This is pretty much a “all Tech companies have to jump on the AI hype train” pressure on publicly traded companies and those who need lots of investor money, and little if at all customer pressure.

All investors want their money to be in the same place as those who invested in Google before it made it big, and the AI hype promises exactly that to the “winners” of the AI race.

Customer needs and demands are well below secondary to investor pressure, especially for companies which have dominant market positions (so general customers have no decent alternatives) and startups whose entire business model is AI.

God forbid people want the compute they are paying for to actually do what they want, and not work at cross purposes for the company and its various data sales clients.

I think that way of thinking is still pretty niche.

Hope it’s becoming more widespread, but in my experience most people don’t actually concern themselves with “my device does some stuff in the background that goes beyond what I want it for” - in their ignorance of Technology, they just assume it’s something that’s necessary.

I think were people have problems is mainly at the level of “this device is slower at doing what I want it to do than the older one” (for example, because AI makes it slower), “this device costs more than the other one without doing what I want it to do any better” (for example, they’re unwilling to pay more for the AI functionality) or “this device does what I want it to do worse than before/that-one” (for example, AI is forced on users, actually making the experience of using that device worse, such as with Windows 11).

Code made up of severally parts with inconsistently styles of coding and design is going to FUCK YOU UP in the middle and long terms unless you never again have to touch that code.

It’s only faster if you’re doing small enough projects that an LLM can generate the whole thing in one go (so, almost certainly, not working as professional at a level beyond junior) and it’s something you will never have to maintain (i.e. prototyping).

Using an LLM is like giving the work to a large group of junior developers were each time you give them work it’s a random one that picks up the task and you can’t actually teach them: even when it works, what you get is riddled with bad practices and design errors that are not even consistently the same between tasks so when you piece the software together it’s from the very start the kind of spaghetti mess you see in a project with lots of years in production which has been maintained by lots of different people who didn’t even try to follow each others coding style plus since you can’t teach them stuff like coding standards or design for extendability, it will always be just as fucked up as day one.

A Mini PC with an N100 (exact same performance as the microprocessor in the Pi5 according to this) and 8GB RAM will cost you around $140, which per what a previous poster dug out is exactly the same price as a Pi4 with only 4GB if we’re talking about something with the equivalent kit (i.e. with box, dissipators, power supply and HDMI cable)

Funny enough I recently bought an N100 Mini-PC with 8GB (as a Christmas present to replace somebody’s aged Windows 8 PC) for just a bit over $140 (more precisely €123, so $143 at today’s exchange rate).

According to this the performance of the microprocessor on the Pi5 is at the same level as that of the N100.

So basically if you buy a Mini PC with an N100 and 8GB memory you can roughly get the performance of the Pi5 at the price of a Pi4 with only 4GB.

I think the point of the previous poster that “this is wild” is exactly right.

Unless you actually need the actual pins with I/O ports, I2C, SPI or such for controlling some electronics, you’re better of with the Mini PC and even if you do, you’re probably better of with a Banana Pi or an Orange Pi.

You almost certainly could do it with an ESP32 (a microcontroller with Arduino support and which supports WiFi and bluetooth).

An ESP32 Super Mini board costs about $5.

Of course, forget about an UI other than web-based for the ESP32 or proper OS (like Linux) support, as that stuff is on the embedded systems side of things (though kinda powerful for one) rather than the Single Board Computer side.

I did not know that.

Took them two decades but better late than never!

I totally agreed with that: their Server OS is superior to their Desktop OS.

I just think it’s mainly because their Desktop OS has fast enshittified after Windows 7 rather than because Windows server is actually all that great as a server OS.

In fact, thinking about it, one might even say that Windows Server is better than the Desktop version because it’s to a very great extent a Desktop OS (in terms of having things like having an a complex UI layer and set of support applications integrated) the very thing which is actually a large part of the reason why its an inferior server OS for typical server-side scenarios because there what you most value is maximum computing resources made available to the server applications (which tend to be heavy users of computing, memory, networking or a combination of those) and an integrated UI layer actually uses more of those just for the OS (both directly for its own work and indirectly from the added complexity of a bulkier OS resulting in less streamlined execution paths) making fewer resources available for the same hardware.

If you look at the Linux distros and distro variants for server deployment they are actually vastly inferior to the Windows OS Desktop - for starters because they’re command-line only, though nowadays there’s often web-based management interfaces which are still a much lighter option than a directly integrated UI layer - exactly because absent an intergrated UI layer, not adding the UI support on top via something like XWindows or Wyland on a server Linux distro actually makes them better for server tasks.

Ah, yes, Windows NT.

I remember how this little operating system with a kernel invented by a Finnish dude and with no real corporate back almost completelly ate their market share in the server space back in the day (not that they’ve had a significant server market for long in between the end of the era of corporate Unixes like SunOS and the beginning of the era of Linux).

I actual did server-side development and just about every company I worked for in 2 decades and 3 countries had masses of Linux servers and if that much a handful of Windows servers, and that included all sized of company, from small ones to massive corporate behemoths - Linux was simple the best way to get the most use and performance out of your server hardware.

Whilst I haven’t been doing server side stuff for a few years, I’m actually surprised they still have any server market at all, since the only upside their server solutions have over Linux is perfect integration with their Desktop OS whilst all the rest are downsides.

I guess that they have some market share because basically their servers serve as glue between instances of to their Desktop OS in a network because of using closed protocols (i.e. a forced dependency on the desktop market rather than superior quality) whilst for any kind of generic computing they’re an inferior solution to even a free OS.

AAA games from around the 00s and 10s with heavy DRM are also often a problem, with the official version of a game not at all running in Linux no matter what you do, whilst a pirate version of the same game will work just fine.

Because my games library is much bigger in GoG than Steam, I’ve been using Lutris alongside the Steam App from the start (for over a year now) and the rate of no-hassle success I’ve had is just as good as with Steam and the whole process of installing a game from GoG and running it is just as slick in Lutris as doing so for Steam games in the Steam App.

Further, Lutris is much more open and flexible than Steam, so for example I’ve configured it to by default run my games inside a firejail sandbox with localhost-only networking, I can install games from many sources and formats rather than just digital distribution from a specific game store and it’s even perfectly possible to run pirated games with it (one of my Steam games won’t at all run in Linux, but a pirated version of it works just fine from Lutris), none of which is possible with Steam.

The actual gaming is just as seamless with Steam as with Lutris, but Steam is purposefully a closed solution highly integrated with a single games store, so it’s way more restrictive about what you can do with your games than Lutris (which follows the open source ethos, up to and including having a ton of obscure configuration options)

If we’re talking about denying profits to fatcats leveraging the Intellectual Property legislation they corruptly bought (for example anti circumvention legislation, business methods patents or the insane copyright lengths nowadays), then Piracy is pretty much a Moral Obligation.

That’s already happening: just look at the origins of top British musicians and actors now vs 3 decades ago - the age of stars hailing from the working class like David Bowie and Michael Caine is well and truly gone.

Like many other things, the filtering out of anybody not from the upper middle and upper class happens very early on and often even upstream from them starting their careers: it’s simply not affordable for them to go live in the places were things like good theatre academies and the best opportunities are, especially with the insane housing costs there.

On top of that there’s also the heavy nepotism and cronyism in those environments, especially theatre, so somebody not from that environment already and whose parents don’t “know somebody who knows somebody” there are pretty much screwed.

Losing money to piracy is well behind those things in affecting working class kids’ chances at making it big in the arts, especially given that the stage at which they are being blocked from progressing is one where they’re not famous and make most of their money from live performances, were piracy has no effect or can even have a positive effect if it helps make them more known as artists.

Mind you, I think it’s the morally right thing to do to pay those who need the money when you enjoy the product of their work, directly and bypassing the industry leeches which just leverage their control of distribution to extract rents, I just disagree with your theory that it’s somehow relevant for the arts being accessible for people not from well off origins, since my own observations when I had some contact with that world back in the UK and being interested in the subject also read about it, were that the causes of the massive fall in people from the working class in the arts in the UK were a cross between broad structural problems that pretty much stopped social mobility in general there and the nature of the arts as a very tough area were a handful of people make most of the money whilst the vast majority of artist spend years trying and failing barely capable to survive (nowadays not at all unless they have the bank of mommy and daddy to support them).

Personally I had lost all hope on those fuckers as soon as I saw how they went after Corbyn.

Then again I was just an EU immigrant in the UK and left after the Leave Referendum because that was the last drop for me and I lost all hope for the UK as a country (I kept following UK subjects for a while, hence actually caring about the whole Corbyn thing, but that slowly tailed of after a few years)

In the years since periodically some news or other comes out of the UK that just confirms my decision to leave Britain as one of the best in my life.

PS: Also, full disclosure, I was a Greenparty member back in Britain, so I was always significantly left of New Labour and didn’t have a good opinion of them. Mind you, they still exceeded my expectations … on the downside.

The politicians who wrestled back control of the Labour party through a campaign of smears with the help of Israeli-linked Jewish groups and who, immediately after that started at purge of any with dissenting opinions from that party, had more than demonstrated their love for Machiavelism, even before rising to Government purely on the back of the First Past The Post system and Reform splitting the far-right vote thus costing the Tories lots of seats.

Also, as others pointed out, this faction of Labour has long had an autoritarian streak, both in terms of the insane civil surveillance infrastructure they built last time they were in Government (as exposed by the Snowden Revelations) and their relentless weakening of privacy and even pretty basic legal rights.

This is really not surprising: the goose stepping into Fascism in the UK has started a while ago, it’s just that it’s a posh kind of Fascism wrapped in layers of deceit and disguised as “Rule Of Law”, unlike in places like for example Hungary were it was closer to the more traditional “strong-man with an iron-fist” Fascist image.

Judging by what has come out regarding UK personalities and the Epstein files, they’re looking for whistleblowers who would denounce the pedos they have amongst their elites.

If it’s not in your hands in an open format it’s not yours.

Not even cats are safe from cats.

Finally some worthy storage for memes!

Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.

As long as they keep selling the flash memory chips to drive makers, what’s the big deal of them dropping the SATA protocol from their consumer devices?

There are plenty of China-based companies which still make flash memory drives with a SATA interface using Samsung chips and at this point that tech is so mature that there really isn’t any great added value in terms of performance from getting Samsung SATA drives over getting some generic SATA drives with Samsung chips.

It actually makes some sense that Samsung is focusing their consumer-facing device production in a higher performance protocol which is very well established now and were the device speeds are not constrained by the protocol itself, rather than in a protocol were the maximum speed of the protocol (600 MB/s) is actually what constrains the device performance since the memory chips themselves are capable of more.

As a consumer, 6 or 7 years ago it definitelly made sense to get a Samsung SATA drive because they were actually some of the fastest in the market, but these days even shitty-shit no-name brand has SATA devices with 580MB/s read speeds (and, if large enough, similar write speeds) which is near the theoretical maximum of SATA3 and M.2 devices supporting PCI4 x16 offer several times the speeds of that.