper wasn't used by him until the 2000s.

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

This is pretty much the opposite of what most commercial software wants to do. It wants a single master, with known commits, so that a single known version gets shipped in the end. This is the exact opposite of what git was meant to be, yet it gets used there anyway. I notice the summary talks about a centralised system - yep, that's what you want for commercial, not a distributed multiple master.

Defrost mode.

Same day, Albert Heyn and Delhaize got hit (Netherlands and Belgium). The nature of the incident is as yet unknown, but it is now clear that these supermarkets have had to shut down parts of their systems preemptively, following a "cyber incident". The shops are operating (and freezers are cold), but websites are down, self-checkout kinda works, payment systems are slow, and all home deliveries have been cancelled. Logistics to stores have also been affected.

I like this stuff but...

• Blade Runner (film not book) - 1982, 44 years old
• Godzilla - 1954, 72 years old
• Star Trek - 1967, 59 years old
• Star Wars - 1978, 48 years old

Even the Marvel stuff dates back to the 60s. I think pop culture is a bit stuck in a rut - there are good sci fi series out there, and new ones need to emerge as major cultural touchpoints as well. It's all feeling a bit retread at the moment.

If it were open source and someone cared enough to fork it, then presumably there are open licensed contribution to the repo that Siemens won't own the copyright to.

What happens to those? Can they be taken closed source at all?

I don't think people looking for entertainment are going to pay to watch a propaganda hit piece.

"There use to be news, with editors that would filter out the wrongthink"
FTFY

Wading through the garbage, one does find a few gems from time to time. Not unfounded rumours, but verified stories with links to sources that the regular newspapers do not print for some reason, or discussions and opinions outside of your own bubble. And it becomes clear how much of a bubble mainstream publications have become. Or maybe they always were...

Just to note, the WSL containerisation approach is horrible for anything I/O intensive. WSL 1 had ELF binaries supported by the kernel and ran natively, this is a far superior approach to WSL 2's containerisation when it comes to raw speed.

I benchmarked this a few months ago and it was between 300%-600% slower on raw disk performance I/O.

How about governments using AI to process intelligence and making strategic decisions based on the AI's "insights".

It's not real. It's not intelligent. It's a probability matrix - a very good one, but that's what it is. When people say they 'convinced it', what actually happened was they started using language recognisable in a subset of the model's training data and the model responded using probability with data from that same subset as it's statistically closer.

In this case, they used language which is the kind floating around with people negative to AI, and so the AI constructed a sentence using data in their "negative to AI" section. Nobody got convinced of anything. It's very impressive, but it's 'just' a probability matrix.

If I call tech support or the bank or whatever, I don't want, need nor expect to see the other person's face. In general, video calling isn't widely used except in multi-person meetings, or when calling a loved one overseas. The avatar is not needed.

Also, give your AI agent a phone number where I can reach it, or give it its dedicated app or whatever, but default to "handset mode" like a regular phone call. Let me put it on speaker if and when I want to. Turning the interaction into a regular phone call will go a long way towards making the conversation feel more natural. Interacting with Siri and Alexa feels unnatural; adding an animated avatar to a disembodied voice won't help, even if the conversation itself flows naturally. I know, a phone call isn't suitable for every interaction, especially when collaborating or co-creating with someone, but it covers most cases.

But I guess a simple audio call is harder to monetize.

No, they're already training it with its own dogfood. They don't need contractors for that, because they can do that themselves. They're just also paying people to add human data.

I was listening to this on BBC news on my commute this morning (in the UK). They said it attacked a Medicare site, which is the Australian national health system. My immediate thought was "ah, so someone in the US asked it to do something with Medicare records and forgot to limit it to just the US then". So off the AI trots to do exactly what it was asked to do - "collect records on Medicare', without any regard to geography at all. Hence this 'hack'.

I mean, I'm just guessing so that opinion is worth what you just paid for it. It does sound plausible to me though.