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I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?

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True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

Surviving the first and perhaps only crewed Starliner flight, getting a full ISS rotation and a flight home on Dragon feels like a bit of justice for crew who put their careers on hold for Boeing. The Starliner assignments got the short straw and hard to imagine other astronauts not being sympathetic.

Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.

Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.

However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn’t stress me.

The loss of life from WWI and WW2 in particular had a huge impact on country towns. They planted avenues of trees, named roads, engraved the names of young people on walls.

Election cycles are seasonal events and there is a traveling circus that supports them across the English speaking countries. There is also trans-national movement within political influence businesses like News Corp and other lobby groups.

Historically Australia has often adapted media from elsewhere whether it be advertising or television formats and much of the country was so isolated pre-Internet that we never noticed that football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars was a ripoff of hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet.

I expect over negative/false/deceptive campaigning would be regulated as we have a comparatively robust and fair electoral system. AI is built into popular image editing tools and political staffers aren’t necessarily great graphic artists so I expect we will see more low effort AI images in political advertising and everywhere else as society continues to embrace mediocrity and deskilling.

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They run Windows and all this third party software because they would rather pay subscriptions and give up control of their business than retain skilled staff. It has nothing todo with Linux vs Windows. Linux won’t stop doors falling off Boeing planes. It is the myopia of modern business culture.

There have been widespread reports that a faulty software update from security company Crowdstrike is crashing a lot of corporate Windows systems and disrupting many transport and financial services globally.

What is the appropriate response to fascists though? Can we joke about them getting hung from lamp posts or is it too soon?

I am driving in country SA this morning and I see a fossil in a red trump hat walking in the car park in front of my bumper. He would have been fucked if I was driving a Tesla or one of those stupid yank tanks. Thought about telling him to fuck off back to America or throwing a Seig Heil but I think the sad old fuck was just looking for attention and I wasn’t going to play. His grand kids probably don’t talk to him anymore since they succumbed to the “woke mind virus”. Poor fucker, joining a doomsday cult must be isolating.

Over a century ago the locals were goose stepping down the street in support of the Kaiser. Nothing much has changed I guess. While we will be dealing with the consequences if the US fucks things up this isn’t our war. People who are disconnected from society think it is but why become one of those sad fucks.

Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.

Apple, like Nvidia, are a hostile hardware platform. I have a lot of respect for the ingenuity of the people who invest time and energy to unlock closed hardware. That is the true foundation of the free software movement. I am far less sympathetic to people who support these vendors financially and then complain when things don’t work. Caveat emptor.

Windows 9x was extremely time consuming to install with multiple reboots and before that it was all config files. Out of the box 95 couldn’t play media, connect to the internet (thanks trumpet), even access a cd. Normies bought machines pre-installed and got help when the system shit itself. Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust. You had to reboot numerous times and use third party drivers and apps for everything. I recently installed a disposable Win 10 to do a firmware upgrade and Microsoft have come a long way though having to disconnect the Internet to get a local login is very dark.

In the mid 90s the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult were producing chemical weapons which were used in a deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Prior to the attack Aum briefly owned a million acre cattle ranch in Australia where they tested sarin and may have tried to mine uranium ore.

Several nuclear powers are run by autocratic theocracies/cults and the US could be heading in that direction.

Have always said this. My preferred deep fried crumbed pub protein is a massive Weiner Schnitzel with gravy.

Reality. ‘AI’ application just spyware that tracks your spending habits and sells them to mega corps that then adjust the products and pricing to you to maximise profits. Uptake is below investor expectations as most intelligent people realise the service is an expensive con. VC funds run out and backend is shut down. User left with expensive non-functional device.

The first Polaris mission is on an existing proven vehicle and the suits look to be in the final stages. It seems to have taken a lot longer than anticipated but I don’t know if cancellation is likely. If aspects look too difficult they can alter the mission. The risk for the later Polaris Starship program is that Starship gets stuck in development hell which is still very possible.

There have been a number of tech companies that produced very successful and innovative products only to run into a brick wall with a successor product that was too ambitious or made wrong choices and either never made it to market or arrived too late.

The booster, raptor engines and launch infrastructure have been impressive and a lot of fun to watch but now we get to re-entry, full and rapid re-use, orbital refueling etc and the risks of a serious roadblock that eats all the cash and time increases in my opinion. I think it is great that companies are literally pursuing moonshot projects but we have to manage expectations.