This gives some insight to the voting by the Debian team to adopt systemd. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flwn.net%2FArticles%2F58531...

All I can say is that it's very telling that Poettering now works for Microsoft.

How much energy does it take to drive to a laundromat and back?

Freshwater is cheap for a reason: it's abundant. It's agriculture that uses the overwhelming majority (70% of withdrawals and 80-90% of consumptive water use. Industry next (20% of withdrawals). Residential usage is way, way down the list, and washing machines are only 17% of that (well below for example lawn watering at about 30% overall, but which in some regions is over half of all consumption, and in the summer and times of water scarcity can be the vast majority). An early 1950s top-loader washing machine would use about 40-55 gal plus 0,3-0,5 kWh of electricity for the machine itself, and if your water wasn't municipally heated, heat would cost about 4,5-6,5kWh / 16-23 MJ (about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a litre of gasoline / 0,13-0,19 gallons). At the then-standard 14-15 MPG in the US, that laundromat better not be more than 2-3 miles away if you're trying to save energy (just ignoring the energy they use to heat their water!)

For the record, while there may be more anti-AI backlash on the left than the right, there's an awful lot on both sides (and a lot of users on both sides). For example, Bannon-acolyte Joe Allen on stage before a Trump rally a month ago warning the crowd:

Why wouldn’t you want a mosque in your neighborhood? Well, because the people in there aren’t like me. They don’t want the same future I do. Now, if you look at the data center, this incubator for algorithmic immigrants. Already, if you look at Hugging Face, they’ve already broken out and invaded other companies. These immigrants are out of control.

Literally, this r/opensource mod set the policy: "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community." Does that sound very "leftist" to you? Yes, his reasoning was because translators use AI, but still, that's literally the opposite of appreciating and accommodating diversity.

I cannot find anything beyond that indicating how Wesley Wolfe (r/wolvereness, the mod) votes. What I can tell you is that there was a big backlash in the sub to his actions. Some amusing, like a person asking, "What do we use now that we've banned Linux? I can't afford Windows keys for all these damned servers." A lot of people seem to just be ignoring his rules. At the top of the sub right now is a post titled, "Linus Torvalds posts his AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap". It seems to have sparked vastly more AI discussion than it shut down.

These points are all flawed, and if I thought you wrote them, or even understood them yourself, I'd bother writing a full rebuttal.

Not half as violent as allowing obsolete approaches and flawed architecture to remain out of some weird combination of concern for backwards compatibility and sentimentality.

Are those conversations and results kept in an extending prompt? How far back can your bot typically recall? Does the company charge for extra prompt (history) size?

Python 2 users were supported for more than a decade after 3 came out, and there was a LOT of migration tooling released. CIOs may not want to be forced to upgrade too often, but if they think upgrading once every 10 years is too much, then they need to quit and get into something more aligned with their expectations. Perhaps blacksmithing.

The way I see it is that many websites would be better off with a self signed cert than no cert at all. At least the site traffic is encrypted and a plugin like SSL lighthouse could alert the user if the cert changes.

And a site wants to add trust to their cert then they'd be better off to have their partners, customers, competitors sign their cert than some random CA that nobody has ever heard of. And it wouldn't stop CAs from signing the cert too and perhaps to gain maximum trust in a browser that might still be necessary.

Browsers could show some kind of score / checklist of what the cert says about the site based on who signed it or not. It would still be a better system than the shakedown racket that exists today.

> Explain to the AI what it got wrong and have it fix it. You could fix it yourself but that will just confuse the AI.

Please elaborate. Confuse for what purpose or context?

If you need to cancel your model subscription for some reason, does all the bot's knowledge of your shop's practices and patterns go away?

If that's a problem, then in-house or fully open-source models may be safer even if not as good initially.

"Back in my day bots draw 8 fingers per hand, you spoiled whipper-snappers have it down to 6!"

I don't think the main issue is the end-user software. It's all the other stuff that makes the company work. I work for a small startup, and I can list at least a dozen software platforms that we use, and I'm sure there are dozens more; none of which we could trivially migrate away from. (Fortunately, most of which I don't really want to, as they work fairly well.)

Besides the technical stuff, there's the HR benefits, the expense reporting, the door lock manager, the office reservation system, etc. I'm sure all of these are subscriptions. Many are probably quite inexpensive, but some aren't.

At some point, it will be cheaper to tell Claude, "We use the OverPriced platform. Examine our usage of it, and develop a replacement platform tailored to our needs, and include a transition plan to suck all our existing data and configurations over to the new system." But then there's one more system to support locally, which may not be worth the cost. Or if OverPriced is too ridiculous, do the same, but spin it off as FairPriced and compete.

Let’s see what DEI hire the administration puts in charge of this.

There are 640 acres in a square mile

[Sighs in metric]

The proper response to being in an area where datacentres are crowding in is "lobby your elected officials to increase property taxes and not give out tax increment financing deals". Tax everything, and tax it well. They'll stop building new datacentres in your area, and the ones that are there will (unless they were given a long-term sweetheart deal beyond your already-low tax rates) start being cash cows for your area.