Counterpoint: I have a $5 RISC-V computer that has a dedicated AI chip capable of running basic image recognition/voice synthesis/time series prediction/whatever you want algorithms. This is what people need to think about when they think about the future of AI. All this shit with piping things into datacenters to throw away energy talking to the stochastic parrot is A - not even remotely going to be the main use for AI, B - not going to be necessary for tons of tasks (likely won’t be necessary to have ChatGPT-quality interactions within a couple years). ChatGPT is like the ENIAC of AI. Complaining about the energy use of AI and pointing to the energy use behind ChatGPT queries is the same kind of mistake as when Thomas Watson said in 1943 that there was, maybe, a world market for five computers. Yeah, there was maybe a world market for five ENIAC’s, tops, but get with the picture, people. AI’s much bigger than LLM’s.

There was that Islamophobic Buddhist monk who self-immolated in Sri Lanka in 2013 to protest Muslim butchers. People across the spectrum weighed in on the idea of burning yourself alive to protect cattle. I don’t recall anyone calling it crazy then. At most, reprehensible, misguided, etc. But the idea you’d kill yourself to protest the treatment of cattle wasn’t considered “crazy” at the time.

The line seems to be when you’d do it not just for cattle, but also for Palestinians? Is that the conclusion I’m supposed to draw? That’s when self-immolation starts becoming “crazy?”

See, in order to assume his act was “crazy,” we have to start by making it a normative principle nobody should ever lay down their life for others. I think the divergence over whether his act was political or was he automatically crazy boils down to: are you a bootlicker?

Hmm, on plus side, Aldi tends to run cheaper and have generally decent quality for the prices. On the down side, Aldi also owns TJ’s, who’s currently trying to overturn the NLRB and thereby destroy most of the infrastructure of American labor law.

I just go to Kroger, because they suck, but they haven’t signed on to abolish a huge swath American labor law with some spurious bullshit

Yeah, and as “ideals” go, an OS design philosophy is a bad hill to die on. Just take the process supervision and go.

I don’t really get this idea that it’s bad for systemd to be a standard. Do you remember what it was like before systemd? Tons of things that couldn’t be done reliably, or at all, by the desktop environment, because there was no underlying “system” for the desktop to engage with. Automounting drives, everything, was an unreliable disaster.

Problem is, nobody’s alternative solves all of the problems people wanted their init system to solve. People don’t like Poettering, but he made inroads with systemd in large part because he actively took notes on what people wanted, and then delivered. He’s an unlikable prick, but he delivered a product it was hard for many projects to say no to. That’s why project after project adopted it. It solved problems that needed solving. This counts for more than adherence to an archaic design philosophy from the 70’s most people don’t follow anyways.

init.d wasn’t really what you’d call an “init” “system.” It was shell + conventions about how to write shell scripts to manage each service. It effectively offloaded most of the work people wanted an init system/service supervisor to do onto developers that just needed to ship a system service. Templates/patterns/best practices emerged, but at the end of the day, init.d was just shell, and it caused tons of problems.

The extra complexity of systemd is in exchange for dependency management, service supervision, tons of things that are important/desirable for sysadmins/developers today, but are all far outside the scope of init. I’d much rather cope with the extra complexity of systemd in exchange for being able to write an actual service definition file.

Libraries. If you had to write everything from scratch, nothing would ever get done. You pick a UI library/framework that meets your needs and is supported in the language you’re using, and go from there.

You can use a Web interface, it’s absolutely hideous but it gets the job done. I hear QT is pretty easy to develop for and it’s cross-platform.

Also, the countries with higher quality of life are facing their own versions of the problems the US is facing. The world system is slowly collapsing and we’re all supposed to pretend like nothing is happening.