I'm...curious...if Nadella's assessment of the board had to do with some deficiency in keeping minutes; or if he's just shocked into incomprehension by the idea that the board would fire you for anything aside from failing to make line go up or some really sordid sex thing that is going to reach public knowledge real soon.

For basically any employee "is lying snake who none of us can trust about anything he says" would seem like it does the job, especially with the fairly limited US requirements for firing people; so it's hard for me to see that as an obviously amateur move unless they were either chaotic in some visibly horrifying way about it; or he is just applying his own theory of what the board should and shouldn't fire you for (and to what, at least theoretically, is a nonprofit board that was supposed to be keeping the c-suite on-mission; not just appeasing the shareholders).

Arts and Humanities are fine....as pursuits of the leisure class who don't need to make living from them, or for people who work for a living to enjoy as hobbies.

Everyone is free to enjoy arts and humanities, but it's cruel to encourage expectations of gainful employment and silly to expect to
make a living from them. Confusing jobs and careers with hobbies can be financially deadly, so I didn't.

Careers fund hobbies so you can enjoy both. For example I can afford to collect and restore classic motorcycles because I did not try to make it a business. In consequence I easily afforded a well equipped personal workshop instead of starving for years to establish a financially vulnerable business. Fixing fighters paid much better.

I suspect that it depends on how strongly or weakly the 'bloat' is connected to other things; and what supporting them involves.

Something like not having TSC (which itself comes in several variants depending on whether it's from the era where you actually had 'a' CPU that just ran at a speed, or if it's one of the ones that tries to compensate for the complications of variable clocks and multiple cores) presumably comes up in a variety of nasty places related to the bad things that happen when things are not done in the expected order.

Just some random PCI device that nobody developing actually owns anymore is presumably at risk of unnoticed regressions; but (especially with the amount of PCI DNA that got carried over into PCIe or was used for the software-visible interface of some system on chip that skipped the cost of actually implementing a 32 bit parallel multidrop bus out to the PCB but either specifically sought compatibility or couldn't justify cooking up something custom when the peripherals they were integrating were all derivatives of PCI designs) it's not necessarily much maintenance overhead for it to just exist on a 'cool if it works for you' basis as a module that you probably don't need.

There's also the secondary matter of the fact that 'the kernel' has a limited number of people directly focused on its interests in the abstract; rather than some hardware vendor, distro, enthusiast, or hyperscaler's interests. If preserving hardware compatibility is directly contrary to the interests of supporting the major contemporary use case of fairly large 64 bit x86 servers and embedded ARM widgets (as 486 and pre-TSC 685-ish likely was) it's going to have relatively few friends among the people actually doing the work. If someone wants to maintain some weirdo HAM radio interface card that merely assumes the existence of PCI it's not clear anyone will go out of their way to help if they need to update something to cope with a change elsewhere; but it's not like the Ministry of Kernel is going to order them to go find bugs in the implementation of CXL memory because that's where the money is.

If these guys are actually treating a user agent string as an authentication mechanism I'm honestly surprised that being on the public internet hasn't already eaten them alive purely because of the supply of malicious opportunists; and I'll be even more surprised if it continues to work out for them now that they've drawn a fair amount of attention to it.

The more computers can replace humans the more they will replace humans.

The ideal business has no workers. Humans are expensive, unreliable, easily corrupted, lie, cheat and steal and are frequently incompetent.

It's silly to trust other nations with one's data because the nation one made friendly arrangements with can replace the administration you trusted and purge its appointees.

Europe should not want any but FOSS because proprietary software only belongs to its creator. To use it is submission to its owners. The cost to European governments to code any software required is a trifle compared to relying on the kindness of their enemies.

No non-corrupt reasons exist to want the shackles of proprietary software. That's like wanting proprietary speech.

If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

It's essentially impossible to make a good argument for some uncached CI lunacy that has you outperforming the overtly malicious as a source of traffic; but if there's one thing that reliably upsets people it's getting called on convenient behavior that they can't readily justify; so I'm genuinely curious what the ratio of sensible adjustment to unhinged freakout by bro whose subsidy is not in fact a law of nature they'll see.

Obviously trump doesn't care; if anything the grifts that you can totally phone in are probably even funnier than the ones where you have to try; but I'm puzzled by why this sort of thing doesn't bother some of his enthusiasts more. Not the nihilistic edgelords and ethnic nationalists so much; but if you are actually enthusiastic about 'greatness' shouldn't it worry you that Dear Leader, who you trust to deliver national renewal, apparently can't puke up the sort of zero-effort ODM rebadge job that any garbage tier prepaid carrier does anywhere from multiple times a year to at least annually, depending on market conditions?

Obviously the phone itself is basically irrelevant; but it seems like the sort of project that would cause anyone not wholly immune to feel some degree of at least secondhand embarrassment about.

Yes, but now you have it too complicated for 95% of the vibe coders. So they simply won't do it. Because skipping all of those steps still results in something that compiles.

They fuck up spreadsheets as well. A truckload of business-critical spreadsheets have errors in them that often go undetected for years.

It's hard enough to get actual developers to properly consider security. Not surprised at all that vibe coders don't.

Plus, of course, most of the training data is insecure to begin with.

But let them learn by fire that there's a reason actual programmers take time to ship a product, and it's not that the AI can type faster.

When prices change, evaluate priorities.

If a tool costs a thousand dollars but will generate sufficient profit or save time or add convenience to justify the expense, I'd buy the tool. A thousand bucks is quite affordable for many skilled trades machine budgets. Tradespeople are normal people too.

If a thousand bucks is not affordable, choose different parts accordingly, for example using multiple smaller and/or different storage drives.

If a toy costs a thousand dollars and that is too expensive, choose a different toy or save up for one you prefer. It's easy to not buy new hardware which doesn't make one money.

If buying the entire machine at once is unaffordable, buy parts gradually.
If a used machine solves one's problem for less money, buy proven used PCs.