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Comment Makes sense (Score 1) 10

I never understood Mozilla's foray into AI.

There's just nothing about Mozilla that suggests to me they are experts on the subject matter and have much to contribute in the area. I could be wrong, but Mozilla is so tightly associated to the web that it just was a hard sell to me that their AI efforts were going to go anywhere from the start.

Comment Re:But eventually it all collapses (Score 1) 58

But if I tell an LLM "Thanks that suggestion worked" that feedback is lost to the void. There's no upvoting, no storage that I know of applying to all other questions people ask to let the system know "yes that answer worked particularly well". So all the LLMs can go on giving out the same answers forever not really knowing they are flawed... unless someone publishes an article about it.

There's no reason why LLMs can't have feedback mechanisms. In fact they do. ChatGPT has thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. It almost definitely tracks usage of download and copy to clipboard buttons.

Comment Webmasters all over again (Score 4, Informative) 81

I remember there was a short time when the web was new and "webmaster" was a profitable occupation. Then a combination of improved web design software, CMSes, frameworks and the like quickly ate the low end, and the higher end just got rolled into software development.

I'm not sure why anyone thought that knowing what keywords a specific model recognizes best could ever be an enduring form of employment. To me it was always clearly extremely temporary.

Comment Re:I assume I'm supposed to be outraged by this (Score 5, Informative) 71

Amazingly, ISA disappeared much later than I thought. It seems there's a Skylake motherboard with an ISA slot out there. That architecture was only discontinued by intel 6 years ago.

Also, I believe the bus still internally survives in many boards that don't have a physical connector, and the LPC bus is ISA in a slightly newer form.

Comment Re:Year 2000 called. They want their teergrube bac (Score 1) 87

No, this countermeasure isn't going to do anything useful. Any web spider is going to run into thousands of these, and therefore already is going to be coded to tolerate it fine.

These countermeasures were made to trip up worms and naively coded Perl scripts used by mom and pop spamming operations. That is useful to an extent, but isn't going to do absolutely anything against the bigger players.

All you have to do is to keep track of stats like depth and performance, notice that a branch is doing badly, and prune it off.

Comment I guess we'll see (Score 2) 77

I really liked the older XPS 13. Light, powerful, great Linux support. Smashed the screen on that, figured okay, I'll get the new one, the XPS 13 Plus. I want more RAM anyway.

It's gone downhill. Two USB C ports instead of 3. Worse touchpad (previous was clicky, this one seems to have some sort of embedded haptic device that one day just stopped working and no physical mouse button keys). Function keys and most importantly ESC key are now a touch surface instead of physical keys.

Hardware-wise it's still nice to use, but otherwise a disappointment. I'll be way more careful with picking the next one.

Comment Re:Nobody wants more features (Score 5, Insightful) 83

"Can display any website" implies the heck of a lot of features.

A modern web browser is effectively an operating system in itself. Here's just the WebGPU standard, take a look: https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu/

Just scroll down that page and try to estimate how much programmer time is needed to implement that correctly. And you can use most of the web without that just fine actually, until you come across something that happens to want it. Modern browsers have an alarmingly large amount of such features.

Comment TIOBE is complete bullshit (Score 5, Insightful) 108

Why is TIOBE still talked about? Their data is complete nonsense. Don't believe me? Look at how it's made:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...

It's basically searching for "$LANGUAGE programming" on various search engines, then taking the "5 million results found" counts. After that they use some fudge factor they seem to have come up by themselves. Why is google.com worth 7.69%? Why is Wikipedia the second in the list, do mentions on Wikipedia go up and down by language popularity? Why is google.co.uk in the list, when it also returns English results?

Does Google even promise that the result count they display is remotely accurate?

Let alone that this barely means anything if it worked because it's trivial for anyone to inflate counts by encouraging the use of the term, or it can also go down if some prominent site happens to go down.

It's an absolutely terrible metric and I don't understand why anyone cares about it. At least try to be remotely accurate. Look at Stack Overflow activity. Look at commits on Github. Look at subreddits. Something that indicates actual usage at a given point in time.

Submission + - Samba gets funding from the German Sovereign Tech Fund.

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that
supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital
infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source
ecosystem.

The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB
over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a
robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is
expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.

All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running [4]
and gitlab MRs will appear soon!

https://samba.plus/blog/detail...

https://www.sovereigntechfund....

Comment Re:Customer's perspective (Score 2) 50

And many of them will be perfectly right.

When I was 12 at school we had an active pirate scene going during the lunch break. And it included some pretty fancy stuff. I don't think any of us had the pocket money to legally pay for 3D Studio.

These days it's much easier to click "Buy" on Steam. Having money is quite convenient.

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