Obviously their actions are going to be fiscally motivated at the root, but sussing out how they intend the precise dynamics to play out is more nuanced.

Thinking of this as an effort to woo the defense hawks cuts a very clear path.

Anthropic's actions seem performative. Others have already speculated on the likely audience(s).

The two paradigms eventually merged, but there was a problem: it wasn't really a merger. It was more that scientific computing became the implied default, and simply absorbed new and emerging business use cases over time, and actual business computing languished in senescent obscurity.

Scientific computing precepts are dreadful at business use cases (and the reverse is true as well). For an example, one need look no further than the horrors of IEEE 754 in financial calculations, which even Microsoft has admitted are a problem(1).

Now here we are. Every "general purpose" computing architecture and platform out there - from Windows on x86-64 to macOS on aarch64 to Linux on RV64 - is derived from the scientific computing lineage and paradigms.

Small wonder that modernizing and porting decades-old business software is a nightmare.

(1) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

(just a personal tinker project - don't look for it upstream any time soon unless I get extremely bored)

//rolling my eyes into the back of my head//

I'm imagining some auditor seeing an "rsh" binary on a Linux system and dinging the system on it, and weeks of back and forth emails and meetings required to determine that, no, in fact, this is not remote shell, it's Ruby shell, and it's actually not a valid audit finding.

And, of course, that's completely omitting the binary collision issue because frankly anybody with "old" rsh installed deserves whatever pain they get.

There's no rule that the nomad life has to be permanent, and I don't know of anybody who went into it thinking that it would be permanent (myself included).

It's very useful as a breath of fresh air, a respite, and a chance to shake up one's life in positive, meaningful ways. In many ways, it's useful to think of the nomad life like a multi-year vacation, and oh by the way, when you do decide to "go home," you have many more options for defining where and what "home" is than you might have considered possible before. I think some folks who have _only_ ever lived a settled life might be a bit blind to those nuances.

What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.

The location collection mechanisms built by Apple and Google that would be effective at a state or regional level within the US have been built for advertising, with secondary purposes of opt-in anti-theft. They weren't built for continuous, rigorous enforcement of legal prohibitions within a given sub-region of the USA.

I think you're asserting that e.g. 90% of TikTok users in Montana would be impacted by the ban, and 10% would find a way around. For advertisers, that's fine. For enforcement of a law? Bzzzzzz! That's gonna be arbitrary-and-capricious'ed right out of the courtroom doors.

Even on post-billed plans, getting the billing address from the mobile carrier to Google requires a degrees of cooperation that is not currently in place. Apple may have an easier time in the regard, but then again they're not likely to cooperate either.

Within the USA, there might _possibly_ be sufficient technical infrastructure available to block app downloads at a national level. Maybe. And leaving aside the myriad circumvention routes.

But at the state level? It's simply not there in the way that the legislators think. Application-level data? Turn off location services. GeoIP? Nice try- mobile carriers don't reliably egress in the state from which the customer traffic originates. E911? Protected by other laws. Cell tower location? What about folks near state borders, and there's no reliable vehicle to get that data to app store operators right now anyway.

What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.

Effectively, to enforce this would require cooperation between government agencies, mobile carriers, and app vendors on a scale that has not be done in this country before- and with two of the three parties not even remotely interested in such cooperation.

This thing is pure political theatre.

Even the G3-G5 PowerMacs aren't really usable for modern web browsing anymore. The vanilla FOSS browsers aren't reliably building on them anymore, and even the "keep it usable" browser projects like TenFourFox are just barely scraping by performance wise on modern sites.

Note that your distro choices will be limited with these, but they all have at least a couple still available.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35895902

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

... That is all.

A certain breed of application developers love to spout this tripe until the operating system and/or the dev machine and/or the Internet connection don't work. Then queue days of tearful agony and whining to the tune of "I need this to do my job!"

At the time, I had no idea that it was a discrete programming language; it only registered in my mind as part of the OpenBoot/OpenFirmware environments. Then I ran into the FreeBSD bootloader and things finally clicked. "Aha," I thought, "this is an actual programming language." But what made it so popular for the early boot process, and where else was it used?

The modularity was stunning. It was easy- almost absurdly so- to build complex code up from a series of tiny individual functions. That, coupled with the minuscule interpreters and simple stack-based approach, made perfect sense for situations where developers need to perform complex tasks with minimum of storage overhead, and with portability as a first class citizen.

I find that it's a good fit for quite a few things, but if you're looking for a specific example: clustered Java application stacks, like ELK or Hadoop.

Zones, crossbow networking, SMF, and ZFS w/ BEs all working seamlessly together is a fantastic combination for easy-button admin of low- or zero-downtime clustered applications.

I feel like this just perfectly summarizes my early years in the tech field, back when I was a screwdriver jockey and spent my afternoons diving under desks. "Why yes, person who gets paid more than twice what I do- spilling a chai latte on your laptop keyboard does mean that it has to go away to a computer hospital for a bit, and no, I cannot magically go back in time and make a copy of all of your important files on an external hard drive for you."

To the author: no hard feelings- I love devs. But just like you might be surprised at the person struggling to write a simple be five-line bash script, sometimes the hardware-oriented folks are surprised at what doesn't occur as an obvious issue to others.