A quarter-century back…

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3676

World domination. It’s a powerful and faintly sinister phrase, one you might imagine some B-movie mad scientist muttering as he puts the finishing touches on some infernal machine amidst a clutter of bubbling retorts and crackling Tesla coils. It is not a phrase you would, offhand, associate with cuddly penguins.

When Linus says he aims at world domination, it seems as if he wants you to laugh at the absurd image of a gaggle of scruffy hackers overrunning the computing world like some invading barbarian horde—but he’s also inviting you to join the horde. Beneath the deadpan self-mockery is dead seriousness—and beneath the dead seriousness, more deadpan self-mockery. And on and on, in a spiraling regress so many layers deep that even Linus probably doesn’t know where it ends, if it ends at all.

The way Linux hackers use the phrase “world domination” is what science-fiction fans call a “ha-ha-only-serious”. Some visions are so audacious, they can be expressed only as ironic jokes, lest the speaker be accused of pomposity or megalomania.

PC gaming is still only a bit over 5%, but it’s one of the last remaining computing environments where Linux hasn’t become the dominant OS choice, as it’s displaced embedded systems and servers and suchlike. Things have changed a lot.

Yes. Now try 0177.0x1.

I’m pretty sure that IPv4 address formats are more complicated than IPv6 forms, if you are actually doing RFC-compliant validation.

Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It’s not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it’s a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.

Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.

A lot of users aren’t going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are “presets” of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they’re doing it now. One doesn’t have the sort of “the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run” the way you do on Windows.

https://tech.yahoo.com/computing/articles/debian-edition-doesnt-linux-172134222.html

The Debian project has just released a new snapshot of its alternative operating system, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, which now includes a working 64-bit edition. This is a massive update for a project that many people forget exists, but you need to know right away that this is not a Linux distribution.

This latest release is based on Debian Trixie, or more specifically, the testing branch known as Sid. The Hurd is the original kernel that the GNU project was developing before Linus Torvalds announced his “hobby” project back in 1991.

I don’t think that Linux is going anywhere, but Hurd does march on!

I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.

So, I’d agree that he’s probably not doing a fantastic job of running Tesla as an auto company these days. However, if you consider Tesla to just be an auto company, its valuation is way too high. I think I heard someone put it along these lines a while back, that “Tesla is a solid auto company, but one valued at ten times what it’s worth.” The only way its present-day valuation can really be justified by an investor is if they think that the bulk of the company’s value is going to come from new things that it is doing and that those things will all be wildly successful, like robotaxi service and humanoid robots and all that. The value that would have to come to those for Tesla valuation not to already be wildly out of whack would have to be so large that what Tesla does as an auto company wouldn’t matter that much.

EDIT:

https://money.usnews.com/investing/stocks/tm-toyota-motor-corporation-adr

Toyota: Market Cap: $264.50B, P/E 11.08

https://money.usnews.com/investing/stocks/tsla-tesla-inc

Tesla: Market Cap: $1333.16B, P/E 354.33

https://money.usnews.com/investing/stocks/gm-general-motors-company

General Motors: Market Cap: $65.77B, P/E 24.93

Even if one agreed with him, he’s not actually doing, in this post, what he proposed there, which is linking to the source:

Linking to the source should be the primary way of attribution.

Like, setting aside the whole question of whether-or-not stripping out the artist name is reasonable or not, what we’re actually getting is the comic with no artist name or source link. @JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social had to dig up the original by doing a reverse image search and linked to the original himself.

Elon Musk’s xAI and SpaceX merged in February, valuing the company at over $1.25 trillion. SpaceX is now preparing for an initial public offering (IPO).

One of the things that Musk has to do to get his trillion dollar pay package fully paid out from Tesla as CEO is to crank up Tesla’s market capitalization. Many people, including myself, would say that this is a pretty wildly unreasonable payout, that Musk, via the aid of a friendly board, is transferring a lot of shareholder assets to himself that a company acting in the interests of its shareholders probably would not. I’ve wondered if this is a gyration to advance that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/09/05/tesla-proposes-compensation-plan-for-musk-that-could-be-worth-as-much-as-1-trillion/

Elon Musk Threatened To Quit Tesla Before $1 Trillion Compensation Deal

To receive his full compensation reward, Musk will need to meet the ambitious goal of raising Tesla’s market cap from around $1 trillion at present to $8.5 trillion within a ten-year period.

It looks like it’s a free image hosting service, and given that and that @AntiBullyRanger@ani.social also said that they couldn’t reach it directly, my guess is that there’s probably a number of people who upload content that violates someone’s requirements and get the host blacklisted by folks of a censorious nature.

EDIT: @over_clox@lemmy.world and @AntiBullyRanger@ani.social: A Lemmy instance can be set up to proxy images for remote sites. This has some privacy benefits (someone can’t harvest IP addresses of Lemmy users by just submitting images and waiting to see which IP addresses load them) and also the incidental benefit of bypassing restrictions like this, as long as your Lemmy home instance is accessible on the network that is blocking the image host. The home instance I use, lemmy.today, does this, and I’m sure that there are others. You might consider setting up another account on a second home instance that does that to work around this, if it’s common for you where you are.

https://lemmy.today/post/50406412 is this post on lemmy.today, for example.

The link that my browser actually loads is https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ibb.co%2FG3CVVyq2%2Fgghhhh.jpg

The downside is that your lemmy home instance has to spend the extra bandwidth and storage space to serve the images, so it requires the admin to be able and willing to expend the server resources on it.

I assume so. Here’s a video of someone floating a boat (apparently in air) in it, and then sinking it by pouring cups of sulfur hexafluoride over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee2NaYRnRGo

If it avoids diffusing into air to the degree that you can scoop it up and pour it, I’d imagine that it’d pour out of one’s lungs the same way.

But if you just want to get most of it out of your lungs — like, you’ve been breathing it and don’t want to asphyxiate — I imagine that exhaling all the air you can and inhaling air and doing that a few times would probably do a pretty good job, the way the Mythbusters video above did with the helium.

Sulfur hexafluoride does the opposite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvvSIAqOkIw

I’d guess that most industrial users of helium don’t consume it and could theoretically recover it from whatever process it’s involved in rather than just releasing it.

EDIT: Hard drives being an exception, as apparently some ship helium-filled; there, it’s actually being consumed during the manufacture.

EDIT2: I’d also point out that in the long run, we probably do have to be more conservative with our helium supply. We get it from pockets in the earth. It’s actually not all that common; it just happens, though, that we go to a lot of effort to extract natural gas, and that happens to sometimes also come up with helium, so we get that supply. But because it’s not reactive, it doesn’t bond to anything — it stays in gas form. When we let it go, it heads to near the top of our atmosphere and eventually gets lost to solar wind. Many users who today just release it — because why not, as the natural gas people will be providing more, and it’s cheaper that way — probably will need to capture what they’re using if we want helium to continue to be available.

Lithium ion batteries are far cheaper now at a consumer level than they were thirty years back.

EDIT: I’m actually surprised that a higher proportion of laptops today don’t ship with 100 Wh batteries. Go back some years, and shrinking the battery had a much larger difference in cost than it does today. The larger battery gives you longer battery longevity (makes it more reasonable to charge to 80%, say), can be used to make a laptop run more quickly, can power more devices. The only drawback is weight, and it isn’t that heavy.

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)

Anubis is an open source software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them in order to deter web scraping. It has been adopted mainly by Git forges and free and open-source software projects.[4][5]

https://lib.rs/crates/iocaine

Iocaine is a defense mechanism against unwanted scrapers, sitting between upstream resources and the fronting reverse proxy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haze_gray_and_underway

Haze gray is a paint color scheme used by USN warships to make the ships harder to see clearly.[1][2][3] The gray color reduces the contrast of the ships with the horizon, and reduces the vertical patterns in the ship’s appearance.[4] It is the color of USN combatant and auxiliary surface ships, in contrast to the dark gray or black color of submarines, the bright colors of ceremonial vessels and aircraft, or the white of hospital ships and some U.S. Coast Guard cutters.

Note that Twonks is British, and the Brits typically use a slightly different gray, with a more greenish cast (historically, IIRC, they selected paint color varying based on theater of operations, but I think that in practice, “warship gray” acts as more of a uniform to indicate that something is warship today than to reduce visibility, as in actual combat ranges in 2026, visual detection probably isn’t going to matter much).

goes looking for their colors

Apparently “weatherwork grey”.

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235079311-modern-royal-navy-warship-grey/

I doubt that there’s actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:

Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell

Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.

EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

The guy in Nebraska probably has fewer resources to protect against you than the sum total of all of the downstream companies that you’re trying to attack.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Carsfuckingcars/

deleted by creator

I mean, Apple is the example the author is using to come to his conclusions, but he’s talking about the industry as a whole regarding the disk controllers.