there’s this idea in the AI development zeitgeist that “rare data” is the only advantage left. this stuff is almost certainly motivated by that type of thinking. if they can have data in their datasets that no one else does, they view that as the only way left to be ahead of the competition.
this latest AI stuff was just the last straw for me. Spotify has routinely shown disrespect for the artists they rely on
what i mean is that Claude Code wouldn’t report as a Linux desktop browser without some nefarious behavior. what i mean by “surely” is that it would be shitty of Anthropic or OpenAI to do that for no benefit on their part. curl, wget, httpie, xh, whatever client use a specific user-agent that would be a reasonable default to use for any agent without fucking around pretending just to skew metrics.
those header report that they’re bots.
sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents? the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.
and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?
the AI explanation and reasoning is weak. what does “largely disappears” mean without numbers? Cloudflare doesn’t do vibes; give me numbers. in any case “desktop” surely means that the user-agent reflects a desktop browser and not a CLI tool, right? otherwise this number would be closer to 90% than 10%. unless the agents are intentionally spoofing browser user-agents i don’t buy it.
no mention of Steam’s and Framework’s hardware offering that come with Linux? no mention of the clear mass migrations?
here’s an AI explanation: LLMs are helping people who otherwise would struggle move to Linux
again, why do you hate yourself? do you think using Windows and holding it wrong is empowering? i don’t get it.
trust is required somewhere. if you don’t trust Microsoft, why would you use Windows in the first place?
why work on a feature that your users categorically reject? this isn’t me projecting, i literally have this conversation with a buddy all the time. he’s a programmer and talks about all the problems with Windows like there aren’t options. use the OS the way the devs designed it, pick a different one, or stfu
woof these downvotes. Windows users will never stop hating themselves
you say that like that makes it not worth doing
Windows users get what they deserve here. Windows gave you an app store, and you spat on it. maybe it was a bad implementation, but signed apps exist for a reason.
not precisely. Rust has let mut and Kotlin has val; ie the member layout and the mutability are treated differently, since those languages have mutability rules.
this is a circular argument anyway. the language designers could have figured out a way to do type inference like, eg, Java, but, again, explicitly chose not to.
a lot of modern languages explicitly disagree, eg Kotlin and Rust
classic. this has been a problem since the language was new.
the problem is that Rust is designed to not have this as a use case, or rather has machinery to make this marginally safer (mutexes etc) or make it unstable (panic) or just as unsafe as C (unsafe). if this is a pattern you want to maintain, Rust is going to throw friction at you by design, because tbh this pattern is the source of a ton of bugs.
it’s conceptually more complicated, but game engine devs have been moving to some form of Entity Component System[1] architecture, because it gives you a way to access memory that is both cache efficient and safe.
all that said i’m not a game dev. i think Bevy[2] was the blessed solution for a while?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system?wprov=sfti1 2: https://bevy.org/
my hot take is that a distro at the end of the day is just a package manager and an install script.
the question i would ask is: what do you want out of your package manager?
this would be an odd question for your given non-Linux user because their package manager before was called “fuck it YOLO”.
i’ll go through some that i use or have used.
apt/rpm/etc: stable. designed for the Linux of the 90s. uptime is king. i end up using these usually out of network effects. some popular package uses it in their Docker file or my VPS only supports these. they’re boring, but that’s on purpose. updates are purposeful and vetted (relatively).
these are your Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc flavors.
pacman: seriously just a great design philosophy imo next to the others. rolling release. no versions. fix forward. also with the AUR, you get your “fuck it YOLO” packages back in a way that they can actually be maintained, updated, or nuked as appropriate. if you ever caught yourself waiting for a CUDA release on apt, this is for you. Arch, Manjaro,… i think there’s a ton of vibe coded configs that all pretty much amount to Arch.
nix(/maybe guix?): a software engineer’s package manager. everything is declarative, reproducible, and version controllable. what was that thing i installed last weekend? it’s in the commit log. need 3 different C compilers/graphic drivers/toolchain dependencies installed? handled by the OS, and cleaned up when those versions change. this is my current rig cuz it helps me keep a bunch of machines in sync for my home projects.
Gentoo and LFS and anything else would be a bit much.
yeah, i mean it’s all bit abstract, but that’s essentially what it is.
a concrete example would be Nvidia. they’re wildly profitable, and they don’t care how overleveraged you are as long as their barrels full of cash keep coming in.
i agree with you that there is a concerning amount of debt and leverage going on, but it’s undeniable there’s money changing hands.
but also, speaking of abstract, all this shit is made up and most of the money “moving” is just flipping some bits in a database somewhere. i also agree with you that it’s all a bit of a facade for people with power to play with power while the true “value” of society such as cost of living and quality of life take a low priority cuz “AI has a $T valuation”. but if you live in this system, this is what it is.
yeah, i know the argument you’re trying to make, but that doesn’t change the actual capital and labor being used to create these things. whether it’s profitable once the investors run out of money is another story.
i mean, people are making money. sure there are debts owed, but Mark isn’t going home to a 1br rental even after being so “humiliated”. the bag holders are the investors.
i kinda feel sorry for Yann LeCun and his team at FAI. he’s been saying from the beginning that LLMs are not the way forward for AI research as a field, and that has kept Meta from competing in this gold rush effectively. world models, multi-modality, etc are fine and good research but aren’t here to compete with Claude Code or even as effective at being good enough for stuff like search.
not to be too reductionist, but it’s a tough spot when your head of AI is insisting that this tech has no future when there is a literal $T market for it.
the irony is that these “frontier labs” like OpenAI and Anthropic have basically dropped every greenfield research project that doesn’t directly support their “agentic AI” infrastructure (ie endless Markdown prompts + a while loop) while the labs working on the true frontier are seen as failures because they can’t make a bazillion bucks burning megawatts of energy to replace their front end devs.
this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.
i mean, i’m not arguing for this position necessarily. i agree with you.
that said, in practice, the “bad data” comes out in the wash. for example, all of Reddit is likely in their datasets. who knows what their data cleaning process is like, but diversity in the data is generally a good thing from a training perspective.