Let me stop you right there.

You presuppose that we know what a good desktop is. I don't think we do. I think trying many different variations to find out is exactly how we some day will.

In which parallel universe? Windows has shown what a barely passable desktop needs, one that is just about good enough to stop people from escaping from the lock-in.

We agree.

But it is not a problem the Linux crowd can solve. Because it's not a technical question.

We had this discussion in 2023. And in 2021. 2020, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007 and I think 2005. Or so.

Oh dear, poor users don't know where to start. I'm sure that is the one and only thing that stops the entire world from switching to Linux. Certainly not the lack of games, business applications or compelling reasons to switch from the shit that they currently run and know is shit but at least they know that shit.

Linux has won the server OS wars. When's the last time anyone had a serious discussion of using whatever the last windows server OS version is for anything critical? When's the last time you logged into a Solaris machine?

The desktop is a different game, always has been, always will be. It's a game run not by technical excellent. I mean, exhibit A: DOS and Windows, who were never, ever, the best OS - just the most popular one. But on the desktop, what matters is if the users can use it (it's right there in the word) and that hinges on two things: a) familiarity and b) availability of applications.

a) is a lot more serious than most of us nerds realize. Think about any random corporation. Let's say 5000 office employees currently using Windows. Re-training them to use Linux instead might take just a few hours for the tech-savvy ones, and let's say a day for the less so. Add twice that as a period where productivity is at least somewhat hampered by them having to look up again or ask a colleague how to do X. Suddenly you're looking at something like 30-50 thousand hours of lost productivity. And these are not minimum-wage people. So your bill is what, half a million?

b) this is the applications the business actually uses, not some Open Source alternative. If the graphics designers use Photoshop, they need that, not Gimp. Tons and tons of enterprise software is windows-only. And there we are with the chicken-and-egg problem.

Seriously, "the Linux desktop is too fragmented" is bullshit. All things considered, that's the least worry of anyone. And one of the greatest strengths. I know that I would've given up completely on Linux a lot sooner than I actually did if there had only been KDE and Gnome, and not Enlightenment and other interesting options pushing the boundary of the possible. Heck, E would still run circles around almost all UIs today.

It's not that much of a change, though. The USA has only ever paid lip-service to its "allies" and always seen Europe as competitors. It's not a shift from "friend" to "enemy", just from "competitor" to "enemy".

I don't get the Rust hatred. C has implicitly had an "unsafe" mode for much longer than Rust.

If you're a C kernel developer, you can jump on the Rust bandwagon very easily: just put the keyword unsafe in your comments and you can write code just like Rust developers.

Maybe, just maybe, this mistake was caused by the fact that the same sort of people who are likely to write bugs into their code are the same types of people who prefer "safe" languages because understanding the subtle nuances of how computers work is difficult. They would prefer a system where they couldn't make mistakes, rather than a system where they had to understand the code and the machine to a high level. There's a place in the world for these sorts of people, but it's not in OS/kernel development. The sort of I-can't-make-mistakes-with-Rust mindset probably lulled the coder into a false sense of security, with the predictable outcome.

The problem with Gaudi is that even if you did everything right, it was still embarrassingly behind nVidia offerings. So after a lot of work to *try* to support Intel as an nVidia alternative you still end up just in a terrible place.

They spent some time trying to spin it as 'well if you don't need a H200, then Gaudi 3 is good enough', except by that argument the H100 is the right choice. So the only thing they could have done is be way cheaper than nVidia and AMD MI.

Now the bubble is indeed fishy, but Intel's incompetent swings at a product for the segment is a separate thing altogether.

I think they are only hypothetically 'current' as in not really available. I think if you wanted to buy a Gaudi solution new you might find no one really ready to sell it to you.

Intel abandoned the concept, again. What you see online is mostly the corpse of a product and vendors playing with leftover samples to hedge their bets in case Intel decides to get back into the market with a follow-on product.

I mean, we already have those all over the place, except they don't change while parked because why would we ever want to do that and focus exhaust in a bunch of stationary cars, exacerbating air quality particularly in things like parking decks?

I *guess* you might be imagining a gas engine so weak as to not keep up with driving that needs extra time, but that's just not an issue. Even if we did want to go with a tiny engine block, it could still keep up with average power demand of going 80mph. However once a car has committed to owning the intake, cooling, and exhaust of a gas engine, it's not like going from a 500c to a 1500c engine is a big deal and that gives you *plenty* of power headroom

My household has one PHEV and one full EV. If we *all* want to go to somewhere together, then for a short trip we don't care which car we take, for medium length trips we will take the full EV since it is generally a more pleasant quiet drive and if it's a trip longer than 200 miles, then it's back to the PHEV for the short gas stops.

Yeah, the charging situation is interesting.

If you charge at home, so much cheaper than gas.

If you can't charge at home, so much more expensive than gas.

Well, sure, but you can say the same thing of so much in automotive tech...

When all those gaskets need to be replaced, when the transmission grinds itself, when the coolant system leaks, when the turbo goes, if the timing belt goes, every few months when you change the oil, etc etc.

Sure, it's a item worthy of being wary of and a good opportunity to improve, but it's not like ICE engines are nice and immune from expensive costs down the line.

Yep, all the biggest from the dotcom era were companies that provided the proverbial pickaxes and shovels, and we *mostly* see that here too (Apple largely being unrelated, Google actually a bit, but not wholly in the game of actually training models, mostly the big players are mostly providing hardware or infrastructure to all these.

The big cautionary tales that everyone remembers like pets.com and webvan had silly high valuations, but no where near the heights attained by Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft of the time. It was just so many of those dotcoms sourcing from the vendors propping up their valuations, but the vendors remained viable businesses just as they were before.

Even OpenAI, the most hyped of the hyped purely AI plays is still relatively dwarfed by Meta. OpenAI would be an example of something more akin to the intrinsically dot-com startup. So OpenAI has probably done more for the market valuation of nVidia and Microsoft than themselves.

Of course pre-pandemic, it was around $1200/ounce, and it's been just insane since the pandemic set in until now...

True, still not at the peak, but speaking of adjusting for inflation...

Cisco from 1998 to 2001 had a crazy anomalous valuation that was the biggest of the big examples of the dot-com bubble run amok. That behemoth of a company had an inflation-adjusted market cap of about a trillion dollars. Microsoft was in same ballpark, with Oracle and Intel a bit less, but still big examples of the dotcom bubble.

This time around, Google is 3.8 trillion, Meta is $1.6 trillion, Microsoft is $3.6 trillion, Amazon is $2.5 trillion, nVidia is $4.4 trililon, Apple is $4.1 Trillion....

This bubble is just massively bigger than the dotcom bubble, with just one of the big players this time being valued even adjusting for inflation more than all the big players of the dotcom era put together, and there being a fair number more of them this time. It dwarfs the 2007 bubble in these top few players alone. When this pops, it's going to be mind numbingly severe fall..

Yeah, this is one area where LLM can certainly make one side more successful. A screw up means either the attack fails, which no worse than not trying or messing up the target system, which may not be the ideal outcome, but it's not like the attacker really cared that much about the target system...

You think the companies are deliberately keeping their models from being professional grade because of some sense of social responsibility?

That is hilarious. They are pushing as hard as they can and hyping it up even more than it is capable of performing. Any shortcomings on their part is not by lack of trying or somehow holding back.

Such a shame that CVE quality is generally crap, as it's flooded with dubious 'findings' from people trying to build a resume as a security researcher. I'm not sure why you assert this is largely still done manually, reconciling with SBOM tools in my neck of the woods is pretty much automated for detecting and flagging issues because *no one* has time to deal with the gigantic volume of CVEs. Of course another problem in those SBOM tools is they have a terrible false positive rate. Trying to follow their guidance 100% may be impossible (complete misidentification) or requires significant work (SBOM tools don't do great with 'backported' fixes, and many software components don't bother with maintaining backward compatibility, so rebasing to a new version is big).

Updating software that is vulnerable is a key component, but I wager a greater general risk is how folks configure and operate credibly secure software stacks in insecure ways.