Notices by nixCraft 🐧 (nixcraft@mastodon.social), page 2

After all the drama, Broadcom announced that VMware Workstation Pro is now free for commercial use and personal use on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Would you trust them now, considering that free hypervisor exists? https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/11/vmware-workstation-free-for-all-part-2

In its infinite wisdom, Big Tech has become a master of linguistic obfuscation. They wield buzzwords like weapons, expertly blurring the lines between related concepts. Suddenly, everyone's an "AI expert" because they've used Apple's "Intelligence" (AI), and GitHub becomes synonymous with Git itself, confusing newbies. It's all fun and games until your grandpa or mom asks you to explain the difference between "the GitHub" and "the Git."

WTF? how is this even legal? 🤨 paid internship? so this is the future they were talking all along, flying cars and living on the Mars? LOL.

Debra Lynn (gf and later wife) wasn't directly involved in the Debian project itself. She was the inspiration for the name. Debra ("Deb") Lynn + Ian ("Ian" Murdock) == Debian. He combined their names and the rest is the history.

Softlanding Linux System (SLS) was the first distro in 1992, but it was buggy. So, it led to the creation of Slackware and Debian. I had never used SLS, so I started with Slackware.

Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in Jul 1993. It is the oldest distro still in existence. However, someone was dissatisfied with Slackware and created another distro a month later, in August 1993. This was Debian, the second oldest distro, founded by Ian Murdock. Both of these distros are still maintained, and Debian is often known as the "mother distro" because it has spawned many more distributions. #Linux #OpenSource #history

Many AI companies, including OpenAI, are currently unprofitable. They are taking jobs away from others, leading to a race to the bottom. Eventually, only large tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, & Apple, which have deep pockets, will survive this AI race. In the meantime, NVIDIA will be prepared for the next big bullshit with its GPUs, having already made a significant profit. Apart from job loss, I fear as they are pushing LLM into the medical field, innocent people are going to die

Chegg Is On Its Last Legs After ChatGPT Sent Its Stock Down 99%: After seeing its stock fall 99%, there are doubts the online education company will be able to pay its debts. https://gizmodo.com/chegg-is-on-its-last-legs-after-chatgpt-sent-its-stock-down-99-2000522585 For years, the company paid thousands of contractors to laboriously write answers to various questions. Now, the company is going out of business because OpenAI scrapped everything from the Internet without paying anyone, and those thousands of contractors/writers are also jobless.

Me trying to enter the BIOS.

Popular technology stacks that make your life as complicated as possible:

1) It all started with the Networking stack.
2) Data stacks like LAMP, MEAN, MERN, Serverless, etc. Every stack after this made you hate your job.
3) Frontend Stack
4) Microservices Stack
5) AI Stack.

These stacks often overlap and integrate with each other depending on the project's needs. So you can't simply skip this mess now. This is why some of us want to run into woods and never return to civilization.

Tim Apple: We are unique. We do in-house industrial design for all of our computers and iToys that you love. Everything is shiny and tiny, and we think you are going to love it.

User: Buys a new M4 Mac Mini but notices the power button is at the bottom.

User: I solved the power button problem:

In a big, empty room filled with computers, there's an old Sun Solaris server sitting under a desk no one remembers. It has an uptime of over 20 years. Every day, a cron job runs on a forgotten Solaris box, generating critical financial data everyone uses to make retirement investments. Even though no one thinks about this box, everyone needs it & fetches that data using FTP. It works all alone, making sure people can retire comfortably. It's like a secret helper, quietly working in the cold.

Classic Windows apps like Paint and Notepad are also getting LLM (Generative AI) support. There is no reason whatsoever that Notepad should do more than text editing. Microsoft has gone crazy with these tools. Of course, as part of these tools, your text in Notepad is sent to Microsoft under the name of Generative AI, which then sells it to the highest bidder. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/11/06/new-ai-experiences-for-paint-and-notepad-begin-rolling-out-to-windows-insiders/ Stick with FLOSS tools and OS and avoid this madness. Keep your data safe.

my idea of a good time is configuring ~/.vimrc for six hours straight.

#vim #linux #unix

Private Cloud Compute Security Guide by Apple https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compute/ Apple definitely stands out in this era of privacy and AI, where most cloud computing and AI/LLM companies abuse your personal data to maximize profits. It is not just corporations. There is growing abuse by governments worldwide where they buy citizens' private health and travel tracking data without following proper procedures. I hope other corporations like Google and Meta will now up their game, but I don't have hope.

OMG! Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/mozilla-foundation-lays-off-30-200502497.html Did Google perhaps pressure them to do this?

#firefox #mozilla #opensource

*** PSA ***

Three things to do today:

a) Make a backup.
b) Verify your backup.
c) Find out how long it takes to restore your backup.

3-2-1 is a good backup policy.

This is not going to end mostly for human tech workers, journalists, writers, & artists. The billionaire AI tech bros found a new loophole to make money. The laws are slow to catch up with this kind of abuse. By the time laws are updated, the whole generation of whilecaller jobs will be lost forever. They are already deploying AI in hospitals to replace trained medical professionals. This will not going to reduce your medical bills. You have to be a delusional fool to think this will help you😅

New York Times tech workers are on strike for fairer pay and just cause job protections. 

Perplexity, an AI company that has repeatedly ripped off the work of human journalists and created a mess for every human work, is now offering help to the New York Times.

See how these AI companies are stealing jobs from humans and then selling back services at a price. https://www.404media.co/perplexity-ai-offers-to-help-new-york-times-with-tech-union-strike/

Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux https://kevinboone.me/systemd_embedded.html

#Linux #opensource