probablybetter

no. just NO. look at maps of polio proliferation before/after Jonas Salk, the frikkin guy who DISCOVERED/CREATED the polio vaccine, and then look at maps related to Gates work, which, while admirable, bears no comparison from the night-vs-day world of pre-polio-vaccine vs post-vaccine. Wards of people in iron-lung machines staring at mirrors on the ceiling. It was before your time, but this is no excuse for spouting total nonsense.

WHAT??? Jonas Salk GAVE the IP for the Polio Vaccine TO THE WORLD FOR FREE!

how dare you say that Billionaires gave us these things. you are telling lies.

no, creating the actual technical standards and the internet is/was hard. monetizing it and walling off sections of it is STEALING FROM THE PUBLIC that which we already PAID for and selling it back to us!

Zoom!? WebRTC! Proprietary XYZ? Standards!

and a lot of it is directly funneled to crony's of the current king...

I doubt DOGE will recommend cuts to SpaceX funding.

I need to remind you that Mush has invented nothing nor is he an engineer. His vast personal wealth is extracted, and at least part of it's vastness is due to corruption. Mush's personal views expressed on his own-media-trumpet Xitter, have hampered more technological innovation than he has ever enabled or paid for.

BTW what's SpaceX carbon footprint like? This 'man' also just paid for a slice of the US presidency that just pulled the US out of a global treaty to attempt to address human-caused climate crises that are unfolding in front of our face on a daily basis as predicted. Mush has done net harm to Earth, not good.

sure it is. "mature" markets are only interesting for large moneyed entities to try to tweak things and squeeze .01% more profit out of a service/process/product.

innovation is risky and rewards accordingly.

Ycombinator app-startups are low-hanging-fruit with marginal innovation and marginal risk => it ain't hardware, and it's just webservices and a few React devs...

SpaceX and DARPA and ARPA = our tax dollars.

nice try. The billionaires gave us none of the above. Sincerly, an old programmer who was actually there when these things were funded, often at the public expense in many nations.

Computer games are pan-et-circenses, IMO, but I also don't recall any billionaires having created any.

Your John Galt story is trite and untruthful.

They are dodging a bubble and don't even know it. If America thinks it can base future prosperity on the AppStore and AI, it should think again, because actual innovations are needed, and this low-hanging-fruit tech-bro-fantasy investment cakewalk will not provide anything but pain upon the inevitable comedown and disillusionment. You will not be able to sell products nor services with the term AI anywhere near them in the very near future. (already the case amongst a certain percentage of us)

RaspberryPi's SOC famously boots from it's GPU first, then it's CPU. The GPU is a binary blob (not open source) thanks to Broadcom...

Broadcom... that same hardware mfgr that makes your Debian install so much extra fun... (well, if you care about networking and integrated controllers...)

It boggles my mind that the entirety of the hardware world cannot accept the simple concept of making computer hardware capable of booting and running <latest open source operating systems literally purpose-built to take advantage of general hardware standards the Hardware Manufacturers WERE ALREADY MAKING for Microsoft Windows (TM)>

I mean, it's not like Linux didn't spend 30 frikkin' years specifically aping hardware that carried the WIntel brand from the IBM PC with MS-DOS up to WindozeWhatever13 or whatever they are up to now...

I cannot fathom the strange incentivization schema that would cause the entirety of the existing mass-retail OEM computer production to be "Windows ONLY" and actively contributing to literally selling LESS of their own units via efforts to lock their own hardware against running your own damned OS upon it!

I buy hardware I can run Linux on. I have no use for Microsoft Windows in any capacity for any purpose, period. end of story.

Hardware Manufacturers please take note! (I remain puzzled... Dell even sells some preloaded Linux laptops, IIRC... what gives, Dell?)

Please tell me what quantum leap was provided by LLMs. Please inform me of any developments that made current LLMs possible.

I contend that there are none. Witness the actual transformer kernel technologies over the last 20 years and try to find a single new one.

Neural Networks? that's 90's technology. Scale is the only new factor I can think of.

This is an investor-dollar driven attempt to use brute-force to deliver "magical" results when the fundamental technology is being mis-represented to the general public, to CTOs, and even to Developers.

This is dishonest and will not end well.

Please name me one technological advance of major import in the fundamental transformer kernel space that has occurred in the last decade that has any import at all on today's LLMs.

I will wait.

it is unlikely that the output of LLMs will improve. there is no fundamental breakthrough in transformer technology (or anything else) powering todays' LLM "revolution"

There is only scale being employed like never before => vast datasets being plowed through being sufficient to provide the current illusion for the less observant humans out there...

10 years from now this current fad of LLM's pretending to be intelligent will look preposterous and unbelievable: "how COULD they all have fallen for such hype, and what a cost of joules/computation... the least deterministic means possible of coming to any result... just wasteful for no purpose..."

Consider the bubble already burst, in terms of developer confidence in this sort of nonsense.

Containerization and orchestration of containers vs learning how to configure HaProxy, how to use Certbot, hmmmm

The questions you pose are legit skills web developers need to have. Nothing you mentioned is obviated by K8s or containerization.

"oh but you can get someone elses pre-configured image" uh huh... sure, you can also install malware. You will also need to one day maintain or configure the software running in them. You may even need to address issues your running software causes. You can't do that without mastering the software you are running!

Author presumes we need Docker in the first paragraph. I suppose this is why they think we need Kubernetes. I propose using "the operating system" as the basic-unit here. It already runs on shared hardware thanks to a hypervisor. Operating systems know how to network.

The entire desire for Docker in a production app comes down to willful ignorance of how software one depends upon is configured.

I have no need for Redis in my life. There is nothing unique it provides in 2024, and they have no special sauce I would consider getting hooked-on (locked into).

I am trying to remember why their software became considered ubiquitous for caching and sessions, and I reckon many a framework is busy rectifying this choice, as we speak.

... but, garbage collection, no direct memory management = impossible to write any firmware etc that needed to directly set bitflags and such. how could you call Go "low-level systems programming"?

Relative to Ruby, an interpreted dynamic language, sure, I will grant you that Go is lower-level, in the sense that you can compile a binary executable from it.

Go also happens to have web server primitives in their standard library and you COULD build a web app with only net/http...

i saw that... (gem, ruby... hahhaha)

I would say that bad ideas are having a heyday across all economic sectors, not only tech. You could call it the epoch of bad ideas having a heyday, if you want.

One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.

no Linux build? (appimage or snap etc? not expecting distro support for proprietary small-shop software)

If you have actually learned from the code, you learned about code structures, and yes, they are attributed/named/noted. Everything from "Gang of Four" patterns to applied mathematical algorithms like a Fast-Fourier-Transform have attribution and history.

Where I find myself frustrated with the general argument you put forth is that it alleges that pattern-extraction is the extent and essence of human learning.

I do not think that the current LLMs-are-AI trend has grasped neither the essence of intelligence nor learning. I recognize that one cannot paint an entire field of study with broad strokes, but there is a certain amount of in-industry Kool-Aid consumption that, while perhaps rewarded by more gullible portions of the market, is poisoning the public well of goodwill.

This can only lead to a very harsh backlash, which we already observe undermining the deeply-funded attempts at foisting this stuff upon the world at large as "AI"

Computers are not human being and never will be. The fact stands that CoPilot has no notion of code outside of its training data and is merely a pattern-extraction machine. You can dismiss this claim, but you cannot disprove it.

I would avoid Facebook and Meta products in general. I do NOT trust them. We have approx. 20 years of their record to go upon.

Am I the only one that sees unfriendly input/output channel names with Pipewire in client software?

(Bitwig, Ardour, Reaper, more? I would like to see "Input 1" or "Channel 1" and not some strange ciphers when trying to assign things in a little dropdown selector in a DAW)

wow. no. debian is the opposite of a dead end. now, ubuntu and lubuntu and xubuntu = i agree. android, however, is garbage. - it most certainly is not consistent across devices and editions - having to do phone-like-stuff on a desktop/laptop is painful - i hate Android. It's settings bother me the most. there is ZERO organization here! There are DARK patterns galore, it's built to dissuade you from doing anything serious.

I can only take your comment as either a joke, or you literally only use a phone/tablet in life.

news flash: Android audio is ALSA at it's core. Additionally: native Android audio is ultra-high-latency... completely unacceptable for pro-audio

The "mess" of Linux audio is due to ONE reason: single-client ALSA driver model.

every other layer is a coping mechanism and the plurality and divergence of the FOSS community responds in various ways: - Jack - PulseAudio - PipeWire

I am unclear why Jaroslav Kyocera chose to make ALSA single-client, but Apples CoreAudio multi-client driver model is the right way to do digital audio on general-purpose computing devices running multi-tasking OS'es on application processors, in my opinion.

Current issues this article does not address that actually constitute large parts of the "mess" of Linux Audio:

- channel mapping that is not transparent nor clearly assigned anywhere in userspace. (aka, why does my computer insist that my multi-input pro-audio interface is a surround-sound interface? I don't WANT high-pass-filters on the primary L/R pair of channels. I am not USING a subwoofer. WTF)

- the lack of a STANDARD for channel-mapping, vs the Alsa config standards, /etc/asound.conf etc.

- the lack of friendly nomenclature on hardware inputs/outputs for DAW software, whether on the ALSA layer, or some sound-server layer. (not to mention that ALSA calls an 8-channel audio-interface "4 stereo devices")

- probably more, but I can't remember. My current audio production systems have the DAW software directly opening an ALSA device. I cannot listen to audio elsewhere until I quit my DAW. This works and I can set my latency as low as the hardware will allow it.

this is the thing: more than about 10ms latency is unacceptable for audio recording in the multitrack fashion, as one does.

this.

could but it's owners might have a vested interest in influencing public perceptions to PREVENT positive social outcomes and favor the owners financial interests.

(seems rather more likely, given who will/would own such a machine)

it doesn't?

if you are referring to issues using sqlite as a production database for large-scale web applications, I would remind you of the phrase "horses for courses".

https://sqlite.org/whentouse.html

I feel that it is important to point out to native english speakers that the word "decadent" shares a root with decay, and simply means a decayed rotten state, a decline. It is perjorative. There are no implications of 'opulence', unlike the common usage of "decadence" in English as a sort of slang to describe a rich chocolate cake, for example.