... Lobby crew!

FOSS finally getting general public mindshare. Finally!

... big thing. I don't think anybody has anything against any vehicle, tractor or other, or anything at all stuffed to the brim with useful electronics. (emphasis on useful) The problem is when that technology is proprietary, disfunctional on purpose and designed to be extortive. That farmers are sick and tired of that I can see clearly.

One big part of the problem also is that farmers are locked into their business harder than other people, more prone to corporate extractive and extortive business pratictices and they are likely not the type to have the free time to deal with these practices in other ways.

Setting up a non-profit and/or publicly shared business to offer hardware designs that counter these problems are a likely candidate for some use- and helpful businesses. I expect this to be the next big area where the FOSS concept catches on.

There have been a lot of model-poisoning spam over on Quora too. Notably in service of pump-and-dump manipulation of stocks belonging to companies that are basically circling the drain (off the top of my head, seen NXXT, RIME, MYNZ->QUCY, DVLT, NRED and maybe one other I'm forgetting). When you can create tons of accounts, post tons of AI-generated slop that just occasionally casually mentions whatever "fact" you want the models to ingest, and so on, all for "free" or so close as to make no difference, I guess this is what you get.

It's only that now, roughly 25 years late, even the dimest of dimwitts in the political sphere have noticed that proprietary software is shitty by design and expensive and thus plan to move to FOSS rather than continue spending trillions of Euros on software that experts have downloaded for free and in better quality from the intarwebs for decades now. One should never say never I guess.

It's only by coincidence that that software (mostly) happens to come out of the US. Which is totally beside the point of why FOSS is gaining traction anyway. FOSS from the US will certainly be part of that transition too.

Ex-superpower that can't afford it's lifestyle. Like the US will be in a few years if we don't sweep the idiots out of power.

If this AI craze plays out only half as intense as often predicted, the disruptions are going to be much bigger than just the current graduate job crisis.
Which, btw., is happening _all_ over the world right now(!). Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

Going from bits/OP-code to OOP and Functional Programming easily happen on its own in a single individual lifetime and career if the hardware is there and available. Many people doing programming in the 80ies or eariler discovered some form of OOP on their own just by writing code. The first serious refactoring of the first seriour program usually leads to OOP all by itself. I clearly remember discovering fundamental principles like higher PLs, APIs, OOP, information hiding, state management, event / messaging systems and other fundamental principles on my very own before learning the academic terms of those things that others had discovered and named. I even came up with my version of Oauth/OIDC for only after something like two weeks to think: Wait a minute, I sure has hell can't be the only and/or first one to come up with the principle of the Ident/Auth/Auth triangle. And sure enough, Oauth and it's update OIDC is already standardized and documented. Test First or DBC are also things that come naturally once you've written a few non-trivial pieces of code that grow beyond the scope of what a single human brain can keep track of all at once at the same time.

Bottom line: No need for those traditions to survive, they come back naturally for any healthy brain capable of logic with a sufficient enough logic machine to tinker with at it's hands.

And let's be honest: For some of the historically grown mess in IT (just take a look at the keyboard in front of you) it would actually be a good thing for that to get lost and be reinvented.

... together for life to evolve and persist on earth. This is certainly a very large part of the answer to the Fermi paradox.

It's open source and there's no liability whatsoever, but that's nothing other than malware. Just not in a regular programming language, but with a specific instruction for a machine. With premeditated, intended malicious consequences.

In other words: It's malware, plain and simple. The flak the guy is getting is understandable.

IIRC this class of substances is won from venomous animals. If it's a toxin that enhances brain function that would be cool. Perhaps something with the effect of stimulants, but permanently.

However, I'm not taking these new drugs just yet.
I'd rather wait a little longer and see if the Ozempic crowd turns into a bunch of blind Zombies or a bunch of Superhumans.

Then I'll make my call.

For some people's beliefs and values, whataboutism is all they've got to offer.

Well, that and projecting.

The even shout "aieeeeee!" when some something scares them.

Yeah, I think they forgot to include "stupid" in the long list of his faults.

"Leaked"

*wink* *wink*

... _very_ fundamental way.

[Disclaimer: Passionate multi-decade Senior Web Developer here]

And that is *drumroll*:

Always online, no standard default way for offline.

Seriously, this is the biggest downside (and perhaps eventually downfall) of the Web and ist it's protocols. It's the reason I initially thought "Who needs this crap?" back in the 90ies when the Web first appeared.

In this regard Fidenet and other BBS networks are technically superior(!!) to the modern Web.

Solid crypto-based Ident/Auth/Authed DNS and a set of document-centric offline capable Web protocols on top would be the right way to do this. Most security problems and this tracker garbage we have to deal with _every_ _single_ _day_ would vanish in an instant. As would quite a few other problems of the modern Web along with it.

The Web is awesome. It won for very good reasons. But it _that_ way the Web is epic shit by design. If the Web eventually fades away it will likely be because of that flaw.

Until then it's paying bills, so not many too hard feelings on my end. But the general IT expert in me sure wishes we had better protocols for solid offline capability.