A couple years ago, I would have agreed. Most of our email is junk. But nowadays, you can have an LLM digest and summarize it for you. That could also be a service the legacy system offers. Grandkids can just ask for a free-form search term without having to wade through everything.

A long time ago, I had the idea for a startup to keep digital material, including accounts, passwords, old documents, etc. in a digital vault that would be released to the next-of-kin when someone dies. It would also convert documents to newer formats so your old unpublished WordPerfect novel could be opened and read by the grandkids (should they choose).

Problem is, nobody would (or should) trust a startup with that material. This is stuff that should be around for many decades and most startups go out of business.

Same question applies to all the other websites out there being mined to train LLMs. Google search Overviews removes the need for people to visit linked sites. Traffic plummets. Ads dry up, and the sites go out of business. No new content to train on 🤷🏻‍♂️

In case needed, may want to also look into multi-arch images so it also supports the right ARM build for the Pi: https://www.docker.com/blog/multi-arch-images/

Wait, did I read that right? After all that drama, they upstreamed the Rust drivers anyway?

41 ssh keys

Dammit! Wish there was a way to avoid inadvertently leaking github secrets.

Oh, wait: https://github.com/security/advanced-security/secret-protection

What happens after ‘No?’ 🤔

It’s not exactly 30%. For sales below $1M, it’s 15%: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/

In Europe, where this was established last year, they started charging a Core Technology Fee to cover the cost of hosting and data transfer: https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/

And if you switch payment providers, you have to pay at least 2.5% plus transaction and any intermediary fees.

It’s nice that Proton is offering a discount, but for everyone else there may be additional ongoing costs.

Thinkpads have always had the reputation for being solid machines, even after IBM spun them out to Lenovo. But there are so many variations of components I imagine it’s hard to keep drivers uptodate for the odd peripherals, especially the entry and mid-range ones.

FWIW, Dell also sells laptops with Linux pre-installed, so likely to have working drivers for all peripherals. HP used to have a “HP DevOne” which got good reviews, but they’re discontinued. If looking for a refurb, that might not be a bad option. System76 and Framework also get decent reviews.

The hardest part about getting Linux installed on a Lenovo was getting rid of Windows and its death-grip on the bootloader and the TPM.

Also, a few things, like drivers for keyboard backlight and fingerprint scanner never got working. If you just want to experiment and play, could always try Linux under VMWare Workstation (free for personal use) or boot off a thumbdrive.

The ultimate endpoint for this sort of optimization is to do away with processes and just have threads or coroutines. Or, if you want to go super-optimized, a super-loop.

Hey, Arduino!

The gift of stabbing.

this side up

The ground level weedwhacker blades could do double-duty clearing out brush (and pesky pedestrians).

Given that 50% of the time, the generated code is unworkable garbage, having an AI automatically write code to create new training models will either solve all problems, or spontaneously combust into a pile of ash.

My money’s on the latter.

If you wanted to run Unix, your main choices were workstations (Sun, Silicon Graphics, Apollo, IBM RS/6000), or servers (DEC, IBM) They all ran different flavors of BSD or System-V unix and weren’t compatible with each other. Third-party software packages had to be ported and compiled for each one.

On x86 machines, you mainly had commercial SCO, Xenix, and Novell’s UnixWare. Their main advantage was that they ran on slightly cheaper hardware (< $10K, instead of $30-50K), but they only worked on very specifically configured hardware.

Then along came Minix, which showed a clean non-AT&T version of Unix was doable. It was 16-bit, though, and mainly ended up as a learning tool. But it really goosed the idea of an open-source OS not beholden to System V. AT&T had sued BSD which scared off a lot of startup adoption and limited Unix to those with deep pockets. Once AT&T lost the case, things opened up.

Shortly after that Linux came out. It ran on 32-bit 386es, was a clean-room build, and fully open source, so AT&T couldn’t lay claim to it. FSF was also working on their own open-source version of unix called GNU Hurd, but Linux caught fire and that was that.

The thing about running on PCs was that there were so many variations on hardware (disk controllers, display cards, sound cards, networking boards, even serial interfaces).

Windows was trying to corral all this crazy variety into a uniform driver interface, but you still needed a custom driver, delivered on a floppy, that you had to install after mounting the board. And if the driver didn’t match your DOS or Windows OS version, tough luck.

Along came Linux, eventually having a way to support pluggable device drivers. I remember having to rebuild the OS from scratch with every little change. Eventually, a lot of settings moved into config files instead of #defines (which would require a rebuild). And once there was dynamic library loading, you didn’t even have to reboot to update drivers.

The number of people who would write and post up device drivers just exploded, so you could put together a decent machine with cheaper, commodity components. Some enlightened hardware vendors started releasing with both Windows and Linux drivers (I had friends who made a good living writing those Linux drivers).

Later, with Apache web server and databases like MySql and Postgres, Linux started getting adopted in data centers. But on the desktop, it was mostly for people comfortable in terminal. X was ported, but it wasn’t until RedHat came around that I remember doing much with UIs. And those looked pretty janky compared to what you saw on NeXTStep or SGI.

Eventually, people got Linux working on brand name hardware like Dell and HPs, so you didn’t have to learn how to assemble PCs from scratch. But Microsoft tied these vendors so if you bought their hardware, you also had to pay for a copy of Windows, even if you didn’t want to run it. It took a government case against Microsoft before hardware makers were allowed to offer systems with Linux preloaded and without the Windows tax. That’s when things really took off.

It’s been amazing watching things grow, and software like LibreOffice, Wayland, and SNAP help move things into the mainstream. If it wasn’t for Linux virtualization, we wouldn’t have cloud computing. And now, with Steam Deck, you have a new generation of people learning about Linux.

PS, this is all from memory. If I got any of it wrong, hopefully somebody will correct it.

Does “Please shut up and get to the point!” count?

Blocked all the server domains. There are a bunch of lists out there for various TV brands.