... Lobby crew!

FOSS finally getting general public mindshare. Finally!

So my house has EV and gas vehicles, and by far taking the gas vehicle to a gas station is way more annoying than plugging it in at home. Not to mention the maintenance (oil change? nope air filter change? nope brakes? just like hybrids the brakes barely get used). No random surprises like "oh great, some fluid on the ground, smoke is coming out the exhaust.

The battery is the big one, and the tendency to be heavier means faster tire wear, but the plugging in for a lot of people is a *plus* not a minus. Meanwhile the gas car has a few hundred here, a couple thousand there, and by the time I might have to replace the battery, I am pretty sure I have racked up equivalent costs over a much more annoying series of repairs and maintenance.

Tip, as soon as you say "copilot says", no one will take you seriously.

Yes, an *engine* can last a while, but that's far from the full picture.

Headgasket will likely not last that long, and while *technically* the engine "lasts" through that repair, that was an expensive repair.

Timing belt won't last that long, and that's an expensive maintenance item.

The transmissions for ICE wear more than EV, and those tend to have a relatively shorter life than cited, and that also is pretty pricey.

Further ignores things like oil changes constantly incurring expenses. Brakes on EVs and hybrids last way longer. If you can charge at home, your fuel savings are huge (public charging, maybe not so much).

Yes, when the battery goes, it will be expensive, but in that same time you probably have otherwise accumulated a comparable cumulative maintenance and repair bill for petrol-exclusive issues.

As they said, 8x code output is a flawed metric. By volume they are getting in.

One could even reasonably argue that they tend to be good at catching critical little details that are difficult for humans, like the consequences of a shallow copy buried in a sea of code creating a security disaster. A "needle in a haystack" scenario, where AI does comparatively well with the relentless attention span.

But in other ways, they are verbose messes, and will toss a whole lot of pull requests. Each of those pull requests may be a lot more volume than needed. For example, I got a CodeGen pull request for "close a gap between two elements after updating the UI framework to new version". Yes, real issue, and.. well, the referenced gap *did* close, but with a lot of dubious side effects. The issue called for a single CSS rule to be tweaked. It instead was hundreds of lines of CSS, sometimes verbatim repeated 4 times (the originator said he had to ask the prompt multiple times because it failed the first few times, it seemed Claude thought maybe adding the same rules it already added might have helped). Others might have just run the code saw the gap closed and accepted it, despite the baggage of 99% of the lines changed having no particular intent behind it.

This is in a normal where a lot of developers think even simple things need to be complex. Hello world needs to run in Azure Pipelines using Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible spawning at least 6 microservices. They think they need all of that and yet it's unmanageably convoluted, so the AI kind of lets them have all that superfluous complexity without actually managing it.

Thanks to work, I'm using it all the time.

It is true that even opus 4.8 cannot always bring a mundane code to life credibly. It can depending on what we are taking about, but the sorts of things it fails at are well short of the complexity of what it would mean to rewrite itself in any credible way.

... 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.

They are finding a plateau with where the LLMs can go and could use the narrative of a "pause" to explain why capabilities are going to iterate in a more 'evolutionary' way instead of the revolutionary way folks are expecting.

There isn't to my knowledge a mechanism for the models to "self-improve", whatever one may think, at least the output doesn't have access to change the model in any way. The narrative of "oops the AI started evolving itself on accident" doesn't have a way to happen.

Considering that even the vaunted Opus 4.8 can't always develop mundane traditional software beginning, it's hard to imagine it could rework the model itself even if it had such access.

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.

So then what is the point of Yoda being immensely old? Is he basically 63 in Yoda years?

It did. The authoritative upstream repository for the Linux kernel is hosted at kernel.org, not GitHub.

The "victory" is literally "pwning the libs." The thought process is, "Anything that denies them something that they want makes them weaker and us stronger." The base rallies and cheers, and meanwhile Trump and his cronies go back to extracting ungodly amounts of wealth from the entire world's resources.

Kinda unlikely. If you leave anything sitting under the ocean, it's going to experience significant wear and tear. If there's no budget even to monitor the status of the monitors, let alone conduct routine maintenance, they're likely to be as good as junk by the time they're switched back on.

Not to mention that the data is also used in industry, particularly in farming and fishing, where it is used to predict climate-related events. And this aren't just long-term events we're talking about. "Where are the fish likely to be this year" is a question this data can help answer.

What? I have one. It's hooked up (through an adapter) to the VoIP port on my fiber router. It rings and everything.

So they know damned well that a huge facet of technology is consistent, deterministic interfaces and behavior. Sure, there's a demand for AI to also provide more flexible interaction in some scenarios which is desired, but many scenarios are benefitted by the dependable interaction of apps.

So on the face of it, the concept of a platform that is a strict subset of the capabilities of platforms already out there (the "app" devices are plenty capable of running the "AI" interfaces) is dumb. This has proven out with the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1, dumb devices that did nothing better and simply signaled affinity with AI.

But Microsoft isn't quite as stupid, so what's the real point... well...

That's really the goal, to reset expectations from having capable personal devices with generally perpetual entitlement to renting every single thing you do from Microsoft. You can have your 'PC' run those deterministic applications you are used to, but it's just going to be a virtual desktop to Azure now.