Truly sad. It looks like Kent is pretty deep in the AI delusion. This is a guy who, while often controversial and with obvious issues, was nevertheless a very talented and energetic programmer.
Common in desktop software for controlling measurement gear like oscilloscopes. Those have actual knobs on the equipment, so the software does the same thing and it's the worst thing ever.
His non-apology apology even follows a familiar pattern: I wrote it myself but just used AI for some help, and it inserted false quotes! Bad tech! But I have now learned my lesson!
Very similar to what a rector recently wrote when she got busted giving an AI-generated speech in her inaugural speech in her new university job.
None of it is true, of course. These people are just sorry they got caught.
No, it's worse than that. The city council very much implemented an anti-car (harassment) policy, to the point that car owners felt hounded by their own council's policies. It seriously wasn't a matter of "marginally less privileged".
Motorists are an easy scapegoat but without alternatives it's just political handwaving. And most people are motorists.
Take my city for example. I work in an office block around a 15 minute walk from the centre, which has free parking for employees. Monday this week the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city effective immediately. When it was pointed out they they hadn't provided any of the necessary signage or machines for this, they decided it was illegal to park there at all, with fines and tow trucks for non compliance. An email from them suggested "cycling or using public transport as the weather is nicer".
I cannot stress this enough. No warning, no compromise, no other use for this land, just an immediate draconian announcement.
It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them
> the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city
what a strange way to put it... why didn't they just say that they are not using any more taxpayer money to finance your parking space? Land in a city is not "for free".
> It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them
I'll be totally honest in that I don't know what the arrangement was before, but that free parking was previously enforced by permits so it's a reasonable assumption that it was not at the tax payers expense
Your job in any political office is not to leave everything as-is and to cement yourself into that position, but to make marginal improvements, even if doing so costs you the next elections or inconveniences people (hopefully only temporarily).
Most of those marginal improvements can only be seen as something positive in retrospective, not while they're being made. While they're being made, they'll always be unpopular, as the voter base is usually not keen on defending the people that are currently in charge. That doesn't mean they won't show up in the next elections, just that they are quieter in the meantime.
in the ideal world maybe - but we don't live in the ideal world: most are trying to get re-elected, or elected to a higher office now that they have experience.
and even in the ideal world a great leader can do more in the next term if they get relected.
I don’t know that it’s a helpful distinction. A lot of people do it all - drive, walk, bike, and take public transit. Only in this kind of discussion do I see people declaring it a team you have to choose.
The starting point is anti-anything-but-a-car, so it's understandable that in the process of getting to any sort of parity you'd feel like it's "harassment".
It's like claiming getting rid of slavery is "harassment", because your unfair privileges are being taken back.
So this looks like a spite fork intended to make a point, not likely to become a widely used fork of systemd.
However, 1) he is right, and 2) systemd's recent full-throated embrace of AI for programming make it clear that systemd really is in dire need of a fork. This project has gone full corporate insanity.
I was never one of the vocal anti-systemd folks (I think it's a huge improvement over SysV-style boot stuff), but the risk of this project was always the monoculture aspect. It's on approximately every Linux install, and it's going bad FAST.
Not that I know of, but it also isn't really anything worth talking about imo. They added claud review as additional "eyes" on PRs (which already found actual bugs missed by maintainers) and added an AGENTS.md for the people using agents. They require disclosure of usage of agents (including which one) to know to be ready for the usually pitfalls encounted with them.
Like... they could say they entirely ban agents usage in their repo but how likely is that someone that wants to use them just doesn't contribute because of the policy instead of hiding the usage?
IIRC it also effectively is the same policy as the Linux kernel.
Exactly. Even if all it ends up amounting to is the stuff in the last paragraph of the summary, that would be huge.
The EU has a long history of doing things like this -- forcing the hand of national governments to do what they all knew needed to be done, but lacked the political willpower or mandate. Freeing monopolist-dominated or coddled industries like telecoms, delivery, airlines, railways would never have happened without the EU.
I checked the prices for 64GB DDR5. There's some variance based on brand/model but the average and trend seems more or less right. Did you happen to notice that it is about prices in the EU?
This fails a basic smell test: For DDR5, there is only a ~6% price difference between 16 and 32GB. Reality is that 2x16GB goes for about 400 (so that checks out), but 16GB of DDR5 can be had for a bit more than half that (250ish)-- obviously, otherwise people would just buy a 32GB dual channel kit and sell both 16GB sticks at a huge markup.
I just checked again. 16GB DDR5 (291 Euro) to 32GB (519 Euro). Seems right to me and does not match what you reported. Maybe they updated the website by the time I checked.
For the record: When I posted the previous comment, prices at ramtracker were 410ish for 32GB DDR5 (which is realistic) and 380ish for 16GB DDR5 (which is not).
Their price history does not reflect this at all, so I'm not trusting their values one bit.
At best, they changed their complete history to reflect a different product (or basket of products), and while the 16GB-DDR5 category is closer to accurate now, the 32GB is now too high: 32GB of DDR5-6000 can be had for 400ish in the Netherlands (or elsewhere in Europe).
Pcpartpicker has no plot for the 16GB DDR5 category (2x8GB?), which is the one value that makes absolutely no sense in the ramtrack plots.
But if you look at individual DDR-2x8GB items on pcpartpicker, it becomes obvious that ramtrack is just completely off here (why would 16GB be only 6% cheaper than 32GB, that is just not credible).
Source is a Dutch price comparison website. They have a undocumented API where I can fetch price history from. I picked a kit from each category and that's the prices your seeing.
Somebody in the article mentions that it's a spectrum, not a binary, and she's right: you can't call it AI-free if your product is human-made but all the marketing is AI slop.
I thought EEVBlog's Dave Jones had a good idea for exactly this kind of problem when advertising open source hardware [0]: a logo that clearly showed which parts were open.
I see open source projects entirely run by clueless LLM-using idiots, and existing projects overrun by them, and there is none of the quality or passion you would normally see.
Even if I were to apply my skill/energy to a project of my own, my code would just get stolen by these LLM companies to train their models, and regurgitated with my license removed. What's the point?
Honesty is the whole problem with ideas like this. If you're the kind of deluded idiot that considers LLM-generated crap "your code", stating exactly how little you had to do with it is not in your advantage. Far easier to maintain the lie.
If you review the code generated by the LLM in response to your specification and you own the responsibility for what that code will do in the real world... congratulations, it is now Your Code in every way that actually matters.
In a few years, your position will be revealed as getting angry for someone that called you with your number stored on their phone - instead of memorizing it and dialing the numbers manually - and didn't start the conversation by admitting that they haven't memorized your number.
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