Tim O'Reilly had a good essay, "Alpha Geeks" that describes how new tech gets adopted.

Arc seemed interesting but how many Alpha Geeks will run a closed-source browser in this decade where vulnerabilities are everywhere and of potentially existential risk?

They're in a tough spot selling a proprietary browser in a world where they have to depend on uptake first by the people who don't care if it's open source or not.

Brave seems to have found a business model that lets them do both. It's not obvious that the proprietary business model is viable for Internet browsing, but marketing can take up a lot of that slack.

Certainly Safari maintains an important market share so it's not completely off the table but those users need to be sold to if the Alpha Geeks aren't interested. I'm not sure if Edge has separate CVE's from Chromium but in both cases vendor-bundling is the supermajority of user acquisition which is quite difficult to compete with.

Sprinkling on a bit of AI seems like the go-to strategy this year - heck maybe it'll work at some point. It's not impossible that somebody will invent a killer-app desktop AI integration. An agent dashboard might be useful when the reliability moves a few more sigmas out.

I didn't realize he was born in the 1930's.

Older than a Boomer, he didn't need to be a "digital native" to understand how the Internet should work.

Truly a legend in Internet History. RIP.

Assange always timed for maximum political impact no matter who was doing the evil.

Did you complain when he released Collateral Murder showing the war crimes under George W. Bush?

Back in the 90's Newark-Philly was close enough to the SONET Ring with multipathed fiber. You could get an OC-48 for reasonable money ($1300ish IIRC) with absurd uptime guarantees if the ring ran past your building. Backhoe Bobs couldn't take down your service without a coordinated attack.

Have we ripped all that out in the past thirty years?

You'd think ATC would be important enough to pay for reliable service.

The lifetime+75 years people are battling with the Transhumanist tech bros.

It's a shame the small current creators will be swept up in this but two groups who are parasitic on society are going to war, so all I need to do is find some low-carb popcorn.

I always wonder if people genuinely think that when America was first colonized, the Mayflower people got off the boat, said 'wow, there's gas pumps, like, EVERYWHERE, I wonder what they're for.'

Every argument against EVs that have to do with 'infrastructure' was also an argument against gas cars. "Wait, you're saying that where I can just let my horse eat some goddamn grass, in order to run this 'automobile,' we need to pump oil out of the ground, ship it to a refinery, refine it, ship it to a local gas station, put it back into the ground, then every few hours I need to use fuel just to drive over to one of these fuel stations, put more gas in it, then drive around some more? Ludicrous!"

You can very happily run an EV charger on a 100a service; just don't run the charger, the electric stove, the electric dryer, and the air conditioner all at the same time.

Either set your charger to only run after hours when everybody is asleep anyway, and you'll still be full in the morning, or keep track of what other appliances you're running.

Or get one of the chargers that can measure total load, and throttle itself accordingly.

Your personal laziness doesn't obviate the fact that EVs are, in fact, way more easy for 99% of the population than gas cars are.

Apple take care of us and keeps us safe by ... :checks notes: ... not escaping special characters in their commerce filter with in-band signaling.

Hey, kudos to the backend guy who yeets invalid messages, though.

Too bad the yeets don't file bugs when the client is identified as an Apple product. I have a feeling Woz would have wired up an old school firebell to alert on such cases.

NetBSD: saving old hardware from the landfill

OpenBSD: when you're sufficiently paranoid on your network edge

FreeBSD: fast ZFS and embedded/dsdicated systems where you distribute proprietary linked code. Large photocopiers and such. Also pfSense, et. al.

I'd be tempted to try FreeBSD ZFS again now that it has native encryption. I lost a huge zpool to known bugs in GELI last time I tried.

I'm on linux now but there are major performance issues that are still tagged Open on Github and that's after sitting down with a calculator to make custom settings to eliminate a half dozen 'edge case' performance problems. At least I can opt in to the legacy algorithms that aren't buggy enough to OOM the server (regardless of how much RAM one adds).

> Nice 'summary', Slashdot.

So you're saying they could be replaced by AI? ;)

Too bad they didn't link to LibreLingo for context.

Every API and protocol is a USB-C plug now.

Each Spring when I'm outside a female will buzz up to me and dart around me for a bit until I go grab the feeder and fill it up.

Not aggressively but they'll remind me too if I'm busy and am outside another day.

Impressively they return to their same summer areas each year with amazing precision. Usually when the tulips bloom so I keep an eye out once the daffodils are done.

When you encounter a "just replace everything with solar" smoothbrain it's best to ask them how they will handle reactive power.

You get a reaction, that's for sure.

We can do some cool engineering for workarounds but it's amazing how alluring the One Ring is to some.

5) answer knock on door when FSB shows up at hotel to inquire as to why you immediately powered down your phone, and have been seen outside of the hotel.