The problem with carbon based fuels is that we’re unburying them and releasing carbon into the atmosphere which was sequestered under the ground for millions of years, a LOT of it.

If he’s taking solar power + CO2 from the air to make his fuel, then when he burns it it’s just a closed cycle system, at least no new harm done, just returning the carbon previously captured from the air in the process.

It’s actually quite a lot more than a bit more secure. Think of it as the difference between traversing no-mans land on a bicycle (current systems) vs in an armored personnel carrier with armor thick enough to stop EVERYTHING that the other side can throw at it. Sure, you could just open the door of the APC and take a hit, but if you don’t do that, you’re pretty safe.

I do not understand why these two things make their users so enthusiastic

Are you trying to think logically about that question? Because that would be a huge mistake.

flatpak, which is something which would really get to my nerves.

Yeah, not my favorite either. A BIG part of why I’m not loving the majority of the immutable systems I have investigated is because they all seem to heavily lean on tech like flatpak, snaps, etc. and there are valid logical reasons for that, but I’d really rather not go there…

Everything is possible. The point of immutability is the ability to restore to “factory fresh” state with a power cycle.

In theory, the data section is treated as data only, not executable. Software (games) can, and will, improperly store and execute code there, but at least they can be identified when they do and disabled/removed without breaking the underlying system.

easily solved by not giving them root access.

Root vs non-root is, in a nutshell, a tangled mess with millions of opportunities for “oops, didn’t think of that” situations: https://www.cve.org/downloads

Immutable keeps the legacy system confituration basically unchanged, but also restores it “from ROM” every time you power on. (not real ROM, but effectively.) In an immutable system, the attack surface is dramatically reduced, and much more diverse among systems than with a mutable OS.

Immutable means: every time you power it on, it’s the same.

So, if you get infected by a virus, power cycle and it’s like it never happened.

That, like everything you read on the internet, is a gross oversimplification, caveats apply, etc. etc. but for the most part, that’s what immutable means: the running system has no ability to persist changes (except in very specific, controlled, secure, easier to protect circumstances…)

It’s the kind of thing they should have developed to release-ready state 20 years ago - when hard drives were already absurdly large vs needs of the OS and data.

I believe it’s plug and play.

I forget what the latest I ran the numbers on was, but $100K up front and $20K per year running costs seemed like it had a decent chance of being useful to our department of 10 software engineers, which isn’t bad, but it’s an LLM on par with 6 months ago’s frontier models.

If I could get those prices for a local instance of Fable 5, I’d be pushing the paperwork to make it happen.

What I want to know is: if you’ve got a product that has been market tested and proven for a decade to be creepy, why do you pick a celebrity with a creepy dad to promote it? Are they just trying to own that sliver of market share that doesn’t care?

Digital loss definitely happens, but with a tiny bit of care, it can be absolutely prevented.

I don’t know what tokens really cost, but so far even burning them without care for efficiency, they’re costing about one day of my salary per month to six weeks.

Give it a vibe to document the support, it can do that - it can even do it in non-hallucinatory fashion, if you tell it to.

What AI “decision making” does in our processes is: write the reports exactly like the procedure says they should be written, and fills them with whatever you want to hear - looking up convenient references to back up your opinions. You probably should double check the references yourself to be sure they actually exist (though I think AI is getting better at checking its own work for things like this lately) - but… yeah. Ask it once and it will give you “an opinion” that doesn’t take into account all of the factors that matter to you. So, as you explain all the factors, it also becomes obvious what you want to hear, so after several rounds the obliging AI eventually not only “sees things your way” but can pile on the BS as deep as you ask it to to back up those opinions. What would have taken days to research and write can be done in an hour or so.

For a long time, when I’d replace a computer the new one’s hard drive would be so much bigger than the old one I would just copy the old computer’s entire drive into a folder of the new one - I think I did this at least four times before I decided that I almost never looked back into those older folders and found anything valuable.

I looked back 15 years like that once and found: clip art, and banner printing software for a printer I threw out 14 years earlier.

Don’t be so sure… I work for “megacorp” and about a year ago word came from on-high: “thou shalt not C (or C++, not that they know the difference) anymore. We are in mortal fear of embarassment that we allowed a mistake to be made that our all seeing oversight should have prevented by mandating the use of safe tools.”

I believe it was 100% deliberate.

I also believe that they employed relatively naive near-children, barely capable of doing the axe swinging, to do most of the cutting work, exactly because those children believed the men telling them they were “doing the right thing here” and didn’t know enough to stand up against the damage they were doing. Unfortunately, this is more of a human trait than a human child trait, as demonstrated by Milgram.

In the bigger picture, it seems that the people calling the shots actually want the current administration, and especially its elected president, to look as awful, stupid, cruel, idiotic, incompetent, moronic, despicable, corrupt, and generally un-electable as possible, and DOGE was some of the earliest action taken to make this happen. Cutting the screworm prevention program, gutting the medical monitoring that prevents 6000 people from getting explosive diarhhea parasites from their lettuce. Now they’re openly advertising: for pay access to early insider trading info and releasing documentation showing that Russia helped get him elected… won’t release the Epstein files without a 3 thousand ring media circus, but here you go: Putin’s payola on a plate…

The question is: what comes next?

Thing is, if they would give Mick and Jane enough time with Claude, they could make it look like Bob’s work again, but it would still take time - and tokens too.

Well, academic exercises for grades, I’d call Rust students.

Throw away programs people do for fun, I’d call Rust hobbyists.

Pretty much anyone else, doing it for money (a living: roof over head, food on table), or open source contribution - I think they qualify.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LICENSEPLATES/comments/1ux71nl/the_whole_sqz_a55_story/

But… are you really sure it’s not running?