Computers have had the capability to automatically execute nearby bats for years, just run autoexec.bat

Typically, the free product they push doesn’t cost them trillions of dollars.

That model works when free users are costing a couple of cents in server resources, not hundreds of dollars.

Yeah, Oracle gave it away to Apache Foundation, but it was too late, and at that point everyone switched to LibreOffice.

That’s probably why they gave it away: they gave up on monetizing it after all the users already left.

Continuing to operate nuclear plants that we’ve already paid for and are on the hook for decommissioning costs is perfectly sensible. Building new ones is what isn’t.

There’s lots of newer designs we could use, but they’re still not going to be economically viable. A new nuclear plant isn’t about today, it needs to be viable over its expected lifespan: around 2036 to 2076.

The fancy new designs aren’t up against today’s batteries. They’re up against 2040’s batteries, and they can’t compete. For the price of a new nuclear plant, we’ll be able to buy those massive battery farms and have money left over. Not today maybe, but a new reactor isn’t going to start feeding power into the grid for ten years or so, so it’ll need to compete with 2036’s battery prices on day one and it’s only going to get worse from there.

The main issues with nuclear power are that it’s more expensive than renewables with battery storage, and that it’s very slow to build which makes it the go-to option for coal and gas supporters looking to delay the energy transition for a few more years and use up all the funding.

There’s probably a lot of people on ‘stable’ distros who are still running Wayland code from a couple of years ago and hitting bugs that have been fixed already.

I feel like a lot of people tried Wayland in 2020, a bunch of things didn’t work and they’ve been permanently traumatised.

I switched my laptop years ago, but my desktop only fairly recently - multi screen, mixed DPI with variable refresh rates for gaming took longer to be ready than my laptop’s single screen, normal DPI, fixed refresh rate config.

If you deal with the fundamental problems of the protocol itself and also provide backwards compatibility… Congrats, you’ve just reinvented Wayland and XWayland.

Dealing with X11’s problems while still being X11, when X11 is the problem? Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath either.

A human centipede of slop.

There’s people on Youtube who teach you how to take a video’s transcript, use it to generate an AI video and upload it to Youtube.

And they’re upset people are taking transcripts of their videos, generating AI videos and uploading them.

Just… Just take a minute to contemplate that. It’s amazing.

High resolution graphical assets are big. That’s why we’re now getting 32GB video cards in desktop PCs.

Sure, nobody’s doing super high end graphics on a phone, but it doesn’t take much high resolution art to take a big bite out of that 6GB. Phones don’t have separate system and video RAM, remember.

That’s because empty RAM is wasted RAM.

You want to keep RAM full of stuff you aren’t using right now. That stuff can be erased almost instantly if you need the RAM for something else. That’s why OSs list “Available RAM” and “Free RAM” as two separate things.

Removing all the idle apps from RAM just means you need to wait longer every time you open one of them.

the ICQ age

There’s a blast from the past. Uh oh!

Reminds of when companies offshored their whole dev team and just sent requirements to them thinking they’d make code cheaper.

I mean, it was cheaper. It’s just that it was also awful. It was basically like firing all your senior devs and giving their work to randos who can’t code, but with plausible deniability.

That’s binary blob drivers for you, you just try different versions and hope it gets better someday.

One of the big advantages to open source drivers is that you can do a bisect to track some new breakage back to a specific patch. Sure, most people don’t know how to do that, but there’s a lot of people who can. And then the problem gets fixed for everybody.

I’m not sure government can. AI isn’t a profitable company with a product that people want which has a short-term cash flow problem, AI is a money pit that will just burn up as much cash as you can pour in.

If they hand AI firms a trillion dollars, they’ll be back for another trillion next year.

I didn’t do the legally mandated number of "Hail Corporate!"s yesterday.

“Nobody wants to work” always has the unspoken second part, “for what I want to pay.”

Related: https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity

It’s possible they’re getting more stuff written and more emails sent, but the lower signal to noise ratio means this isn’t actually helping.

He’s looking for his balls.