xorcist

The problem with find is that you can't specify the maximum tolerated command line lengths, and find hasn't historically been very smart about it (it just had a compiled-in value). Apparently this is fixed in GNU find, but for older systems and other platforms that may still be an issue.

Another feature missing in find that xargs has is the maximum processes to start at a time. find will run the commands in sequence, but in many situations you really want to run a bunch in parallel.

Bash while loops are pretty readable and the above would be a nice to iterate over lines if it wasn't for that gnarly pipe, which is a common source of errors in this construct. Remember that a pipe starts a new shell. So:

  grep stuff file.txt | while read key value ; do [ "$key" = "target" ] && found="$value" ; done

  while read key value ; do [ "$key" = "target" ] && found="$value" ; done < <(grep stuff file.txt)

Not really though. There's a whole product segment like LabView, which has existed for over three decades now, for people like biologists and chemists who do not like to code.

Those tools are built for quick iteration. Compared to that, using an LLM surely feels a lot like programming. Also a lot less deterministic.

Violins are basically ancient and evolved gradually over huge time spans,

Hey! I understand your point and you are completely right about violins and saxophones being completely different, but it is simply not right to use the word "ancient" with violins.

We know pretty much exactly how and when the violin evolved. If you found a viola or another instrument from the 1500s you would perhaps say that it's violin-like, but it's clearly not a violin. The Stradivarius is from the 1600s, the modern concert form is from the 1800s. Any which way it is far from being ancient.

A better example of ancient instruments is the flute and the drum. They are truly ancient, have existed in many cultures, and we do not know when they were first built.

If anything, it should be safe to assume by now that capabilities don't scale linearly with model size.

Are there any reasonable analyses of the practicality of data centers in space?

The purpose of "datacenters -- in space!" isn't to actually lift server racks into orbit, one piece at a time.

It serves the same purpose as every Tesla serving extra as autonomous taxis, as people travelling by hyperloop instead of a functional train service, and as humanoid robots doing your dishes instead of the normal robots called dish washing machines.

None of these things are meant to be taken literally. Yet they all seems to have worked out just fine.

For these arguments to carry pathos they all need have a grain of truth to them. There will be local AI in satellites, for "special" applications. Think image processing for birds that have a very nice high resolution view of your back yard, and whose decisions must be low latency or when bandwith is an issue. The trick to the argument to to blur the issue by conflating it with the datacenter AI that anyone can use.

the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa

They hardly have time to compete, busy as they are with foot-shooting practice.

The thought that anything could improve without bounds would be absurd. We are living in the physical world after all. The (open, interesting) question is how close we are to the limit.

They would have done that long ago if it was that easy. The fact that they aren't tells us something about the actual business utility of leading models.

Case in point. There is no chance tobacco would be declared legal if it was invented today. Don't you agree?

Not a good counterexample either. The link to Russian intelligence services may not be proven, but nobody seems to dispute that there were paid influencers? Also that this was not declared anywhere and the money was at best grey in origin?

In events like these it can be useful to operate on the systems thinking maxim and strictly look at who benefited, as this is interesting in itself without entertaining the suggestion that they engaged in anything illegal.

When it comes to social media in politics, I believe the burden of proof is on those who claim a net benfit. Centralization of traditional media is generally regarded as bad for open democracies, and the ultimate owners of almost all social media globally can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.

it excels at is firewall busting

Some would consider that an anti-feature. Firewalls are not to be busted. Nothing good lies at the extreme end of working around overly strict policies. Change the policy instead.

Keep in mind that Oracle can be deliberately nebulous about what their cloud offering is (pun intended).

Any hosted service can be bent into the shape of a cloud. Large parts of Oracle Cloud balance sheet is probably just hosted PeopleSoft and similar.

They have this in common with IBM which, at least on paper, have a large cloud business.

if you squash the commits when merging the PR?

You tidy up and rebase before making a PR. Anything else is really disrespectful of your reviewer's time. That is also how all the larger open source projects operate.

you only get one commit for the whole feature

If you are doing one logical commit per PR, you are doing way too many PRs.

Alternatively you don't have a working review process.

There was also Tizen, FirefoxOS and a whole slew of others. It was a remarkable time.

But it is true that the app-based future, that didn't exist yet, probably came with market dynamics that limits the number of platforms to two or three. It just wasn't clear which those were at the time.

What a vanilla Linux-based platform, and Meego, Maemo, Moblin and Mer were just iterations of the same thing, would have had going for it was that it could have had much better long time support and not just for hardware for software. Linux famously do not break userspace, and can regularly run 30 year old applications. For a phone you would be surprised if a 3 year old app worked.

Microsoft did this so much worse than both Apple or Android, even if they all suffer from it. Every release of the operating system came not just with new design language, never earth-shattering but often interesting, but new GUI toolkits and application packaging. Just a recompile of your application often wasn't enough, you were expected to rewrite your application to fit in with the new. They really shot themselves in the foot with that, and they did it over and over again despite never having leading market share and everbody seeing where things were heading. It was (and perhaps still is) probably the only way they could operate as a company.

The vanilla Linux-based platforms mentioned above had their own problems which should be obvious from the naming scheme alone, which would have compounded had their marketshare grown bigger. It was a forkfest. But that's the issue with corporate open source, there is rightfully an inherent skepticism where a single company dominates what is an open source project. This is also why Linus never took a job with the big Linux providers. It wasn't for a lack of opportunitites, but he knew that had he worked for Red Hat, people would always suspect even technical decisions to be made for the benefit of his employer. The most successful open source projects are vendor neutral. That is not in telecom companies culture, they had a very hard time understanding that and tend to form alliances instead. Not the same thing.

The EU's goal is the strategic defeat of Russia

This does not even make sense as a conspiracy theory.

Had "EU" wanted to hurt Russia there were was a thousand ways to do that. But they didn't. Instead they traded and built infrastructure. Most EU countries saw Russia as a partner before they invaded their neighbour in the most gruesome way possible.

If anything, the EU should have reacted sooner. It was shameful they didn't. You can't really pretend like nothing while an all out war is taking place on the same continent.

That's not it. If you have an internal network, where every host is provisioned by you, you already control identity.

In that case there's no need to validate anything as names, dns records, certificates and anything else should already be in place.

Introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, the term denoted one of three purported major races of humans: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid

Sounds totally legit.

This is crazy. If you have a home network with a few internal services, or some sort of network where you don't control the endpoints, just use DNS validation. That's why it exists.

But on hosts you control, you should absolutely provision them with an identity and join the local CA. You're going to need it for a multitude of other reasons.

engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people,

No. I'm sorry. You are not allowed to say this. Our society is post-truth enough as it is.

This is a company founded on a singular idea: Lock up as much as the free web as possible behind their login and own as much of the information as possible. Every type of web service on the open web, from forums to classifieds to event booking to blogs and social media, and of course games early on, has been reimplemented on their platform.

Every single person working on maximizing "engagement" or whatever you call it these days knows exactly what they are doing.

Sure, do your thing. Take over what parts of the web you can. Take on the metaverse. We live in a market economy and you are free to do this. But not for a second are you allowed to talk about morals or doing good "from the inside". This is not the responsibility of senior executives alone. That is simply too much.

This is a company where everyone knew an actual genocide was coordinated using their platform, and they did absolutely nothing to stop it, despite the efforts from Amnesty and outside journalists to raise attention to it. There must be a limit to how much spin you can put on it.

Why do people say that? I am not bored by my Braun alarm clock, neither by my Singer sewing machine or my De Buyer cookware. Why would I be bored by well executed digital desktop designs such as BeOS, AmigaOS or even Windows 2000?

So, you live in a part of the world that still accepts cash. Good for you.

That part is shrinking however, so you need a plan to cope with that situation sooner or later. Not doing business with others and growing your own food does not suffice as a plan for most people.

Perhaps "maintainability" is a more suitable term?

Not very likely. It doesn't work that way. Linus usually don't respond to individual patches and hasn't for over 20 years.

A subsystem maintainer will pick up your patch if it is good, and they will deal with Linus for you. Most subsystems have their own mailing list because you need to visibility.

The process is described pretty well in Documentation/.

I think the question is why bother with an LLM if randomness is decisive?

Just roll the dice. I mean, it's not the worse you can do to narrow a subset.

Without a purpose for why you should use a public resolver it is an impossible choice to make.

If it is this hard to choose a resolver, imagine how hard it is to choose a web browser, which is a choice that actually matters.

The nearest resolver is

  $ sudo apt-get install unbound

Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work

In the context of 9/11, that seems like a strong statement to make.

The terrorists (let us agree on this label a priori) got everything they could ever wish for and then some.

Regular Americans in general lost freedoms of movement and communication. The whole political landscape shifted right. The US invaded and destabilized Iraq and Afghanistan. Pakistan and Syria got weaker than ever. The Saudis gained hugely in influence over the whole region.

Wahhabism is now influential in areas where they hardly existed before! They almost controlled Egypt for a while. And when the US retreated and gave controlling power back to the Taliban they showed the whole world that a needle pick in the belly of the beast was all that was necessary. That has given new courage to similar terrorist cells, a situation the rest of the world is still struggling with.

The whole world focused for almost two decades on their part of the world. Nobody can say that 9/11 wasn't an important catalyst for all that. And at a price that would not even cover catering had this been an organized intelligence operation. Terrorism can clearly and empirically be a very cost effective lever in ideological, political and religious struggle.

How can someone say that with a straight face, when the last two decades has been a constant demonstration of the opposite?

Since the Rohingya genocide we can no longer pretend that Big Tech is apolitical.

Private interest now owns not only your personal life and all your interaction with society and is completely necessary at every step for upbringing children but they also influence elections, not only in authoritarian regimes but also in what we used to think of as liberal democracies.

A select few, not limited to Thiel and Musk, clearly wielded some form of control over the world's biggest economic and military power. Not only classical political questions such as taxation but also including influence over paramilitary powers. That influence only came to a halt when it came to what to do about the Middle East.

The political idea that governments are more important powers than private organizations haven't been based in any real world experience for the past almost three decades now.

thought it knew better than upstream, and didn't check their changes with them

That is not fair. Debian generally works close with upstream, since most Debian Developers are free software enthusiasts in some way. The patch in question made it to the OpenSSL mailing list and received only encouragement. The only problem, as it turns out, was that less than a handful people knew those parts of OpenSSL well enough, and they didn't have time to hang around the mailing list. The real development of OpenSSL happened behind closed doors.

A lot of people learned from that incident. It is wrong to blame it on the Debian Developer who tried to clean up the code and went to the OpenSSL development mailing list for help. It is far from clear that uninitialized memory helps randomness at all, unless you are intimately familiar with the history behind those lines.

No further explanations should be necessary.