AI can code - but can it understand what it missing from the organisation and persuade it to chnage - to spend years at industry conferences?

Look at Starliner. NASA just announced that Boeing stuffed up, not with an engineering mistake (no one still knows exactly what broke) but that the whole organisation is so screwed up and so political Nasa just don’t believe Boeing can fix it.

AI cannot fix our turf wars. That’s not intelligence (humans know going to war is bad, but Putin still exists). I ye the systems we live in, and work in.

Changing those is feasible - once they are coded, transparent and open To inspection in a democracy.

We need programmable introspective systems of organisation - democracies in other words.

The engineering was not the problem - the problem was the organisation was more or less toxic and incapable of doing engineering. Writing code that won’t get used because if politics is a job we and AI can both do.

But somehow Linux still took over my personal and professional life.

Going back seems nice but there need to be a compelling reason -docker is fine, the costs don’t add up any more. I do t have a real logical argument beyond that.

However, in 2003 Intel introduced CPUs with SMT and in 2005 AMD introduced multi-core CPUs.

These multi-threaded and/or multi-core CPUs quickly replaced the single-threaded CPUs, especially in servers, where the FreeBSD stronghold was.

FreeBSD 4 could not handle multiple threads. In the following years Linux and Windows have been developed immediately to take advantage of multiple threads and cores, while FreeBSD has required many years for this, a time during it has become much less used than before, because new users were choosing Linux and some of the old users were also switching to Linux for their new computers that were not supported by FreeBSD.

Eventually FreeBSD has become decent again from the PoV of performance, but it has never been again in a top position and it lacks native device drivers for many of the hardware devices that are supported by Linux, due to much fewer developers able to do the necessary reverse engineering work or the porting work for the case when some company provides Linux device drivers for their hardware.

For the last 3 decades, I have been using continuously both FreeBSD and Linux. I use Linux on my desktop PCs and laptops, and in some computational servers where I need software support not available for FreeBSD, e.g. NVIDIA CUDA (NVIDIA provides FreeBSD device drivers for graphic applications, but not CUDA). I continue to use FreeBSD for many servers that implement various kinds of networking or storage functions, due to exceptional reliability and simplicity of management.

Nevertheless, after this initial setback they had recovered and almost a decade later, around 2003, they had become the best solution for many server applications, even if they were not so widely known as Linux, which had spread a lot during the years when *BSDs were tied in lawsuits.

The slowness of their evolution towards multi-threading, which was caused by having much less developers than Linux and less corporate support, was what has propelled again Linux in front of them and this handicap has never been recovered later.

The 2 points listed by you are of course correct, by they are linked to the continuous reduction of the number of FreeBSD users that has started in 2003 and which has lasted for several years, which was caused by the fact that even when you were already an experienced FreeBSD user and preferred it over Linux, it was pointless to install FreeBSD on any new state-of-the-art computer, because FreeBSD could not harness its power.

I'm sure some people have a sunk-cost feeling with Linux and will get defensive of this, but ironically this was exactly the argument I had heard 20 years ago - and I was defensive about it myself then.. This has only become more true though.

It's really hard to argue against Linux when even architecturally poor decisions are papered over by sheer force of will and investment; so in a day-to-day context Linux is often the happy path even though the UX of FreeBSD is more consistent over time.

Which surely says something about all these ideological purity tests

People who don't understand shit about how the system behaves and are comfortable with that. "I install a package, I hit the button, it works"

.. and

People who understand very deeply how computers work, and genuinely enjoy features of the NT Kernel, like IOCP and the performance counters they offer to userland.

What's weird to me is that the competence is bimodal; you're either in the first camp or the second. With Linux (+BSD/Solaris etc;) it's a lot more of a spectrum.

I've never understood exactly why this is, but it's consistent. There's no "middle-good" Windows developer.

The machine and installation is just fungible.

I think I've had Linux as a primary OS 2 times, FreeBSD once and osX once, what's pulled me back has been software and fiddling.

I'm on the verge of giving Linux or osX another shot though, some friends has claimed that fiddling is virtually gone on Linux these days and Wine also seems more than capable now to handle the software that bought me back.

But also, much of the software is available outside of Windows today.

With 9front you OFC need expertise on par of NT but without far less efforth. The books (9intro), the papers, CSP for concurrency... it's all there, there's no magic, you don't need ollyDBG or an NT object explorer to understand OLE and COM for instance.

RE 9front? Maybe on issues while debugging, because the rest it's at /sys/src, and if something happens you just point Acid under Acme to go straight to the offending source line. The man pages cover everything. Drivers are 200x smaller and more understandable than both NT and Unix. Meanwhile to do that under NT you must almost be able to design an ISA by yourself and some trivial compiler/interpreter/OS for it, because there's no open code for anything. And no, Wine is not a reference, but a reimplementation.

Gamers tend to be somewhere in the middle though.

Errr… Galileo was asked to write a book discussing both sides of the heliocentric / geocentric debate … and so wrote a book with two characters having a debate while walking in a garden - one named (I paraphrase for effect) “Galileo” and one named “Pope Simplehead”

Needless to say the next twenty years under house arrest gave him a lot of time to think about character names :-)

They have coexisted with humans just fine over the past couple years.

Someone could probably do a DOS attack on the human monitors, though, sort of like what happened with that power outage in San Francisco.

Even if you fool the sign-recognizing LLM with prompt injection, it'll be an equivalent of wrong road sign. And Waymo is not going to drive into the wall even if someone places a "detour" sign pointing there.

I’m not sure what I want from our security services, but security sounds good.

Also I wonder if there is a background level of foreign agent activity they accept and how is that related to the police’s paradox of using confidential informants

Yup, there's constantly a number of known spies in pretty much all countries. If all were ejected, the other country would do the same to their spies and monitoring compliance with projects would become harder - so it seems in everyone's interest to not be too strict. See for example https://johnsontr.github.io/assets/files/spies_current.pdf

Also there's the idea of "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" which generalises to lots of things - including this one.

Nothing will improve as long as Khan is Mayor, and may not even if he is replaced.

Anyway, MI6 (SIS) is the overseas spies, MI5 is the domestic spy agency.

That the perpetrators may turn out to be foreign agents is neither here nor there, only if they were diplomatic staff would it not be a domestic policing issue. However the UK police have largely withdrawn from certain areas, and this would simply be another symptom.

High Court action suggests there was a civil case pursuing the perpetrators (or their principals), rather than a criminal case. With a properly functioning police system, that should not be necessary.

Kahn is the PCC for London, he sets their priorities.

It is the job of the British intelligence services to blow someone up in Riyadh to deter these activities.

Can you guarantee that something like this will never happen on your watch?

>Homicide rate now 1.1 per 100,000 people, lower than any other UK city and major global cities including New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2) and Toronto (1.6)

I guess you'll praise Khan, as PCC, for that?

For example “High School Musical” Made a billion dollars withoute even knowing such a thing existed.

Edit This is the first I heard of this as well, but it bothers me. Along with the Salisbury poisonings I would be interested in how any criminal activities foreign agents are suspected of doing in the UK (Russia presumably heading the list)

The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)

The CRTs with memory for early computers were actually derived from the special CRTs used in video cameras. There the image formed by the projected light was converted in a distribution of charge stored on an electrode, which was then sensed by scanning with an electron beam.

Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".

Then the CRT memories have become obsolete almost instantaneously, due to the development of magnetic core memories, which did not require periodic refreshing and which were significantly faster. The fact that they were also non-volatile was convenient at that early time, though not essential.

Today, due to security concerns, you would actually not want for your main memory to be non-volatile, unless you also always encrypt it completely, which creates problems of secret key management.

So CRT memories have become obsolete several years before the replacement of vacuum tubes in computers with transistors, which happened around 1959/1960.

Besides CRT memories and delay line memories, another kind of early computer memory that has quickly become obsolete was the memory with magnetic drums.

In the cheapest early computers (like IBM 650), the main memory was not a RAM (i.e. neither a CRT nor with magnetic cores), but a magnetic drum memory (i.e. with sequential periodic access to data).

This fast run to use LLMs in everything can be undone by one court decision - and the sensible thing is to isolate as much as you can.

Really interesting insight

That's funny because they have been releasing a ton of named hero characters lately.

A (I'm unsure how large) portion of the community hates this style of game design and call it "Herohammer"

I play the space bugs because I like huge swarms of things, so thematically I agree with them.

right... there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens, and where are the "millions of coming copyright claims" now?

i don't think what you are talking about has anything to do with killing openai, there's no one court decision that has to do with any of this stuff.

Some genres of music make heavy use of 'samples' - tiny snippets of other recordings, often sub-5-seconds. Always a tiny fraction of the original piece, always chopped up, distorted and rearranged.

And yet sampling isn't fair use - the artists have to license every single sample individually. People who release successful records with unlicensed samples can get sued, and end up having to pay out for the samples that contributed to their successful record.

On the other hand, if an artist likes a drum break but instead of sampling it they pay another drummer to re-create it as closely as possible - that's 100% legal, no more copyright issue.

Hypothetically, one could imagine a world where the same logic applies to generative AI - that art generated by an AI trained on Studio Ghibli art is a derivative work the same way a song with unlicensed drum samples is.

I think it's extremely unlikely the US will go in that direction, simply because the likes of nvidia have so much money. But I can see why a cautious organisation might want to wait and see.