flmontpetit

Nvidia doesn't exactly have Oracle's reputation when it comes to acquiring companies, but given its overall hostility towards competition and open source I can't blame people for being anxious about the news.

The most important resource for self-hosting LLMs is now under the control of a company that has very markedly kept the specialized hardware outside of the broader public's hands.

My current position has implemented a toolchain that essentially makes debugging either impossible or extremely unwieldy for any backend projects and nobody seems to think it's a problem.

It's hard to see the benefit in letting every hardware manufacturer attempt to carve out their own little artificial interconnect monopoly and flood the market with redundant, wasteful solutions.

I think Microsoft will let Windows slowly die over the years. I am certain that at the strategy level, they have already accepted that their time as a device platform vendor will not last. Windows will be on life support for a while, as MS slowly corrals its massive client base onto its SaaS platforms, before it becomes a relic of the past. Beyond that point, the historical x86 PC-compatible platform lineage will either die with it, or be fully overtaken by Desktop Linux whereupon it will slowly lose ground to non-x86 proprietary platforms over the years.

The average end user will be using some sort of Tivoized device, which will be running a closed-source fork of an open-source kernel, with state-of-the-art trusted computing modules making sure nobody can run any binaries that weren't digitally signed and distributed through an "app store" owned by the device vendor and from which they get something like a 25% cut of all sales.

In other words, everything will be a PlayStation, and Microsoft will be selling their SaaS services to enterprise users through those. That is my prediction.

I am frankly wondering if this man believed in any of the things he was saying, or if he was being purely cynical.

The proposition in this article is extremely simple. Adobe Flash would have compromised the end-user experience on iOS devices, so it wasn't allowed into the walled garden. All the lip service he is paying to open source here reeks of PR bullshit. They are perhaps the worst offender, and the furthest removed from the idea of an "open web", of all the silicon valley companies.

Pretending that WebKit was an open source project born at Apple, for the sake of contributing to the open web or whatever, is straight up trashy. Besides this failure to attribute, one could argue that Apple needed to comply with the LGPL when they forked KHTML and KJS. I see no reason to believe that a fully original browser engine born at Apple would be open source.

Fascinating to me how Windows and Linux have cross-pollinated each other through things like WSL and Proton. Platform convergence might become a thing within our lifetimes.

The inexorable process of using security as a pretext to enshittify your platform carries on. I don't believe there is a meaningful difference between Google and Apple anymore.

I used to work for a .NET shop that randomly wrote some automation scripts in bash. The expertise to maintain them long term (and frankly, write them half-decently to begin with) simply wasn't there. Never understood why they didn't just write their tooling in C#.

Maybe this will make it seem like a more viable approach.

I don't believe we will live to see the day where these models can replace a competent production team. At best they'll be what LLMs are to creative writing, which has so far only conclusively replaced low effort blogspam and fraud/plagiarism.

It's already difficult enough to make a successful book adaptation, even WITH authorial intent. Can't imagine that hours of patchwork AI-generated video, with all its artifacting and consistency errors, will fare any better than "The Rings of Power".

By all means. Just not on one of the most popular software development frameworks in the world. Maybe that can wait until after the concept is proven.

From a quick search, Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years as a baseline, and Ubuntu Pro goes up to 12 years. RHEL releases are supported for 10 years.

I'm guessing it's similar with SUSE and other "business" distros.

And that's only because of deposit insurance and heavy regulations on fractional banking.

There is no reason to trust any bank implicitly. As a matter fact that have proven not to be deserving of it as recently as 2008.

Baffles me how this industry is basically speedrunning through the troubled history of regular finance, and every piece of legislation and every institution has to be rebuilt from scratch even though the mechanisms and the problems are almost exactly the same.

Fair, and owning certainly puts you in charge of your own quality of life. My dishwasher has been broken for three months and I'm still having to fight to get it fixed. When I own my own place starting from next July I'm just going to fix things like this on my own time and dime.

Everybody does. Some however only object when the violence is extralegal.

In other words, the rest of of us should just wait until some foreign powers dissolve our oppressors for us?

The core proposition of syndicalism is that the workplace should be democratized. Democracy is far from perfect, and if often fails, but we believe in it nonetheless because everything else is worse.

The real homogeneity is class, thus the need for developing class consciousness in all workers.

It's crazy how we've abstracted financial serfdom out of the status of being a property owner. Contrasted with renting it surely seems like independence, but whether the bank squeezes extra value out of you directly or through the proxy of a landlord, the end result is similar.

Social media cracking down on leftist ideology is something that needs to be studied. They are very slick about it, and will usually find some way to make it appear legit (eg: deliberately interpreting obvious sarcasm as literally as possible and then hitting you with the content policy) but at the end of the day anybody can see that reactionaries can get away with calls to violence and war crime apologia while the rest of us have to be on their absolute best behaviour.

It really goes to show you that capital has no ideology and will adopt whatever shape it needs to as the political climate changes. The United States government is now fascist, and therefore the investor class is also fascist.

Can you employ a doctor even if you don't make more than a doctor? I would hope so.

Self-advocacy for tech industry professionals largely manifests itself in the form of job hopping.

It seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but I've already noticed that when asked questions on LLM usage (eg building RAG pipelines and whatnot), ChatGPT will exclusively refer you to OpenAI products.

Right, it's just semantics then. I forgot how much HN can argue for no reason.

In any case, I'm happy to grant you your wish.

For a minute there I was imagining Python as the actual instruction set and my brain was segfaulting.

Very cool project still

I don't find knitting fun, which is why I don't do it. Even if in theory I like the idea of creating custom clothing on the cheap, and whatnot.

Maybe that's what programming is to you.

Frog in boiling water moment. Most of us have had enough experience with the platform before, during and after this period to know that it's not going back to what it was.

A community that only admits academics is pointless, and a community that only admits American academics is completely absurd.

I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.