zeruch

" It's so boring the kids are still complaining about people who have more money than them" That's not what they are complaining about; they are complaining about them rigging the system further in their favor to the detriment of everyone else.

There is a crucial difference there, and history easily explains why if one bothers.

I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they just have rarely had that demo'd to them.

"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)

It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.

This is....ridiculous. Does Meta also capture it's CEOs movements with such fidelity?

I still have my Sony Vaio from that period. Its on a shelf covered in stickers and signatures (e.g. Illiad, ESR, Commander Taco/Hemos, etc) as a kind of keepsake, since I suspect it wouldn't even boot up after so many years of not being used.

What an utterly strange epoch.

"It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments" Absolutely.

The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.

I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.

"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.

Nobody of a certain age. If you are over 35 you'll remember when they were known as a Chinese firm buying up all of the IBM Thinkpad business...

Hurd is long past ever being anything but a pet project of RMS and his familiars.

Xenix was worse, but only a little. Both it and HPUS were atrocities.

Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).

I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.

Network effects and an as-yet insufficient friction to leave en masse has kept LI in a semi-moated space.

There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.

Which college?

Vera-Augustin, the two founders.

"but I got the impression that their server line was just as important."

They were far more important for the business.

They did. I actually worked on a few of those projects (e.g. Stampede Linux)

One of these days I should blog about how we ended up hosting Python for years...

1. I have some serious biases against Penguin at the time (for...reasons) and frankly was never impressed with their product. 2. Without getting into a bunch of weird minutiae, we got big enough to be a threat to people who could afford to bleed us; case in point, we started doing incredibly well in HPC clusters, and big vendors like IBM and Dell started to offer severely below cost hardware packaged with their full services that completely undercut a business that already had thin margins.

IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.

Reddit was contemporary to Digg, it just survived 'better'

They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

(disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)

Some people can make a living doing something they enjoy. "Success" is not fame, and vice versa (they are wholly orthogonal to each other), and I remember reading an interview with a member of Canadian group Saga, who in the US had like 1 top 40 hit in the early 80s and a few more minor ones in their home country, but ultimately they sell a few thousand records a year, and tour regularly in two "big" markets for them : Puerto Rico and Germany, and they seem to make roughly a middle class lifestyle doing so.

Beats being an accountant or urologist I suppose.

I suspect there's a similar vibe for cover band folks.

"I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well"

Lobbying by big ISPs.

That language feels like it came from a fever dream of Alan Greenspan.

Many are not.

ESRs gravity peaked around 2004.

It did, and that statement is inaccurate only in the fact that it fails to mention that the driver behind the descent was pure self-dealing avarice.

If there is one thing Tufte taught a lot of people, clarity and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.

I've tried so many todo apps and the only thing I've stuck to is Obsidian and a daily morning habit of checking my list (I check it multiple times a day, but I set at least one 'forced' point in the morning to level set.

I also use a notebook that often feeds that obsidian tab because I still often prefer to take notes/diagram by hand. The kinetic action sticks with me better.

I haven't bought a Rotring in decades (and the Rotring rapidographs I do have still hold up), and wouldn't at this stage given the decline in build quality since their buy-up from Newell (although I hear their APAC product is subcontracted to Holbein, which still has a great rep).

"All dogs are completely safe, and only attack when provoked" this is relentlessly vague, and not in line what most animal cognition specialists or vets will tell you.