RetroTechie

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Failing other mitigations, operations this sensitive could be limited to systems with on-chip RAM. That said: seems more like a theoretical than practical method. Still pretty cool though.

Find a way to lower salt & arsenic content, and it could be an excellent fertilizer.

"sysctl -a | grep net.mptcp.enabled" gives "net.mptcp.enabled = 1" on Debian 13 (Trixie). That's a non-server desktop install fwiw.

Edit - security advisory is here: (dated Oct 16) https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2026/msg00...

And personally I expect that datacenter buildout to slow down. The AI bubble won't last, and average dude in the street simply won't up their spending on AI (applications) to a level that justifies the ongoing buildout.

Yes lots of resources will be wasted. But it won't last, markets & investors will correct the situation somehow.

Can't say I'm feeling much empathy for the passengers here. That said: this companies' planning was piss-poor going by the article. Fuel prices go up & down, can't you hedge / insure against that somehow? Buy fuel in advance, take delivery in batches at locations A, B, C around the world. Something like that? Passengers paid $320k/pop, and best you could do is pass the hat & drop 'em off in the next port? Shame on you.

Edit: don't be surprised if that ship still sits in same Cambodian harbour years from now. With a fat (unpaid) bill attached, amid ongoing legal battles. What a waste...

Nonsense. All that's needed is asking around, and listen. You could literally throw the dice, go to random country X, and ask the 1st person you meet what would make their life better.

Maybe the gutter on their roof is leaking, and they need someone to fix it. If so, maybe there's more people with the same problem, and a gutter-fixer would make people happy.

Sure, if you have a 'grand vision' and (again, by asking around) find there's others sharing that vision, by all means go work on that. But to find something useful to work on, any 'vision' is really not required.

Does it also show that when invoked with a filename? If not: it should! (newbie user invoking with a filename *also* doesn't know how to use the editor. So that help pointer should be shown in both cases).

That'll be server-CPU territory, most likely? (read: not supported by cheapo 4/8-core consumer CPUs)

Yes, what smart RAM manufacturers (or who've been longer in the business) are doing: ramp up production capacity, but do so gradually.

Those ramp-up timelines tend to be longer than the markets' boom & bust cycles. So they'll be looking at longER-term trends to decide what to invest in & when.

1) Assuming that RAM in AI datacenter is doing more useful work than outside it.

Wrong! That depends entirely on what it's used for. And since mr. Altman doesn't KNOW what your or my RAM chip(s) are used for, he also can't decide which use is more important.

2) What he deems more important, is a matter of opinion. What's important to him, likely won't matter to me. And vice versa.

Go read some history books, mr. Altman! Maaany wars have been fought over "I know what's best for everyone! Now bow & kiss my toes!"

Oh and 3) all those AI datacenters are built using other people's money than the tech bros running the show. Whereas consumers pay for RAM with their own money. But hey, no doubt it's more fun to shovel *other* people's cash into a firepit.

Humanity is destroying this planet's biosphere in the pursuit of greed. And it might well cause our demise (not just us, btw) if we don't change our ways.

Imho it's hard to find flaws in the logic laid out in the essay. If you can: bring it on!

Try & look for this in any activity. It's analog to "attention makes [X] more beautiful". Put more effort in = get more out of it.

It's so easy to get lost in things that appear fun/useful at first, but turn into a pointless timesink that gets you nothing.

Do things that move you forward, solve problems, learn, help others, sharpen your skills. For such activities, any effort invested has a return.

This is the future, imho: some tiny, cross-platform, ultra-reliable kernel (like seL4), a set of shims that offer different sets of APIs (OS "personalities" if you will) to apps, an emulator, VM or binary translation layer here & there, all happily living under the same roof.

*BSD (including Linux compat layer) + Wine + some emulators like DOSBox already goes a long way. MS Windows desktop running on top of Linux isn't outside the realm of the possible either. And be sure to check Genode OS.

Fun times ahead!

THIS, so much. One time (~1995 or so?) I bought a boxed SUSE Linux release. Pulled out the book, and practically on the 1st page, there was a copyright notice specifically allowing anyone to copy that book & pass it on. Whereas for practically every other book I'd had in my hands up to that point, copyright notices consisted of various "forbidden to do X, Y or Z" statements.

That right there convinced me I had something different, something special in my hands. Disclaimer: I had read about "open source" before, so I did know what I was looking at. But still it felt special.

Unsurprisingly: note the documentation linked to at the end of jmmv's Unix<->NT comparison above. They're ALL Amazon "buy this book" links. Over on the Linux/BSD side of the fence, such references are typically web pages, man pages, a free-download pdf or the like.

It's not the "free beer" aspect that got me over time. It's the "open", "sharing", "community project", versus "closed", "profit", "property of BigCorp Inc".

Same with food. NONE of this type of preparation is difficult, very space / time consuming, or expensive.

As for the LNG situation: worst case is do without heating. Totally doable in UK climate; extra layers of clothing & blankets / sleeping bags do the job (been there, done that in the NL).

Remember we're talking getting through a crisis, not comfort. Although you can have both with more prep work.

NetBSD userland is not?

For who 'needs' it, USB-Ethernet dongles exist.

Yes, and that makes not dealing with this issue worse on Apple's part. If MacOS' setup somehow doesn't allow untangling a (still deemed trustworthy?!?) root certificate issued by eMudhra from the broken intermediate certificates, then revoke that whole chain including the root & accept collateral damage.

Failing that just provides an incentive for apps to do their own chain-of-trust implementations. Which like you said is not the way to go.

Optimal: piecemeal. As in: X sockets on a board, each socket takes a chip that adds CPU core(s), GPU cores, and some amount of main RAM. More chips, more powerful computer.

Keyword: socket. Read: replaceable. Bad chip out, good chip in. Slow chip out, faster chip in. Soldered onto board = reliable, but a defect could junk the whole machine.

But there's no shortage of software developers who make today's computers slow. Just an idea: perhaps we should replace 'em with Real Programmers (tm)?

Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.

Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.

That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.

Can we have left-chained bicycles, please? (if nothing else, just for the novelty / fun aspect)

That's okay if components are small, have well-defined boundaries / dependencies, are easy to inspect, and all that is rigidly enforced.

Obviously that's not where we are.

On the bright side: in most cases that complexity is self-inflicted, unnecessary, and can be side-stepped if so desired. Problems we're seeing don't occur by necessity: they occur because we've complicated many jobs more than those jobs need to be complicated.

Go back to first principles, cut bs wrappers around everything, and move on.

If a paper/proof is impossible to understand by humans, it could be considered useless (irrelevant) for most intents & purposes.

Regardless how interesting or valid looking, might as well be gibberish pulled from /dev/random. Until:

a) Written down in a form that humans can understand. And/or

b) Turned into practical applications that are demonstrated to work.

In other words: safe to ignore, until a) and/or b) occurs.

Reducing power draw becomes increasingly harder as you go down the scale. And in use, it's either "sleep/idle" (not doing work) or "draw power" (however modest).

More likely / practical use for those 40y tech advances: similar runtime & power draw, but waaay more compute power (and RAM). Like 32-bit 100 MHz+ vs few-MHz 8-bitter. Oh and more beefy battery ofc.

A $1 microcontroller + a character LCD (or epaper) could get you there. Leaving software + physical construction.

How many humans, living what lifestyle, what eco-footprint, Star Trek style tech or back to cavemen after a nuclear winter, those are some of the questions.

As for other species... fewer of them for sure.