Posts by naive

AI: ignore the downers in this world

Pointy haired bosses around the world are abusing the, alleged, capabilities of AI as a reason for firing people and in the wake of this, keep demands for wage increases by remaining employees down.

Unless some weapon manufacturer develops a self replicating combat system that gets out of control, AI will probably do more good than it does harm. We managed by self control to not blow ourselves to bits with nuclear weapons, there is a good probability that we won't allow terminators to breed like rabbits.

Once there are open-source alternatives to this technology, AI can for instance be used to build affordable systems assisting blind people to get around. AI has the potential to save the lives of millions by breaking the monopoly of Big-Pharma in the field of advanced medicine development. AI maybe enables efficient creation of effective alternatives that can be reasonably priced, allowing more people access to cures instead of dying due to their inability to generate "share holder value" for Big-Pharma.

AI is a technology that proliferates knowledge and helps to give access to high-level information to more people. Starting with the printing press, the world just got a better place with each new technology giving more people capabilities that were previously only accessible to a few.

Don't feel sorry for them that MS wants to eat their share of the IT cake

The PC makers have been sharing the bed with their Mistress Microsoft for decades, it is actually fun to see they are dumped.

Maybe it is time for them to come up with something innovative after 40 years of doing the same thing, cooperate and make a consortium, perhaps involve google and come up with something smart that can serve as an office workstation architecture based on Linux combined with solutions from google.

It should not be hard to come up with something that doesn't need weekly reboots for security patches and is cheaper to run.

Lets outlaw the printing press

Books are far from perfect, however, and can produce offensive text, perpetrate bias, just get stuff plain wrong, and spread misinformation – like pretty much all large language models.

Interacting with ChatGPT feels too much like interviewing Nixon about Watergate

Very careful with its wording. It is great in producing knowledge, it is too protective for the tender hearts of woke Americans.

There is no state or context that evolves with the conversation, it behaves like a vending machine, put a question in and you get an answer.

Admirable for the great knowledge, but too boring to spend much time with.

Why so negative ?

ChatGPT is something new did not have before, is it the first of its kind and will not be perfect. The first cars were not much better than a horse, it took until early 1910's until it became clear that horses for transport were obsolete.

Google method of searching: One gets links to individual information sources. Some good, some are bad. It is up to the user to make sense of the information.

ChatGPT: One gets the boiled down result of countless sources. Some are good and some are bad. The added value of chatgpt is the fact the information it generates offers is based on countless sources. Like google, it is up to the user to deal with the information ChatGPT generates in a responsible manner.

Google search changed how we use the internet, systems like chatgpt will probably change the way how humanity accesses, preserves and uses knowledge collected and generated in centuries.

It is hard to dismiss that ChatGPT is pretty impressive in its 1.0 version released to the pubic.

Competition is great, unless a patent troll like Oracle did file a patent on "Search Enhanced by AI"

For us users it is great that Google picks up the glove MS left it, we end up with a better product through competition.

It is unfortunate chatgpt hates me, can't get access to it for weeks now, hope the Bard will not be "at capacity" for 100% of the time.

However the pointy haired boss

will be happy to hear "Microsoft anti virus" is available.

ClamAV is a good product, the perceived quality of a house hold brand name is always higher for most people in a corporate environment, who are risk averse since corporate environments are little Soviet systems where there are no rewards for good decisions, only the Gulag for ones that didn't work out as anticipated.

One day

There will be an European leader who will tell those Military Industrial Complex puppets from USA to sod off to their fentanyl paradise and leave us in peace.

USA has nothing to the world, except pushing war and weapons to fight it with.

They could also do this with salary

Just put a pot of dollar bills on the floor on the last Friday of the month, the greedy ones should be fired, uhhhmm.. relocated.

It creates weird incentives. In times when the economy is in decline, people will take little time off out of fear for being relocated (in IBM speak).

When things are booming and the company could use the capacity, people feel more secure, since there are many jobs available, and take off more.

Lack of innovation is a slow death

Maybe due to missing out on things, from my viewpoint it looks like google is not innovating.

Years ago I expected in 2020's plug into docks phones that could serve as chrome books, they even didn't try to come up with something.

Google failed to market chromebooks and its services as a low cost replacement for hard to secure and expensive windows farms.

AI, same story, the one able to rollout chatGPT as replacement for the "throw a bucket of URL's at you" search results from google will get rich soon.

I tried their cloud, not convincing, not inviting to hobbyists to try things.

Maybe the big-three, MS/AWS and Google, got a bit too cozy together, split up the market and decided not to compete too hard.

The rich price levels for the 2015 level hardware they all have on offer in their clouds seems to indicate this.

We end up with a Soviet economy when these molochs are allowed to grow further

Companies like Amazon, Facebook, MS and alphabet shouldn't be allowed to grow.

It would be a very beneficial for people if globally all the large companies would be broken up.

With smaller companies we get better products and prices because of competition and they can't act like a major force subduing elected politicians.

People in smaller companies often have better jobs, since they are not reduced to small and expendable cogs, in small companies they make a difference.

The Soviet system produced bad results because nobody made a difference and people stopped caring.

Compliments to the British MP's

When looking at the whole picture, H2 is not so great.

Converting windmill generated H2 into a liquid form needing a pressure of 800 bar (11603 psi) introduces non-significant losses.

Converting the existing network of gas stations to 700 bar pressurized (10152 psi) H2 gas stations will cost more than even Europe can afford, leaving out the significant costs for H2 installations in cars.

The climate religion is used to sell us communism as savior against climate change. For instance, the EU announcement to ban petrol powered cars by 2035 is pure central planning of the economy, aka Communism. Be very afraid when politicians start turning specific technical solutions into laws, tossing human creativity and innovation out of the window until the next revolution.

History proved over and over again that communism is never good for anything but being a source for misallocation of resources, poverty, misery, waste, pollution and death.

Communist solutions for an imaginary issue are marketed with great success to elected politicians in the West, who attend G20 meetings with presentations from Schwab, Gates and other billionaires who envision a world where they took everything from everyone. Even WEF deniers will see their plan once they receive a letter from their community in the next ten years to please invest 100K in their house to get it to energy class XYZ .. or else.. The "or else" is selling your house to a company owned by one of the WEF billionaires who will happily rent it back to you... But hey... You own nothing but will be happy

How about some arithmetic

USA + EU lapdog = 778 million citizens

"The axis of evil" not bending over to the US:

China + India + Russia + Iran: 1412 + 1400 + 143 + 85 = 3040

We all know how well the prohibition worked.

Taken into account that Russia, China and Iran have effective state supported education systems and these countries do not allow drugs dealers to poison their youth with fentanyl, there could be a probability the "axis of evil" will be able to catch up with cpu technology within a decade.

By that time USA will be like Brazil and EU will be like the Germany of 1946 when our elites care allowed to continue their current misguided policies.

It doesn't stop impressing me

The replies it gives on questions concerning subjects I am familiar with seem excellent.

This is probably how google 2.0 will be, just curious how google will merge ads into its replies. It will have an impact on education as well.

It was Putin

Oh no, I mean Trump did it because Putin told him to do so.

CNN, CBS, Washington Post and google search results show this clearly, so it must be true.

MS is either the new Standard Oil or they are part of the US war against Europe

It is interesting AWS, HP, IBM and Google are not having the same complaints.

Since they are not complaining, MS offers them licensing conditions they do not consider to be unfavorable, it is reasonable to assume they would be smart enough to discover unfair practices by MS.

Either MS follows a strategy to kill the small fishes first, or they participate in the war USA is currently conducting to completely destroy the European economy.

Removing the ability to host computer systems would a significant strategic win in this war for the US.

Back to the future

It is the monopoly biting us again. If whatsapp was like the phone system, then we would have gobally dozens of companies running the whatsapp network, not just Z limited liability.

This time will be in the history books as the time of the monopolies, whatever tech or services ones buys, in many cases there are 2 alternatives and at best 5.

The cherry on the cake is that these monopolists have the same incestuous relationship with governments as the church used to have in the middle ages.

> the NetBSD terminal doesn't directly understand modern luxuries like cursor keys and command-line editing

Of course NetBSD supports command line editing:

1. Use ksh shell

2. type: set -o vi (or add: export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi to /etc/profile)

Command line editing with vi keys is supported in ksh.

<ESC>k shows previous command

<ESC>/ps searches for the last command containing the string "ps" , type "n" to show next commands containing "ps"

At my employer we use NetBSD quite frequently in security sensitive applications, it is perfect for use as an appliance.

Opinions and the situation on the ground

Our customer base consists of a few dozen small to mid sized companies with 50-500 employees.

They are all moving to Azure as if there is no end to it.

Even when Azure fees increase monthly expenditures on ICT by a factor of three, it doesn't matter.

Maybe there is a problem in the way companies are valued within the financial reporting guidelines, when a company starts using Azure instead of on-prem, it is financially equivalent to taking on a big debt. Defaulting on Azure payments is the end of the company, but bookkeeping rules do not count this type of obligations as debts. It is weird that accounting rules value investments on assets like on-prem IT infrastructure lower than payments on implicit debts incurred by moving to the cloud.

The transition towards subscription based IT spending reduces the incentive to use Linux and save costs on licenses.

Strange accounting rules do not reward savings on licenses, which are still substantial for MS servers, the Azure business of MS massively profits from this situation.

OSS support of MS is mainly marketing, they do not promote Linux based products like SQL-Server on Linux to existing windows only shops. They do not contribute much to OSS either, they make MS-Word for BSD-Unix based iOS, but do not sell it for Linux.

The army could use Lithium-ION EV batteries as firebombs

Just add a little impact primer to one of the chambers, which would damage the separation between the chambers, dropping them from a plane would have the same impact as using outlawed phosphor.

EV batteries can hardly be recycled in an economical way, using 10000L of water to put out an EV fire leaves one with 10000L chemically polluted water.

Society is literally sitting on a time bomb with the thousands of EV's being pushed by technically ignorant politicians.

Until now, no country announced to build nuclear power plants, implying EV's in many countries run for over 40% on coal, which makes them hardly anymore environmentally friendly as coal operated steamboats from the early 1900's.

It is going to be interesting to see what happens when in 7-9 years from now when those EV's end up on the scrap yard due to swindling battery capacity.

Except from these issues, EV's have anti-social effects. They are big and heavy, taking up lots of parking space. Their additional weight creates hazards for others in case of accidents, do not want to think what happens to the occupants on the rear seats of a Toyota Aygo when an monster like a Mercedes EQ rear ends it with as little as 17 mph. Only war is more expensive and damaging to society than the EV push.

Make it stop

An US army serviceman who enlisted in 1992 didn't see a single day that his country was in peace, always there was a war with imaginary enemies in countries rich on natural resources.

China is out there to make a buck, an invasion of Taiwan would be a hard sell since it is hardly worth it.

But maybe China should behave like the US, instigate a putsch in Taiwan like the CIA did in 2014 in Ukraine to replace the government with a more China friendly one.

MS does brilliant legal delay tactics

By changing their licensing strategy MS hopes to pull the rug from under the case against them.

In the mean time the Hosting companies will experience loss of business due to unfair licensing practices of MS.

Lets hope the courts won't be deluded by this legal guerrilla warfare conducted by MS to wipe out competition and will fine MS to such an extent that those losses are compensated.

If the EU is halfway serious about supporting an EU based IT industry, they should take effective measures to stop a company, that already has a de-facto software monopoly, from becoming an overly powerful hosting company. Such a situation will end badly for everyone.

Slowly the EU slides into a CCP like dictatorship

Obligatory tracking boxes in new cars.

Proposed "internet off" buttons.

Proposed prohibition of encryption.

Censorship on Russian news sites to prevent "misinformation".

EU funds get allocated to support EU friendly candidates during elections in member states.

There are no checks and balances in place to limit EU commission overreach.

The EU applauding machine (parliament) is not accountable to its voters.

Non-elected EU central commitee apparatchiks attack, with the support of Big-Tech to implement censorship and suppression of alternative views, the freedom our (great) grandparents gave their lives for in WW2.

Lets hope the CEO of the Sinaloa cartel doesn't read this

They would move their HQ to the USA, have a few attorneys make up NDA's, enabling them to do their business without any interference from the DoJ.

What kind of legal system allows organizations to legally silence witnesses of crimes ?.

Are there still organisations who use Windows to store valuable information ?

Those who summoned the dementors of information security by transferring large sums of money to Redmond should blame themselves.

We live in a free market economy

If Apple decides to sell iPhones with the case filled with some heat conducting polyester compound, making any repair attempt impossible, they are free to do this. If people continue to buy such devices by the billions, then it is a perfect decision within the metrics of free market and short term capitalist profit making.

Similar to soldering SSD drives on the motherboards of MacBooks, it borders criminal intent to turn expensive gear into E-Waste within the shortest amount of time after the warranty period expired.

Creating legislation to cover all aspects of "Right to repair" will be close to impossible, there are too many ways EOM manufacturers can subtly sabotage repair attempts. The solution is to simply make hard to repair products expensive for the first buyer or the manufacturer.

To legally define what is "hard to repair" will be difficult.

A solution to reduce waste, legislators could simply increase legally required warranty periods for anything that costs over $100 to 5-10 years. In this case, the free market will do its thing in a positive manner, manufacturers will automatically be turning out products which are easy to repair, otherwise they would end up with high costs fulfilling warranty claims.

Such an increase in warranty would have a positive impact on reduction of waste and CO2 emissions. It would also have a positive impact on local employment, since Big-Tech would have to create repair franchises in countries where they sell their products, creating a situation where it shares benefits with others.

Live Free or Die

Technical merits is one thing, freedom is another.

The MS dictatorship made itself felt again with the release of Windows 11.

They implement changes nobody asked for, it feels like stepping in a new car where someone decided it was a good idea to replace the clutch pedal by a small joystick besides the interior light switch.

A choice for windows is a choice for no freedom, a choice to be subjected to random decisions made by people in Redmond a choice to pay money for a system that has backdoors for the authorities built into it.

Choosing Windows desktop is a choice to have no choice and live in the shadows of corporate dictatorship.

Choosing Linux opens the gate to all the alternatives human creativity has to offer, be it good or less good.

Choosing Linux reduces the endless flow of money into the coffers of Big-Tech, enabling more people to make a living with support.