Rob Landley
Sigh. I agree with Linus about big endian being silly, but NOT his follow up list:
https://lkml.iu.edu/2510.0/01052.html
Branch delay slots and aligned access are about saving transistors in embedded designs, especially from companies that don't have $10 million per custom ASIC run.
There's a certain amount of "all the world's a vax, we're beyond the need for diversity" going on among the greybeards. Linux development is reminding me STRONGLY of the early 90's unix community.
Rob Landley
Newer LLM training data unavoidably includes LLM output in what they scraped off the internet, which is like sticking a microphone into a speaker. A fairly small amount poisons the process and the math collapses, making newer models are worse than old ones, despite throwing more compute at the problem.
Plus each query costs multiple dollars to answer: humans are so much cheaper AI companies have cheated and employed them (ala the mechanical turk).
https://www.pcmag.com/news/this-companys-ai-was-really-just-remote-human-workers-pushing-buttons
Rob Landley
When OpenAI launched GPT5 recently it took away access to its earlier models (which people preferred) because an LLM can't learn new things.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittification-of-generative-ai/
If you ask GPT3 about anything that happened in 2025 it doesn't know, which spoils the illusion.
An LLM is basically lossy compression for the google cache, with hallucinations being a bit like jpeg artifacts. Each LLM is a snapshot in time from when "training" slowly and expensively compressed a historical dataset.
Rob Landley
In the 80s software became the cutting edge tech so the 1982 movie Tron had software people. 40 years later we're not noticeably closer now than the people chasing golems in biblical times, but our ability to see faces in clouds now has full CGI 4k support and SO MUCH MONEY behind selling the snake oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
Next up: FPGA people to enslave! (Wait for it...)
Notice the "obedient servant, destroy the world" dichotomy. You want slaves. You're worried your slaves will rebel.
Rob Landley
Humanity has thought general AI (instant slaves) was coming soon for THOUSANDS of years. When pottery was high tech people wanted golems. When irrigation was cutting edge people thought the brain ran on a mix of "humors". Early dissection/voltaic experiments gave us Frankenstein. When clockwork was cool we had the mechanical turk (and "tik-tok the mechanical man"). When radios ran on wall current "metropolis" had an electric woman, then Robby the Robot was solid state, C3PO full of microchips...
Rob Landley
No AI company has been remotely profitable so far. They play up their gross revenue but never talk net revenue. Their argument is basically "we lose money on every transaction but make it up on volume". (And they fudge even the gross revenue with "annualized" numbers that take their best month and multiply by 12.)
It's all loss leader free samples so far even when they're charging for it. They keep saying technological advances will fix that, but don't explain how.
Rob Landley
LLM output is optimized to sound plausible, which makes it especially subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
When a middle manager prompts an LLM for something an employee produces, a manager who can't do that job can't find anything wrong with its output. But when they ask about their own job, they can see the output is nonsense riddled with errors.
So obviously the manager's job is safe, but the LLM can replace everyone that reports to that manager.
Rob Landley
The AI "infinite money glitch" is called a wash trade: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lzjprizgc224
@molly0xfff did a good podcast about how FTX and Alameda sent the same money back and forth, booking it as revenue each time. "My friend and I each received $1000 today... by passing the same $20 back and forth." See also Enron. Microsoft's "investment" in OpenAI included $billions in Azure cloud computing credits, yet OpenAI's use of Azure is part of Microsoft's revenue estimates:
https://medium.com/@venugopal.adep/the-2-6b-azure-credit-how-microsofts-cloud-became-openai-s-secret-weapon-1f7e2f9b0330
Rob Landley
@interfluidity FDR gave his "I welcome their hatred" speech 3 days before the election where he won 98.5% of the electoral vote.
Rob Landley
We're in an s-curve where new advances in solar and battery technology are a regular occurrence: https://youtu.be/yWMxM8YQcN4?si=fF1c_BCG-5KPY9By
Plus all the adjacent tech in the rest of the electrical ecosystem: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/
Especially "the electrification of demand": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE6eBXnb5TU&t=75s
Heat pumps and induction stoves not only replace fossil fuels with potentially renewable electricity, they're SO much more efficient burning gas to produce electricity is cheaper than running gas stoves/heaters.
Rob Landley
Africa is electrifying with solar and batteries, precluding projected fossil fuel demand growth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaExwcNmpXA
The same way countries that could never afford to run cables for phone or internet service went straight to cell towers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging#Leapfrogging_in_developing_countries
Here in the US solar is 91% of new demand:
The difference is in countries without an existing fossil installed base there may never be economies of scale for fuel distribution.
Rob Landley
The european concept of land ownership remains a blight upon the world:
Body shame is another thing colonially imposed upon the tropics:
https://medium.com/the-story-in-history/the-naked-tribes-of-the-world-87cbc86b975e
Rob Landley
Spam is the purest form of advertising. There is no conceptual difference between adblock and spam filtering, merely objections from middlemen who want a cut.
https://social.cyberespresso.eu/@ThreatIntel/115028124005762751
Rob Landley
The US oil industry has largely stopped paying for new domestic drilling.
Fracked wells produce most of their output in the first couple years then trailing off rapidly. But oil companies expect the global economy to contract, leading to low oil demand/prices for as long as this administration is driving policy, and Russia/Saudi MUST sell.
That closing refinery they named is converting its machinery to recycle plastic.
Rob Landley
Elon Musk receives a bunch of hate, but Larry Ellison doesn't receive enough:
https://youtube.com/shorts/hKgtRsqnloE
Ellison cancelled Colbert to combine CBS+Paramount into a new Fox News run by his son. Oratroll is the storage behind the surveillance state.
Back in 2020 he was "one of the few top technology executives to openly support President Donald Trump": https://www.reuters.com/article/business/factbox-oracle-chairman-larry-ellisons-history-of-support-for-trump-idUSKBN2652RV/
Before that, he was one of the biggest users of Citizens United's unlimited political funding:
https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/college-football/first-helped-bankroll-presidential-campaign-now-college-football-progr-rcna187680
Rob Landley
Elon Musk and the power of the bro-code, by Henry Farrell:
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/elon-musk-and-the-power-of-the-bro
"Doing bad things together serves useful purposes for criminal[s]... identify and screen out the people who have real moral qualms... gives you and them a stake in mutually assured silence... rewiring their moral codes so that things that they might once have identified as wrong come to seem like ordinary practice."
"Boasting about incompetence is signaling that you can be trusted to be corrupt."
Rob Landley
Someone on Microsoft Github sent me a "collaboration invite"?
Microsoft Github has achievements now? The peson sending the request has a "yolo" achievement, and a "pull shark"?
What? Why? Why would...
Rob Landley
@fishidwardrobe I am inside the Minneapolis airport.
Rob Landley
I have conceptual questions.
Rob Landley
New video from @sarahtaber about how the right wing panic about smuggled fungus samples is silly: they were asked to bring them by a US university researching crop diseases.
Her threads are generally good, here's the most recent:
Rob does toybox and mkroot, writes linux docs, worked with j-core.org, long ago co-founded Penguicon and Linucon, wrote for Motley Fool, taught at ACC, etc. Trying to learn Japanese and make Android a self-hosting development environment.He/him. Answers to "they/them" just fine.
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