geophile

Cheap PCs enabled the creation of Linux. Linux runs on the descendants of PCs, not mainframes.

I don’t agree. In the mainframe/PC battle, MS and Apple were basically on the same side. Once the dinosaurs went extinct, different mammals fought for dominance.

Not sure what your point is. I’m commenting on a moment in time which is like an earlier moment in time. A different moment in time will have different analogs.

This is exactly the mainframe vs PC dynamic.

No, I don’t think so. PC + MS Office killed Wang custom hardware/software, for example. LibreOffice is much later, and can’t displace MS Office due to network effects. Cheaper won, cheapest can’t because of those effects.

Yes, as I pointed out, mainframes are still a thing. But the vast bulk of the market has moved on.

But aren’t the frontier models heavily subsidized? That’s not sustainable.

Exactly. Even putting aside “better”, brains show that orders of magnitude greater efficiency are possible, for training and operation.

But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins.

- PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to.

- PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products.

- Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge market share from the mainframe world.

Ignoring the huge Chinese open-weight models for a moment:

- The training costs and resource requirements for frontier models are unsustainable. The high price, and social pushback, mean that the American companies producing these models are precarious.

- There are enormous financial incentives for research results allowing for cheaper, less resource-intensive models of high quality.

- Local LLMs on consumer hardware are akin to the PC hobbyist world of the 70s and 80s.

Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now.

Getting back to the Chinese models: They allow for new competition against Anthropic and OpenAI, basically SaaS renting out these very capable AIs much cheaper. That will just accelerate trends.

No it was Java. Sorry, it was late 90s.

I used to love ORMs so much that I built one for Java, in the early 90s, and it was one of the main offerings of a startup that I joined. I have come around 180 degrees. My rethink started when a developer at a Wall Street bank said: having Oracle on my resume is valuable. Having your ORM on my resume is not.

And then there’s the “now you have two problems” dynamic. You not only have to write high-performing queries, but you have to get the ORM to generate that query for you. And sometimes you don’t want objects. And the schema mapping has to track schema changes.

Just write the damned SQL, it’s not that difficult.

That's exactly what I'm doing -- Mini M4 Pro 64GB, qwen3.6.

My hearing is not great, but I think I would have noticed the fan, and I have never heard it. In fact, I had to google to find out if it even has a fan.

Bad managers, in general, grab a metric and then unthinkingly optimize it. I’ve never worked for FAANG, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have bad managers too.

My experience is almost identical. I have found that I need to be very careful with planning, breaking things down into small isolated steps (I can have qwen do this); and also (me) writing a very clear design. Relying on qwen to fill in a lot of those precise details results in those about-to-write loops.

Yeah, that edit inability is weird. I’ve updated AGENTS.md to limit editing (as opposed to rewriting) and that helps a little.

Oh spare me the cult of Larry Wall. His language was crap, and his pontification was unbearable.

That said, he's not wrong about laziness. I'd state it less cutely: Good software takes time, so be patient. The same can be said of most things created by people. Sure, there are flashes of inspiration, like Paul McCartney sitting down and just coming up with Get Back. But those are quite rare. And even in those cases, it often takes time to refine the idea to its final form.

From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.

The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.

Can someone write a tl:dr; about what’s going on? I am a very satisfied user of LibreOffice, and some of the comments here, suggesting we will need an alternative, are troubling.

On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.

I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.)

My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.

Yes, I believe I said exactly that.

I have been using Pop_OS for many years, and I’m still on 22.04, which uses X11. I don’t understand the pros and cons of X11 vs. Wayland, I just want a working desktop.

24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever.

I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year.

To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.

All good points. But what would be really useful and easy is allowing the iPhone to be used as a full-fledged computer on a file system completely distinct from that used to run the phone. Then my laptop is just peripherals connected to my phone.

I think it’s a pretty strong statement. It is unfortunately weakened by going along with the “Department of War” propaganda. I believe that the name is “Department of Defense” until Congress says otherwise, no matter what the Felon in Chief says.

Z-order based indexes avoid the resolution problem. Basically:

- Generate z-values for spatial objects. Points -> a single z-value at the highest resolution of the space. Non-points -> multiple z-values. Each z-value is represented by a single integer, (I use 64 bit z-values, which provide for space resolution of 56 bits.) Each integer represents a 1-d range. E.g. 0x123 would represent 0x123000 through 0x123fff

- Spatial join is basically a merge of these z-values. If you are joining one spatial object with a collection of N spatial objects, the time is logN. If you are joining two collections, then it's more of a linear-time merge.

For more information: PROBE Spatial Data Modeling and Query Processing in an Image Database Application. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 14(5): 611-629 (1988)

An open source java implementation: https://github.com/geophile/geophile. (The documentation includes a number of corrections to the published algorithm.)

The article gets at this briefly and moves on: "I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time."

I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsource a task effectively if you understand the complete task and its implementation very deeply. But if you don't, then you don't know if what you are getting back is correct, maintainable, scalable.

I did an approximate calculation.

The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.

For a long time, I had a MBP (this is in Intel days), with a Linux VM. It was like a reverse mullet, party in front (multimedia), work in back (dev).

And then:

    - Butterfly keyboard
    - Touchbar
    - M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.

So I switched to System76/Linux (Pop OS) and that has been wonderful, not to mention, much cheaper.

FWIW, On Reddit, I am seeing more and more discussions on the Linux subreddits or people getting fed up with Windows and switching to Linux. Usually, it's the Windows 11 upgrade that finally did it.