In the context of Omarchy, the salient desire is to avoid affiliation with fascists. Which NixOS hasn’t exactly excelled at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NixOS#Community_controversy
(I say this as someone whose main laptop, desktop, and homelab are all NixOS.)
I’m more excited about what the Frame means for Steam on ARM Linux. In a year or two, third-party ARM handhelds may be amazing — provided the DRAM cartel gets sorted out, one way or another.
(If you haven’t checked out Armada, it gives a glimpse of what the future might hold.)
And/or trying to use the cash to buy a technical/regulatory moat.
Idk what form that would take for memory, but it’s a pretty standard tactic for big tech, so I could see them convincing themselves it’s possible even if it’s not.
FCC approval is probably the most viable moat.
The second graph doesn’t really even tell the whole story either, because it’s just by release. You need to see how the number of bugs detected/fixed changes over time for each release.
Otherwise super-new releases get an unfair advantage just by virtue of not being exposed for as long. And super-old releases get an advantage too, by falling out of use at the same time more resources are allocated to detection.
I see SSDs, what do you see?
Apple is gonna have an interesting decision to make.
They can either keep their traditional price premium, and pocket the juicy margin afforded to them by being the only buyer who’s not chained to the DRAM cartel…
…or they could push harder on the strategy they were building out before the DRAM crisis, with the affordability of the Neo and the revived Mini, and undercut the whole PC market on price while still delivering a premium-feeling product.
I really hope they choose the latter. Not only would it put the DRAM cartel in a compromising position, but it would shift the whole center of gravity towards:
…which I think are all great moves for the long-term health of computing as a whole.
As a bonus, local inference would get a lot more accessible, which would make the AI barons cry.
I chip away at my memory with every sip I take, so maybe it is a diet thing.
Dude went to the Trump school of publicity. Take every position possible all at once, diss your former employees while denying you know who they are. Don’t give him any more attention please.
There’s Armada OS for now, but I’m looking forward to first party support (eventually) or retooling of Steam Frame support (more likely).
Meh, bring on the ARM devices! Get native binaries on heterogeneous SoCs, and then maybe someday OSes will allow x86 SoCs to live up to their potential instead of forcing them to pretend to be a PCI peripheral and turn into a hot plate just keeping up with serial instructions.
The “it’s just a tool” (with optional add-on “what matters is how you use it”) thought-terminating cliche makes me put my face in my hands a little bit deeper every time I see it.
Daily life in 2026 would be completely unrecognizable to a person from 5,000 years ago, and the difference is not just how we use our tools. The production, existence, and proliferation of the tools shape what is easy or hard, or even what is possible or impossible.
To think that you can reshape the contours of the decision-making terrain and that has no effect on what people do, or how they think of who they are… you’d have to accept that someone in the bronze age could just wake up one day and decide to be a telecommuting web developer on HRT and Ozempic.
To be fair to the original commenter: They did bring up copyright in the context of “what makes this a different kind of tool”, which is an empirical claim and not a normative one.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the author sticking to the level at which he’s an expert. If everyone had to chase down the lowest possible level, we’d all be physicists (or maybe philosophers, depending on your take there).
Besides, isn’t the “materialism” portion of “dialectical materialism” about interrogating the implications of present world you find yourself in, rather than evaluating what-ifs of alternate histories?
However generative AI might have emerged differently under a different regime, this is the version that we have access to inspect and, crucially, the version we must contend with if we want to influence its future trajectory under any regime.
Edit: But I do have to agree that he is much better at diagnosing the problem than he is at prescribing the solution. That seems to be the way of things. People tend to be good at either analyzing problems in detail, or rallying people around a tractible plan of action. It’s very very very rare to see someone who is good at both. So I don’t mind it too much.
Ehhh, probably the most pragmatic option for someone in his position, but I’m not gonna take that as an even-handed analysis of AI in open source, the software industry, the economy, or civilization writ large.
There was a post earlier today that directly counters the “just a tool” trope. (And if you’re thinking “but this is Linus! What credentials could this rando possibly have?”, allow me to preface their essay+video with a note that this guy has experience at high levels in the industry and then quit the industry to get a PhD with a focus on the social impacts of software development tools.)
And Cory Doctorow has a book (and many blog posts and speaking engagements covering the same content) about the precise harms (and non-harms) of AI.
Dr. Fatima (on Youtube) also has a pretty well-rounded take.
And Baldur Bjarnason makes some good points from a cognitive science perspective, though I think he’s ultimately out over his skis quite a bit.
That’s a carefully crafted illusion. And if you’re a power user, it won’t last long.
How so? I’m probably as power user as it gets (been using Macs since around ‘95, been splitting roughly 50/50 between Mac and Linux since around ‘06, and I love weird esoteric coding tools, so I’ll try to run some truly cursed setups) and I can’t imagine what you’re alluding to.
Anyone know the status of Chimera Linux wrt age verification?
VSCode/Codium with vim mode. Regular vim if I’m stuck in text land.
I haven’t tried neovim. Supposedly that could handle everything I need out of vscode, but it’s easier to not be an odd one out at work.
Cursed knowledge.
Good thing SSDs are cheap and plentiful at the moment.
Er, wait…
You are correct. Which has made the tension between the corpo side and the community side that much greater.