Notices by Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)

Oh Wikimedia Foundation sent me one of those emails to remind me to donate like I did in the past. What a perfect occasion to tell them they won't see a cent until they recognize their workers' union.

I was not expecting the value of chipmakers to start tumbling so soon, after all those are among the very few companies that are profiting from the AI bubble. If investors feel the party is already over for them then the great AI Ponzi scheme is very close to unraveling.

@Infoseepage that's a really smart approach (no pun intended). In the past I was not too concerned about SSD drive but that changed recently. On my boxes I mostly used second-hand enterprise drives and those all have 90%+ of flash endurance after hundreds upon hundreds of full disk rewrite. But TLC/QLC drives on client machines are a different story. I've seen 5yo boxes with typical office user workloads (so quite light on writes) that have already lost 30-40% of the flash endurance. That's quite worse on smaller drives of course (sub 1TB) but given those are very common it made me wary when I help out friends and family.

@Infoseepage yes, that's what I thought. I know that large RAID arrays may make this worse by subjecting the disks to shared vibrations and resonant effects. So everything degrades at the same time and risks snapping at the same time.

Reading about a storage array used by a Kickstart project I'm following where they lost 3 drives in the span of a few seconds in an 8 drive RAID6 array. They are now waiting for a data recovery company to hopefully restore and clone the contents of one of the drives to rebuild the array. I don't know how this kind of failure is possible but it's a good reminder to make backups even when your data is in what is supposed to be a very reliable storage element.

EA was a toxic company even before the Saudi's and the Trump's bought it off. Now it's like a sewage pit where people decided to dump radioactive waste and asbestos in.

@mhoye there's also the fact that outside of the tech bubble this whole thing is as relevant as a sloppy fart. The vast majority of humans don't have jobs that involve pushing buttons, and the only way this technology affects them is through inflation and enshittification of the bits of technology they use for communication or entertainment.

It has been zero days since I had to verify the output of a large language model and it was wrong.

@blogdiva I am no expert, just worked a couple of years in finance which gave me both a basic understanding of these numbers and a desire not to get anywhere near it again. That being said circular trading is illegal, there's no way around that... but under the current US administration no one is doing anything to prevent or punish it, and all the companies involved are based in the US.

@blogdiva yeah, if people at a place as conservative and money-driven as Nomura are clear-eyed about this then it should be pretty evident to everybody that something is really wrong

Also FYI this was calculated by those rabid anti-AI woke radical socialists at... *checks notes* ...Nomura Securities Co., Ltd.

I have never seen a graph explain more clearly what's going and why it's completely unsustainable (and this is just cash-flow, it doesn't take into account the rapidly climbing debt!).

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/big-techs-27-trillion-ai-bill-comes-due-chart-of-the-day-100000100.html

How it started
How it's going

@conservancy calling this a "new era" is highly disingenuous. This era will be extremely short, it'll only last until the funding runs out.

Getting a casus belli in 1964: we'll stage an incident in the gulf of Tonkin
Getting a casus belli in 2026: our helicopter was accidentally shot down by a flying moped

The idea of banning minors from using social media is at its heart an attempt to punish victims instead of going against the perpetrator. If minors are more easily victimized by the predatory practices of large tech corporations it's not their fault. The blame lies squarely on the corporations. They must stop using predatory practices. And that's doubly important because those practices hurt adults and minors alike.

In the recent discussions around rsync I've seen people focusing on whether a maintainer has or doesn't have an obligation towards its users, or whether it's the users' job to maintain something they depend upon. I believe this discussion is missing an important point: the money.

🧵 1/4

So repeat after me: the CEOs, the executives, the decision-makers, every single moron running this circus could have used a minuscule amount of the money they spent on it to fund the FOSS ecosystem but they didn't. And guess what, they would have benefitted from it! Immensely! But they still didn't.

3/4

Current estimates set the total amount of money that has been spent on large-language models and adjacent generative AI at 1.4 trillion $ over the past four years. For the sake of simplicity let's cut that to 1 trillion $. With 1% of that money you could have paid 25000 FOSS maintainers 100k dollars per year each over the same time period. That probably covers most of the FOSS ecosystem and then some. And it's one percent. ONE FUCKING PERCENT.

2/4

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/116650337504283427

Great article about what makes #Gentoo special. And if you want to know where the "Gentoo is for ricers" joke comes from here's a blast from the past with choice Gentoo forums quotes from 20+ years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060110073650/http://funroll-loops.org/