Notices by Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)

@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/

Earlier this year I decided to react to the chatbot insanity griping the entire tech industry by studying. I am extremely proud of the work I did in the past few months because I learned a lot while doing it. I'm a better professional than I was six months ago and I'm completely comfortable dealing with complex topics I found daunting only a year ago.

As people around you deliberately deskill themselves, do the opposite. It will pay off, believe me, it always does.

I had heard about the CloudFlare job cuts, what I had not realized is that after announcing them the company lost over 23% of its value in one sitting. I guess the trick of announcing job cuts to pump up your stock doesn't work anymore.

@dalias yeah, I've installed the machine using a modified installer so that it doesn't go into the Microsoft account prompt but I wonder if that could also be reset if I wipe all users

Hey lazyfedi, I'm preparing a second-hand machine for an acquaintance and it comes with Windows. I'm preinstalling the stuff they'll need and removing the junk they won't, but I'd like them to be able to create the first user themselves. Is there a way to "factory reset" a Windows machine that only wipes all the users but not the applications or other configuration changes?

The fact that Google decided to dump a 4 GiB language model file on every Chrome installation is yet another sign of how the generative AI craze is unsustainable. Don't look at it from the side of users, look at it from Google side. Having every user download a 4 GiB monster which will need to be routinely updated is a significant cost. It takes a ton of bandwidth to do that, far more than Chrome updates consume. And yet they're doing it because they're desperate to externalize the cost of "AI".

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@mcmartin/116520863303816350

If you are a student or a young developer this is an excellent way to learn more about computers, and that knowledge will help you grow as a programmer. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that working on a retro system isn't going to be useful. Low-level programming didn't really change much, it was just hidden from you. This will teach you how computers really work in a way that's still accessible because of the lower complexity. And that low-level knowledge will help you, I promise.

This is a very good article on how the Russian regime managed to get around western economic sanctions, but also how many western companies happily cooperated with it so that they could keep doing business in Russia while pretending they weren't.

https://www.kennaninstitute.org/articles/to-leave-or-not-to-leave

So many odd things happening just days before large tech companies Q1 earnings reports: Copilot moving to usage-based billing, Anthropic getting investments from its service providers, Microsoft and OpenAI altering their revenue share deal. It's almost like things are starting to unravel, isn't it?