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Comment It's merely a stop gap measure not a solution (Score 1) 200

This is a stop gap measure not a solution. The real solution is the start building nuclear power plants using the latest technology which is a thousand times safer and more efficient. New reactors can run a variety of fuels including the processing of fissionable waste from the old reactors. They can be built far smaller and fit inside a shipping container. They can also be made smaller still and dropped into a lead lined deep shaft in the earth. When the fuel is spent you fill in the hole with more lead and concrete and drill a new hole. New reactor designs will never meltdown like the old designs.

The UK has a fascinating design where an isotope pellet is fired into another isotype target which causes a short-term fusion reaction which heats a substrate such as lithium which liquifies and passes through a heat exchanger to turn water into high pressure steam. Every few seconds you fire another pellet at the target. The moment you stop firing the reaction stops, the lithium solidifies and the reactor is shut down. You just start firing again to bring it back online. The tech is cheap and can definitely be scaled from small to enormous. Many benefits.

Data centers are already talking about commercial nuclear power using new reactor designs. In the meantime, we need to keep pursuing multiple avenues to reach productive fusion reactors. If we can get it working and produce far more energy than it takes to maintain the reaction and keep it contained it will be limitless clean power source.

Comment WTAF? (Score 1) 158

1. GNU coreutils is ancient as is sudo. There's bound to be a metric ton of legacy code in there for all sorts of bizarre edge cases encountered across many platforms and systems over decades. Duplicating all the C code into RUST is a nightmare and the evidence is found in the delays with the uutils being deployed.
2. This is not about security it's about hijacking the GNU General Public License.

I was going to upgrade an LTS server to this new release but now I am seriously considering making a different Linux distribution choice. Ditching Ubuntu LXD in favor of Incus as well. Yes, I know you can install GNU coreutils to override the rust-coreutils (uutils) and even GNU sudo but I want no part of Rust replacements until they have had several years behind them.

I might just go with Fedora or NixOS without Flakes. Yes, I know Fedora is providing rust-coreutils but it is still optional and not the default like it is with Ubuntu. With NixOS it is declarative, so I get to define what I want regardless. Another option is GUIX but sadly, their package list means I would have to package things myself in GNU Guile Scheme way too often. LISP is fun but I don't want to do that on a server.

Comment A.I. & Open Source (Score 2) 38

The current situation is that the hype is off the charts. The investments are completely incomprehensible, being driven by FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and intense greed. Any other industry, saner minds would prevail. But for some reason Silicon Valley holds a charismatic demigod like influence over their investors. Nobody knows when the bubble is going to burst but it for sure is coming in the future. It will be a spectacular financial crash of epic proportions far worse than the US housing market snafu. Like back then, few will spot the warning signs and make a killing by shorting stocks. Nobody is paying attention to the risks currently being taken just as in 2008.

OpenAI is leveraged to the teeth by a tangled web of deals with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. Scaling across many data centers with more being built. The cost of tokens is highly subsidized. Memory and storage manufacturers have abandoned retail in order to earn a cool trillion selling to these data centers. The electric grid is not capable of providing an ever increasing amount of power. There is talk of small commercial nuclear reactors but the regulatory requirements would be insane. There is concern over water and environmental pollution. The rising cost of electricity. They sell the data center to the states claiming they are creating jobs. Once the DC is built, what a couple dozen workers could manage the whole thing as most everything it's doing is remote. You just have hands and feet onsite. The jobs for construction would be temporary.

At some point the investors are going to expect an ROI and then the money is going to start drying up. With the thin margins upon which most all A.I. companies are riding things are going to implode. OpenAI may be the first and most spectacular financial failure in the history of the world.

Recently the Chinese did it a second time. First time was Deepseek. Now they have new models that again outperform US models. The Chinese models are open source. They are under severe constraints because they don't have endless top tier Nvidia GPUs so they have no choice but to increase efficiency. We landed men on the moon using extremely primitive computers. Even today's smartwatches would appear to be like a super computer in comparison. Open source would allow for far greater efficiencies. Anthropic's Claude Code CLI is using web based frontend developer React + Yoga to render the command line interface at 60 fps. It's absolutely insane and awful engineering. Their interface was flickering for a very long time. Never being fixed until they added a flag to stop the flicker. But they just added even more insane code on top of the previous badly engineered code. Then their code was leaked by their own A.I. pushing it out to GitHub wide open to everyone. Analysis of that code revealed a god awful mess. It's embarrassing really... Not only is the code from Anthropic & OpenAI closed source but they are actively forcing users to get locked into their LLMs by not allowing for API access without charging an arm and a leg to do so. i.e. charging by the token while subsidizing token usage within their own client software.

We need to stop these con artists before they destroy the worlds economies. Sam Altman may be the most dangerous man alive.The code must be freed and openly shared. You never know when some retired software engineer will make a breakthrough in code. It's happened before. Sun / Oracle had 32bit code to run Linux native binaries on Solaris and they killed it because it was too difficult to convert it to 64bit. Along came some random unicorn developer who made it work and shared his findings. In short order it was adopted by OpenSolaris. Closed source is too slow to evolve we need maximum eyeballs working on it if A.I. is truly to succeed.

A.I. is currently faking it till it makes it. There is no guarantee it will ever reach AGI or super intelligence. Even the scientists don't understand precisely how it is even doing what it is doing. But the hype machine keeps on churning. Sure, A.I. is constantly evolving and getting better and better rapidly. Will it ever live up to the hype? Nobody really knows. They just keep lighting money on fire hoping it makes it. A.I. is a significantly powerful tool but its nowhere near the hype around it.

Comment Re:Photoshop (Score 1) 244

"I am not in one of the niche areas that Photoshop serves and serves well so i dont give a damn. If I don't need it no-one does",

No, actually some of us do use some special features.

Like Spot colors for specialized metallic ink or packaging that saves load of money by using one pre-mixed ink plate.

Or bizarro file formats (If you think GIMP is going to open a file from an Ultrasound machine you think wrong)

Or very precise integration with the color profiles and mapping between your screens RGB and Indesign CMYK based printing workflow for accurate printing results. Hint: Printing, as in serious Printing, uses way different processes to render those nice colors than the RGB phosphors in you screen. they don't match. At all. Photoshop makes it work.

There ARE serious applications for photo software outside viewing and editing your porn in RGB out there.

Is PhotoShop a program for the average Joe? No.
Is a 25 Ton Semi-Truck a car for the average Joe? Neither.

But for some reason the Average Joe knows he does not need that truck but he only heard of Photoshop and then gets upset by the fact that he uses a hard-core high-end professional tool for professionals.

That does not make the tool garbage. That makes it an industry standard tool that needs all the bells and whistles used in real industry outside of you computer basement. I am pretty sure Adobe also thinks the thing is overloaded but they have a wide spectrum of clients.

Just like there are cars that suit your needs there are photo editing apps that suit your needs. Photoshop is almost surely not that tool.

Get out of your moms basement

Comment A.I. Is Still Faking It Till It Makes It... (Score 1) 94

It's all about keeping the hype machine going. Sure A.I. is improving at a very rapid pace. But it is still not anywhere near to the level of the hype. A.I. is a useful tool but all these A.I. companies are operating at enormous losses. None of them have turned a profit. Many consumers of A.I. are finding out the hard way that A.I. token consumption is more expensive than human staffers. They are also finding out that even a 28% failure rate is way too high. SalesForce, Amazon, Microsoft, and now Ford have backpedaled. Soon the investors are going to want a return on investment. Soon the token cost is going to need to be increased. Soon we will be running out of electricity and consumer electronics are starting to feel the pinch of inflated RAM / Storage pricing after Micron decided to exit the consumer market so they could make over a Trillion selling to A.I. data centers. Apple just raised their prices, others will soon follow. Electric prices are going way up and some places are talking about austere measures to conserve electricity. Those states need to jack up the price for the data centers so they can invest in increasing power production.

There are major advancements in semiconductors that will greatly increase efficiency thus reducing electricity costs tremendously. The problem is it costs trillions and takes a decade or more to retool FABs to use the new designs. There are also nuclear reactor designs that are much smaller and a thousand times safer than what was built originally. But the general public fears nuclear. These new designs make it impossible for a meltdown to occur, etc. Data centers are already pursuing nuclear power if they get past the regulatory red tape.

The problem is A.I. is moving faster than the supporting infrastructure can be built. We need to move faster to keep up. There may be a tipping point and the bubble may burst. It won't kill A.i. but the hype will disappear if the bubble bursts as investors see their money is being burned with no return on investment.

Comment Setup a media server (Score 1) 32

The only thing I ever used a FireStick for was to connect to my media server with an App Store approved app when I traveled and used hotels.Worst case scenario, I could jack in the FireStick to HDMI and connect the power cable to a USB port. It beats using a tablet or a phone to watch content on a small screen. The more modern tech savvy hotels you can just stream via AirPlay or Chromecast to the TV from a smartphone.

The side-loaded pirate streaming apps are what the newbs use who don't know any better.

Sadly, server storage is expensive again...

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