I’m no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.

Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don’t play well with others.

But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.

While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.

A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it’s the right one, amazing things can happen.

I have a laptop and a handful of desktops between my office and home. Some run Windows and some run Linux. I simply choose which one matches my task best.

Systems where I’m writing server-side code are going to be Linux. Systems that run jobs in the back end such as my self hosting stuff are all Linux. Systems where I’m doing email, documents, and general web browsing are going to be Windows.

Of course, my Windows systems have WSL, and my Linux systems can run Windows apps in virt. These days the line is super blurred and it would no doubt be possible to use only one if I were willing to give up some native app running.

Should have been Jeemail. Lost opportunity…

A lot of FOSS projects are freemium based which seems viable for larger more complex projects.

In these projects it’s common to see the developer get paid for adding features on top of the core version, for a SaaS version, for custom development, or for offering support.

Other projects with a lot of community interest - and a good “community manager” style organizer can attract contributors in the form of pulls, bug testing and reports, and widespread use which generates valuable marketing. These projects only exist because of the labor of love from the whole community.

I’m not against ads in principle. The advertisers are paying the bill for stuff I consume. Great.

For that effort, they get a chance at my wallet. And to be honest, making me aware of a business or product is indeed a way to get me interested in what they sell. I do prefer the ads to be relevant instead of always useless.

That being said, it’s currently preferable to use a blocker and let the people who don’t know how to use blockers subsidize my ad-free ways.

AI companies believe the market will give the best rewards for a winner-take-all strategy.

They believe now is the time to accumulate customers.

Their future financing rounds very likely depend on being able to show growth.

Entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors all know it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be (yet). They hope another few billion in cash will get it there. And hope you don’t notice until they already won the market.

Thank you

I was ready gawk at what ads on my fridge would look like, and then this. I don’t know what I expected.

Carry on, sir.

I was at the Canton Fair last week which is a trade show in China where manufacturers display some of their latest technology.

There was a robotics display all where they are showing off how lots of factories, kitchens, another labor-based jobs can be automated with technology.

This doesn’t really have a lot to do with AI or LLMs, but the field of robotics is advancing fast and a lot of basic work that humans had to do in the past won’t be needed as much in the future.

If your argument attacks my credibility, that’s fine, you don’t know me. We can find cases where developers use the technology and cases where they refuse.

Do you have anything substantive to add to the discussion about whether AI LLMs are anything more than just a tool that allows workers to further abstract, advancing all of the professions it can touch towards any of: better / faster / cheaper / easier?

From the article:

“The thing about that farmer,” Altman said, is not only that they wouldn’t believe you, but “they very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, ‘that’s not real work.'”

I think he pretty much agrees with you.

I think your strategy makes sense for all workers. Being aware of your role in the final solution is more important than the steps needed to get there, and tools merely change the process, often improving it in some way.

A guy with a hammer cant automatically build a house without skills, but it sure helps those who have them. A guy with a nail gun can build a house faster and perhaps with less skill, and few argue that it’s not a worthy improvement.

Some types of photographers may no longer need to operate a camera, but instead transition into someone who can knowledgeably ask for the results from an AI that properly captures the mood and tone required for the end result.

We’re changing how it’s done, but not necessarily what is done.

Interesting, I want to try some of these solutions.

I set up luks on some of my selfhosted virtualbox instances to protect against physical theft, but power issues cause all too frequent restarts that are a serious pain to physically access.

An ssh call in a script that could be remotely used to unlock and complete the boot would be so handy.

Do you remember the era of popups before popup blockers? You’d land on malicious site and have autoplay porn sounds 37 windows deep and just have to long press the power button to get away from the shame. Twas rough then, still rough now.

Unless we’re talking about the days when lynx could render the whole site. Those were days when we didn’t have too many problems like this.

This is a case of stupid laws that still don’t understand the internet (35+ years in to wide use, mofos)

If an http GET request initiated from country A traverses routers and wires around the globe to grab some data from a server in country B, then we have to accept that the owners of the server are not “operating in country A” and in fact the user in country A is responsible for import.

If some laws in country A have a problem with this, then they should unplug their internet wires at the border, or at least learn how to use them and/or govern their citizens.

All that is tongue in cheek to say they can fuck right off.

That was Donnys way to scratch Elon’s back for helping with the campaign. After the back stabbing and subsequent fall out, I’m sure Elon took all his people out.

The answer to the question comes from understanding the marketplace.

Microsoft’s vision in the '90s was a computer on every desk and in every home.

In the late '90s and early 2000s, devices like TiVo came on the scene and disrupted the living room. Microsoft started experimenting with Media Center which was a PC that would sit between your cable box and your TV.

Also remember that Microsoft has been in gaming forever. You certainly heard of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Microsoft’s acquisition of various game studios in the '90s cemented their presence in the space.

Anyways, at the time it was theorized that some company would eventually control media flowing into the household through the TV screen and Microsoft absolutely wanted that.

The media center only found limited success, and was kind of a kludgy solution. The first versions of Xbox attempted to overcome some of this by having some media capabilities. The peak of that effort was the first version of Xbox One which actually had an HDMI input and the ability to control your cable box. Had that reached widespread use, Microsoft would have had lots of data about what TV channels everybody was watching and who was watching (remember the first version of Xbox One rolled out with a camera that could recognize who’s watching) and for how long.

Unfortunately for them, that tech was too little too late and streaming services like Netflix were already catching on. Now you can see in later versions of Xbox Microsoft has pulled back and developed game pass which is a steam-like subscription service, and hasn’t really tried to be a TV media player to the same degree anymore.

When a company gets huge, like Microsoft, they can’t really waste time chasing business efforts that might only have revenue potential in the low billions. It just doesn’t move the needle. The problem is that innovating brand new ideas that will eventually become multi-billion dollar businesses is phenomenally challenging. And people who can do that don’t work for companies like Microsoft.

So the entrepreneurs who can potentially dream up multibillion dollar disruptive business ideas go do them on their own and then companies like Microsoft snap them up as soon as they’re able to (if the founders allow it), allowing dominant players to remain dominant without needing to innovate.

Beholden to the AAPL ticker.

Eek, I’m moving towards nextcloud (and away from Google fast as possible). Is there a better all-in-one groupware + files + collab + office apps suite out there?

It does appear that nextcloud’s devs are eyeballs deep in php tech debt, so their pace of development and integration has slowed.

It’s so big that none of their FOSS components are going to be #1 on their own.

Recently upgraded the version and had to allow untested app versions (which had just disappeared) because they hadn’t been updated yet. That’s a weird problem and yeah, I don’t really want to be beta tester everytime I try and open a document.

They also don’t really have a nice docker compose based deployment yet.

But I couldn’t be happier to be leaving google in the dust, so there’s that.