No longer has the moral high ground over China and other dictatorships. Maybe Gavin Newsom will save us from that but we'll see.

And "China" didn't do anything, a Chinese company did. Some very weird headlines lately.

That kind of hot swap exists for servers, but for general consumer stuff there is USB. It can move gigabytes per second.

Tesla's sales are collapsing. Noted rap music expert and YouTuber Patrick Boyle did a pretty good video on the topic.

It's like a reverse BSD is dead where in this case Tesla really is dying. If musk doesn't somehow convince Trump to give him back his subsidies Tesla isn't going to last through next year.

He can't even pump the stock with AI because he can't get engineers. There's too much competition and he's pissed off too many people.

I know you are but what am I?

Which given the average age of slashdot readers is in a roundabout way relevant I guess...

As an added bonus there's a lot of right wingers here who eat crap like this up. Like all this stories about how LA is a burnt out hellscape ala mad Max beyond thunderdome.

Anyway one of the editors must have noticed the page views around here going down in greenlit this for engagement. I guess if you squint real hard and maybe drink a little booze and snort a little Coke and smoke some weed and eat some of the mushrooms outside your apartment you might be able to tie this into the demographic shifts going on and therefore statistics.

But really it's just rage bait for old right wingers.

He literally wrote Linux.

Since it started as his personal project he was the leader from the beginning. And since he turned out to be a capable leader and never got bored and left there was never any reason to take away that authority as it skyrocketed in popularity.

Basically, he's King because he founded the Kingdom.

The trouble a successor King would have is they could never have that kind of legitimacy, so some kind of more "Democratic" structure (self-appointed electors) is the most likely follow up.

I don't think there's enough democracy left in the world to do anything about this. There's certainly aren't enough people who aren't busy panicking over every little moral thing out there.

We have solid polling that indicates Trump won the election due to panic over trans kids in sports and healthcare for trans kids. Specifically the discredited nonsense called rapid onset gender dysphoria and the belief that your kid might just turn trans someday because of something they saw on TV...

That's just one of many moral panics. There's plenty more where that came from like violent video games and porno and how gay people are going to kidnap your children etc etc etc. heck I've seen some people trying to bring back the satanic panic although I think we are a good 10 years away from that working. When the theocratic police start enforcing Christian doctrine at the barrel of a gun though I'm sure we'll have panics over demons...

Is genuinely frightening how fragile democracy is, how easy it is for a handful of people willing and able to use violence to destroy it, and just how little people will trade in exchange for democracy and the right to have a say in government.

The co-producers of Concorde would have nothing to gain from close up photos of their only rival in the air?

So when you say AI you mean machine learning and llms. Specifically large language models is the big one.

You need training data to make llms work. And the bulk of the training data has been coming from publicly available sources like web forums crawled by bots.

Those forms are either starting to shut down the bots access or they are so full of AI slop they are useless for training.

That means in the near future the only people with access to training data are going to be major platform holders. Google, microsoft, Apple etc.

That means AI is a one-time Gold Rush that will quickly pick winners and losers and create a consolidated market with between two to three players.

As soon as the consolidation is done then yeah the bubble is going to burst. I'm not entirely sure how long but I would think within two or three years tops with how fast things go now. I wouldn't expect more than five but I really am just guessing.

The Tu-144 had a few interesting ideas, but of course they didn't know it was mostly inferior without getting the intel.

If the successor is another benevolent dictator then we're looking at a monarchy, and it's a dynastic succession.

If he names a successor, especially beforehand, then the community gets a veto, and if the candidate passes they can probably take the reigns when Linus leaves.

If he doesn't name a successor then you get a bunch of claimants, each arguing for their legitimacy to the throne.

If one wins the argument they can still succeed him, but there's a serious risk of fragmentation (long term forks) or simple infighting.

If you want a benevolent dictator (King) you need to give them maximum legitimacy, and that means naming the successor early.

Nope, the Kingdom is the project with all the relationships and developers attached.

As I said, unless someone is specifically endorsed by Linus (and maybe not even then) I'm not sure anyone has the legitimacy to succeed him as benevolent dictator.

In either case, the trouble with a pile of forks is people start wasting time with divided efforts, porting patches back and forth between forks, and infighting.

Hopefully one project becomes dominant, but it's not assured, and there's a risk of long term fragmentation.

Establishing something before he leaves is far preferable.

Honestly it's kind of a monarchy. And that makes his approach dangerous.

There's a benevolent overlord (King) who rules for life. And while the King is strong everything is pretty stable.

But the moment the King is gone you either have a strong designated heir lined up, or there's a succession crisis. And that leads to all sort of complications up to and including a civil war (fork).

The fact is that Linus is still King, and if he needs to designate a successor. Either the next King, or a Debian style election system.

My guess is he's thinking something Debian-like after him, because there's no one else with the cred to be dictator for life, and a more Democratic Debian style system is the only thing that could undercut his current authority.

Never rule out that there is a successor that he has in his mind but it's in a sealed envelope and the successor don't have a clue that he's the successor.