It has never worked in any empire, it has never worked in any software development team, it has never worked in any rock or metal band. I see very very little reason for saying there "should" be a power struggle, that always ends badly with no exceptions in any domain. C++ has never been in the kernel, so it's hard to see how Rust could defeat it there. Rust is unlikely to replace C because they do different things well - if the Linux devs have half the intelligence they seem to, there will be a natural federation.

And that is the key concept. Linux is, by its very nature, a federated OS kernel, many teams working in their territory but cooperating with other teams working in other territories through a central "government" that happens to have a hereditary god as head of the state machine.

The problem there is that the BSD folk did that, once William Jolitz quit, and found that people followed a very large number of different groups, to the point where none of the BSDs really progressed the way they could, and perhaps should, have done. The scene splintered. One of the most rock-solid, reliable Unix kernels ever devised has, to put it bluntly, not died (despite Netcraft confirming it) but seriously dwindled into a small niche.

You've got to remember, 386BSD came out a year or so before Linux and had X11 running on it by version 0.1 because essentially all the major challenges had already been overcome. It was THE OS to use, for a long time, for most serious geeks, although numbers were seriously cut into when Manchester Regional Computing Centre produced what was possibly the very first Linux distro, using Shoestring as the bootstrap. The MCC distro was easy to install - far easier than any BSD - and although it couldn't do much, it did turn heads. Further, Linux was gelling around a standard framework, whilst BSD by that time was starting to fragment and bicker.

My great fear is that, when Linus finally stops running the show, Linux will suffer much the same fate. There's a LOT of highly-strung egos involved, and a LOT of very rich companies who would far far prefer Linux to be owned solely by them.

*tries to think, but his head explodes from the sheer number of counter-examples.

I really really wood knot want to corner on wooden wheels. They'd turn to Ash and would be a Birch to fix.

*ignores sarcasm because, well, I have a 4 digit UID and get to.

I think everyone pretty much knew it already, the point is that I can measure the complexity at which AI breaks, which is quite different from merely qualitatively feeling that it doesn't work as well as the claims say.

Agreed, "AI safety" is neither practical nor possible, in part because AI has no awareness or meaning, in part because AI has no capacity for introspection, but also because AI is only useful if it can handle hard questions and hard questions are, by their nature, not safe, and (as usual) because it would utterly destroy the entire economic model of the AI companies.

I can't find any obvious evidence that the guy really knows what "humanity-advancing" means, beyond advancing his own take on the world.

Gemini still struggles with complex problems and large numbers of files. These, IMHO, should take priority over personalisation. I've mentioned in my journal that it is really struggling on anything that is non-trivial. Why should I care what it remembers if it is going to be used in engineering but can't solve engineering problems in areas where you'd actually want AI?

The benchtest I'm using is, yes, more complicated than figuring out how to wire up a Christmas lights display. On the other hand, it's also where it's going to get used and where it needs to work well.

Let's leave the pretty baubles to one side and actually get Gemini working well, OK?

Well, there are some really bad comedy skits on YouTube that feature Spirit. But, beyond that, no, I can't think of anything tech-related about it. And that includes their aircraft.

Is X number 1 in the world got news? No.
Should it be? No.
Is that relevant as to whether Grok is any good? No.
Is Grok any good? No.

Now that's cleared up...

Honestly, I don't know why Snap is even a thing. Yes, you can roll back to a previous version, but if they'd simply used NILFS2, they could have done exactly the same thing without using anything like as much disk space or complexity.

The article is plausible, LLMs have indeed no semantic understanding or concept of logic.

LLMs can be very effective at spotting inconsistencies, dubious reasoning, and design flaws, but you really really have to work hard at it and do a fair amount of the heavy lifting yourself. LLMs, on their own, are worse engineers than Sinclair Research or Microsoft. And that takes some doing.

Even with significant human input, what they produce is likely to be messy and really requires heavy review before use.

Some of you will remember that I've been setting these AI LLMs a serious engineering challenge. Six months of near-constant iterations and there are still hundreds of issues and it's unclear if the design it has come up with is remotely workable. I've got the project up on github, if anyone wants to amuse themselves.

You misunderstand institutional security. The end sought is not true security, but rather, plausible deniability. The institutional users want to be able to point to this SBOM and say, "It passed all our security audits", not "Our analysis missed the security vulnerability which brought down our systems." No one in a large institution wants to take the blame for the inevitable security vulnerabiliity, so things like the SBOM provide the requisite blame deflection back to the package maintainer. This way, nobody is held to account, and everyone keeps their jobs.

Seemingly idiotic corporate decisions are much more easily understood when one realizes that a corporation is largely a machine for avoiding responsibility.

That version is consistent with what I know about Japanese culture and the USSR's involvement. I'm far more inclined to believe it.

Bombing civilians, even in western nations, has never been effective. In Britain, we don't talk about the Blitz Panic, if the Blitz is referred to at all, it is in the context of unifying the nation's resolve.

Why, then, in a culture that put honour above all else, the emperor above all people, and the military over all mindsets, would bombing a city have any different effect? It's obvious from the firestorms created by the US that it hadn't done, and it astonishes me to this day that the US expected any other result.

Perhaps you'd like to live in China or North Korea where you can be randomly apprehended and harassed by the police just "because you look a bit sus".

Versus the United States, where a US citizen born in the US can be deported to country they've never been to, where they don't speak the language, just because they look like an illegal immigrant?!

I don't like communism or socialism, but I can't deny that the Western world is having a Soviet Moment, with Britain and the US leading the way in violating civil rights.