I have softened very VERY slightly on AI code. If it can identify genuine issues than that is fine. It is when folks just trust it blindly and just send 50 commits without understanding a thing or even remotely testing it, that is just crazy. But then on the flip side, yeah all the other issues probably aren’t worth it.

It is complicated at times but then things like this always are. The most successful evil always has some claim to virtue.

Alas, occasionally you have to walk with the devil to achieve some good. One just has to weigh up if it is worth it.

I once asked Stallman about how he used to build and run GNU tools before having the Linux kernel. He was using a proprietary Minix system as a means to get work done until there was a better alternative. I mean running a proprietary system is one thing, burning through the amazon with 100 quintillion tokens is very different.

It is like home cooking, once you have done it and get good at it, why would you do it any other way? Go straight to the source.

Here I am with a Core 2 Duo that boots in less than 30 seconds on my distro.

I am forever amazed at just how bloated Windows can be.

There are folks in the occult space that think LLM’s are possessed by evil spirits. Yeah, I know, make of that what you will.

BUT, when I see folks at the top and the way they talk about this stuff, my rational mind kind of wavers and you see people who are just completely and totally absorbed with these things. Maybe them occult folks are on to something. 🙃

Scary to see, it is like alzheimer’s disease in how it eats away at the persons autonomy below but unlike that disease, it still maintains enough cognition for them to be functional in society. For better or worse.

I use Trisquel, one of the FSF approved distros. So far it seems to have held up well against a lot of the less inviting changes in the Linux space, but it is based on Ubuntu. I do wonder how much longer it will hold up until I end up making the jump to a BSD system. Not the fault of the developers, just that the flow of the base system is too strong to fight against forever.

Fair point. I will say this, the low quality of Chinese goods isn’t entirely their fault. They enable it but it also comes from higher up.

I knew someone that was building some device, I forget was it was, and they were in China sourcing parts. That is when you see the game and they know exactly what is going on. You are after a specific capacitor, they will bring out 10 of the same product ranked in terms of price and quality. The 5 cent part, that will last 5 years or 1,000 hours, the 50 cent part will last 30 years or 10,000 hours.

Most producers will just go for the cheapest parts available to get the prices at the end down or to increase profit margins. China can make brilliant high quality parts, just those that control the pricing will always go for the low end and then blame it on Chinese manufacturing.

But also, many Chinese manufactures offer these parts knowing this, so it goes both ways.

It doesn’t have to be the fastest, it doesn’t need to even be the most efficient it just needs to cheap enough to undermine the folks from Bastards Inc.

Heck, why not do like the giant MRDIMM’s and just slap loads of chips on to taller DIMM’s.

https://www.micron.com/products/memory/dram-modules/mrdimm

A few years back I was talking to an acquaintance that worked in the NSA for about a decade, he was far to casual when he said “Oh, yeah we have back doors in Linux and all over the open source world that haven’t been discovered.”.

I mean, yeah, that tracks but did he have to be so proud of his achievement. He was one of those, ‘see if it can be done don’t question if it should’ kind of people.

I suppose it is a part of their NOBUS “NObody But US” strategy but with the code being in the open, that is a dangerous game to play with it being discovered by others. Nowadays with LLM’s able to do mass analysis of code, I do wonder if there is some regrets in putting those things in there?

But also I suspect a lot of it probably needs physical access to the machine as just sending a few packets to a machine probably isn’t enough to get it into an executable state.

Either way, interesting guy, wouldn’t trust him with anything!