• 5 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: August 25th, 2025

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  • opensource can’t be monetized for advertisements.

    It can!

    That’s what Google did with Android: Google literally made a free open-source operating system everybody could copy, use and develop for for free, to create a wildly successful ecosystem.

    Once the ecosystem was fully developed, slowly, year after year, Google moved features out of the open-source AOSP project and into their proprietary stack. Look at AOSP now: it’s a shadow of its former self.

    And now they’re killing off AOSP and AOSP-derivatives and turning Android into their own Apple-style walled garden.

    I’d say Google very successfully used open-source to its advantage. Google sure knows how to play the long game.





  • I don’t worry about that. There are other markers of AI that are much more reliable:

    1. Extreme verbosity.
    2. Low S/N - i.e. lots of words to say not much at all.
    3. Perfect grammar.
    4. If you drill down into the subject, often completely incorrect - but you don’t know without having to read a whole bunch of tedious text.

    And here’s how you recognize AI:

    • High-schoolers turning a paper on a subject they know nothing about often fluff up their paper - at least when students still wrote their papers themselves - and hit 1. and 2., but rarely 3.

    • Good writers always hit 3. They can be terse or verbose, and they may or may not hit 1., but never 2. or 4.

    • Internet writers don’t write like journalists. Only journalists writing for a journal that happens to also publish on the internet write like journalists. Internet writers don’t quite hit 3, knowledgeable ones don’t hit 2., and almost none of them ever hit 1. Or said another way, when you read something about Linux networking that looks like an Atlantic op-ed, it’s AI.

    Only AI hits 1., 2. and 3. AI almost always writes in a tone and form that doesn’t befit the venue.

    As for 4., if you want an example of this, try to search “NFC unlock” on DDG or Bing (same AI-laden Microsoft trash search engine): you will find scores of perfectly-written articles that explain in painful details how you should buy NFC tags (they don’t say which), program them (they don’t say how), then present the tags to your device (they don’t say what devices) to program them to unlock upon presenting the tags.

    If you know anything about NFC, you know this is all shades of wrong. But amazingly, each article on the subject is many pages long, perfectly written, and there are countless such articles.


  • (no consumer is going to pay for extended) begins to really push people to Windows 11

    Consumers aren’t exactly ecstatic about throwing away perfectly serviceable computers just so Microsoft can push their spyware-cum-advertising platform down their throats either.

    I’d say this is a great push towards Linux for anybody who knows anything about computers and isn’t a corporation with a dumbass MCSE jockey as an “IT” guy.