Great Blue Heron

It’s fun to point at the crappy performance of current technology. But all I can think about is the amount of power and hardware the AI bros are going to burn through trying to improve their results.

This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I’ve been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn’t really care. Now that I’ve read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don’t have a good feeling for the future of systemd.

I’m thinking the same. I understand the people saying it’s no big deal, it’s just an optional field. But the existing optional fields (GECOS) have been there since the beginning of time. The original Unix user database (/etc/passwd) was created in a different time. Things have changed in the last 50 years and we now know that a simple field in an OS level database is not really an appropriate place to store PII. I don’t know what the solution is, as these laws are coming and there will be some people that need to comply, but I don’t think the current change to systemd is the right approach.

On the plus side - this controversy has prompted me to look into other options for my home servers and I’m loving the minimalism and simplicity of Alpine. (This isn’t a knee jerk reaction - I’ve been frustrated by the bloated feel of mainstream distributions for a while - more the straw that may break the camel’s back)

I’ve got a Sony and even it’s showing home screen ads - normally it’s just “suggestions” for shows on streaming services I don’t have, but the occasional car ad also comes through. I have a theory that the reason Sony are getting out of the TV business is that they don’t want to develop their own TV OS and they’re sick of their customers complaining about the ads in Google’s OS.

I’m about to get a 2nd one and I’m seriously considering a computer monitor hooked up to a mini PC running XBMC or something.

It’s not just that it’s slavery, but it’s literally destroying the people doing it. Being exposed to so much horrendous content has lasting impact. It’s like the coal mines (or any number of other body destroying examples) but it’s not lungs that suffer, it’s the brain.

I’ll disagree. The Israeli leadership is doing horrible things and the only way for those of us not in Israel to attempt to stop them is to boycott all of Israel - we have no way of picking and choosing products/services from Israel that will help/hurt the regime. Moves like this by NVIDIA are seen as subverting the boycott in a very significant way and draw out the negative responses you see here. The only people that can legitimately change the Israeli leadership are the Israeli people and they are going to face negative opinions from outside until they do. I understand very well that I’m extremely lucky that I live in a country that has not been taken over by fascists and I do what I can to keep it that way.