All I can hear is the nihilistic AI generated song at the end of the Malus talk. (https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...)

If SotA does not go up in price (ala open weights), then everyone will continue to shill digital garbage AND the stock market will presumably get ravaged. So I'm really crossing my fingers about cost increase and- full circle- this hope is why I like to self-soothe with these articles (i.e. I cannot attest the articles' veracity but it makes me feel good that a human writer is speculating convincingly about instability).

That said, I sense that the ravaging is a forgone conclusion, unless someone pulls a(nother) rabbit out of a hat. I'd qualify agentic coding was a rabbit, so it could happen again I suppose.

Maybe just take out the word "traditional" and be honest: "This is not an operating system. We're redefining the term because it is convenient for marketing."

  - Why would I contribute tons more to my already decent 401k? If anything, I want to pull from it. I refuse to diminish the peak years of me and my family's life together just to be wealthy when I'm old and alone.
  - that's a good point, but know you'll pay tax on top of 10%
  - well I would have paid tax anyway if I just saved it, and 401k turned out to be more lucrative anyway. So the penalty is only 10% when tax is unavoidable timewise, paltry
  - true, but you yourself just mentioned how lucrative the 401k is over time. That money will not manifest over time if you pull it now
  - why would I even want to be rich when I'm old and boring anyway, life is happening for me right now
  - well that depends on what you consider old, you could retire early, use SEPP to access penalty free, say at 50
  - I actually wasn't aware of that as an option... The difference between my age an 50 isn't that large, at least not compared to 55/60. Very good then, perhaps I'll keep things as they are.

  - Anthropic is seen as a victim/hero
  - They get Government-endorsed model hype
  - Monday will be a bad publicity day with the new Agent SDK limits, this overrides/dominates the headlines

  - The government gets to appear like they're ahead of the curve
  - The government gets to appear forcible and weapons-conscious (and maybe earn some right-wing points)

I doubt that Anthropic themselves are pushing identity verification, for what that's worth (which is admittedly not worth very much).

It's a real shame though. Time to shop around, or bite the bullet and buy a real GPU.

I don't know how its style of trust systems can help us solve these major trust problems, but I feel that it's the right direction to save us from the onslaught. If I had the time, this is where I'd focus my efforts, i.e. creating a (maintained) trust overlay on existing social networks. Using slop vacates trust, share your trust signals with other people you trust.

Maybe this means AI has democratized Death Marches.

'Don't believe self-serving lies about technologies being "inevitable" or "here to stay". You don't have to just go along with the dominant narrative. You can make deliberate choices and help others to do the same.'

I stopped here. Was this written by an an LLM? This sentence in particular reads exactly like the author supplied said essay as context and this sentence is the LLM's summarization of it. Nowhere is the original article linked, either, further decreasing trust. Moreover, there's an ad at the bottom for some BS "talent" platform to hire the author. This article is probably an LLM generated ad.

My trust is vacated.

This makes me feel that the SWE work/identity crisis is less important than the digital trust crisis.

Beautiful, perhaps like ice-nine is beautiful.