1994: I want an OS for my PC. There are already options like Windows 3.1. Why do I want to run XWindows on Slackware, which might do most of what I want it to do, but poorly and with constant handholding? Linux should stay with their strengths.

People with my genetics start dying around age fifty - polycystic kidney disease.

I'm ten years older than that, my blood pressure earlier this evening was 120/70something, my last fasting sugar was around 85, I weigh ten pounds more than I did in college, and I've walked 1,393 miles in the last year. My last vice is caffeine and I will go off it periodically, in one instance for seven years.

I got dealt a terrible hand, health wise, Lyme at forty that triggered a complex immune condition, but I refuse to feel (or look) bad. A lot of it IS in your hands, you just need the will to change. It's not easy ...

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.

The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.

BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully Asia and Europe play this transition a bit smarter, so something of our society continues.

It's modded funny because OpenCL is all but dead for new projects. It got weighed down by industry infighting to the point that the big feature of OpenCL 3.0 in 2020 was undoing everything added to the spec after 2011.

So the idea of using OpenCL as a CUDA replacement, rather than something like ROCm or OneAPI, is funny. It's like rewriting C++ programs to use Pascal.

It's dead, Jim.

It's not coming back.

The market IS white hot right now, but the Hormuz hit is just starting to land. Demand at the edges is what sets the price - if all southeast Asian gamers are spending the GPU money on gas, that cools the rush. And I have no confidence any of these datacenter announcements are going to lead to actual builds. Companies talked a great game, but the political heat is on, the electric and water constraints are real, and advances like TurboQuant, which conservatively speaking offers a 4x boost to existing GPUs ... now layer the U.S. economic hit from Hormuz, which will only be a little bit behind the Asian blowout.

The AI/datacenter/GPU self dealing circle looks more like the derivative traders of 2008 with each passing day. Just like CDOs, that "money" is all conditional, and when conditions change, it's all gone. Society got some nice frontier models and advances in manufacturing out of it, now if corporate America takes even half a step back on the rush ... the market won't just vanish, because there IS a lot of benefit to using LLMs, but the demand may only match what's already been built. We'll take the hit from it, then the economy will rebound from a bunch of startups pillaging the existing firms that are politically incapable of making the needed culture change.

I spend my days working on the system for my startup. Since I had a computer science education and a bunch of time in grade running ISP systems, I bring that distributed systems engineer vibe to my vibe coding. It'll need work once it's funded, but the MVP will be functional and secure.

I was using X tokens/week via Claude Code. They stumbled on the Opus 4.7 rollout and I got busy tuning my setup. I added LSP Enforcement Kit + Serena, CodeSight, and OptiVault. This made Claude more or less behave ... while cutting my usage about 80%.

Companies that are using token burn as a metric, if they are not providing top quality tooling for the people using it, are basing their performance reviews on who can tolerate some highly random LLM over an efficient, well thought out harness.

Meta foisted a digital cesspool on us and it would not hurt my feeling a bit to see it completely desiccated. I do feel badly for the legions of humans that are going to be forced to wade through the increasingly crusty muck while the company attempts to figure out what to do about AI. There are rumblings out there about what is happening to the advertising based internet we all know (and despise). Meta clearly can't execute with AI and they may well get bowled over by it.

GM needs to be made to disgorge every dime they made selling that data.

They need to disclose who purchased the data and what the price was.

Every victim of this privacy violation needs legal recourse and class action seems like it would be best for the masses.

Anyone who can show significant harm should aggressively pursue all parties involved.

The only way this behavior will stop is when engaging in it brings bitter pain.

There may well be a legit issue that Bambu is facing, there's a bunch of "think of the children" stuff in play right now, it's mostly about ghost guns from what I have seen. They are perhaps under pressure and maybe they will be compelled to do things in terms of identity of users and/or items being printed. This is another instance of gun nuts ruining things for the rest of us.

But the chickendroppings manner in which they approached this merits a vigorous walloping. If they HAVE to do it due to some government pressure, be upfront, tell all of us, and maybe we'll put a stop to it. What they did here just smacks of ... well ... besides being just plain stupid when dealing with FOSS developers, it smacks ... and they should receive some smacks in return.

A former head of AT&T back when it was The Phone Company made a comment along the lines that the long distance network had to be built to cope with with mother's day and everything else was free. It was used as an example of how guesses about CapEx vs OpEx can go very wrong. It might have been Fred Kappel who said that.

Yup 100%. I can pass among neurotypicals if I keep my mouth shut, but people quickly pick up on it if interacting with me.

CloudFlare was an aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation. Now it's an AI-powered aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation.

Why don't I feel excited about it?