Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

My objections:

1. It doesn’t adequately indicate “confidence”. It could return “foo” or “!foo” just as easily, and if that’s one term in a nested structure, you could spend hours chasing it.
2. So many hallucinations-- inventing methods and fields from nowhere, even in an IDE where they’re tagged and searchable.

Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.

Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box

I think it’s more about “does it fulfill the tropes paper money has established.” It’s like how many of the new electric cars look slightly off because they’ve removed design features (i. e. grilles with obvious air intakes) that are established in cars already.

Interestingly, Soviet banknotes up to the 1961 series would print the denomination in over ten different languages.

I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

The Euro notes look like what you’d get if you asked for prop banknotes for a minor scwne in a nwar-future sci-fi movie. The basic design elements are there to give the general look of currency, but something always seemed missing.

I think it’s the lack of text-- most banknotes have a big, prominent issuing authority name rather than the tiny copyright line of abbreviations, and often some flowery “I promise to pay on demand” legal language leftover from when the note was a stand-in for a stack of silver coins.

Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.

The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.

We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.

I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I’m not sure where the extra resources should go.

Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.

They’ve pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.

There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn’t

It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.

I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.

Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.

I always found it fascinating how the law is such a unique and cloistered ecosystem.

The sciences and arts encourage self-education and self-discovery. Constructive disruption is admired and moves the fields forward. Those who make it accessible and reachable are celebrated.

I love your phrasing “law-priests”. The law is the religion in a secular state. It has all the same trappings:

• The ranks and orders of clergy, where only they are fit to interpret the sacred scripts, with strong bias and penalty for trying to do so as an uneducated layman
• Adherence to doctrine and continuity (precedent) even as the environment it was established in no longer exists
• The constant urge to obfuscate and revel in exclusive language, to continue the air of mystery and impermeability.
• An overall attitude of fear and submission encouraged by the impenetrability. Even our richest and most powerful still fear the legal system for its caprice, and attempt to ward themselves from it with sigils and charms made of contracts.

Someone needs to nail up some theses to the door of the Supreme Court.

Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.