ctOS from Watch Dogs was supposed to be a warning… It wasn’t supposed to become a real system.

How’s it a whoosh? I thought their question was genuine.

Different philosophies.

On Linux, you can delete a running application and it’s fine, because files aren’t actually deleted until the last process that has it open closes it. This applies for all files, not just executables.

Internally, files are mainly identified by an inode rather than the file path. If you delete a file then create a new one with the same name, the new file will have a different inode number to the old file. Anything that had the file open will still have a valid reference to the old file. If you’re running a program and upgrade it while it’s running, the currently running version will still be using the old inode, while any new instances will use the new one.

Windows doesn’t do that. On Windows, the file path is the main identifier for the file. Files that are in use and executables that are running are locked and can’t be modified. It tells you to restart so that it can swap in the new files after closing everything. When updating a program, you just need to close it to be able to update, but OS files need reboots because they’re locked the whole time the OS is running.

Note that some versions of Windows don’t require that any more. Some editions of Windows Server 2025 support hotpatching. This patches code (both OS code and program code) directly in memory, avoiding the need to restart to apply the update. On Linux, there’s a proprietary system called Kernelcare that does the same thing for kernel patches.

For Nginx on Debian, I need to figure out if just updating the libbrotli1 package is sufficient, or if libnginx-mod-http-brotli needs to be updated too. I suspect it’s dynamically linked (since that’s standard on Debian) and thus just updating the Brotli library and restarting Nginx is sufficient.

Ruffle (a Flash Player emulator) has really revitalized Flash sites. It’s made Flash videos and games playable again.

It can just be something small! Help a tourist with directions. Help an elderly person cross the road. Give a homeless person some food or water. Things like that.

Try Premiumize. It’s probably the best debrid service available today. They usually have a Black Friday sale, so you might want to pay for a month to try it out, then get a year or two for cheap during Black Friday.

If you have an Android streaming box, try it with either Weyd or Syncler. Syncler is a continuation of the old TVZion app, if you ever used that.

In addition to file hosts and torrents like Real Debrid, Premiumize also supports Usenet. You’d still need an indexer like NZBGeek, but you can use your Premiumize account to download .nzb files instead of having to get a separate Usenet subscription. You can use the Premiumize Usenet server in Sabnzbd too, if you ever want to automate downloads using the -arr suite instead of just streaming.

In the 90s, my mum’s washing machine would stop if you needed to rebalance it, and a “rebalance” light would come on to let you know. It doesn’t seem like newer washing machines still do that?

Help someone in need.

AI is more than just chatbots though, and there’s plenty of use cases where it can be used to help people rather than replace them.

I started the year being very sceptical of AI, but it’s helping me with a bunch of things at work now. For example, at work we have an agent for data analysis that can find the correct tables to use, gather data, and produce a report, along with proof (all the SQL queries it ran plus any ad-hoc code it used for analyzing the data) so that the work is repeatable and we can verify the accuracy of the queries and logic.

I’m a developer and it’s helped a lot with side tasks too. If I’m coding and see an issue in our code (usage of deprecated code, tech debt we need to pay down, etc), I used to file a task or add a todo comment to look into it later, and eventually get to it. A lot of them are small tasks, it’s just that I don’t always have time to look into them while in the middle of a project.

These days, instead of adding it to a todo list, I just spin up an agent and get it to look at it while I’m working on other things. The resulting code doesn’t get submitted for code review until I manually look at it and ensure it’s correct. The codebase I work on has never been cleaner, because AI has helped me clean up so much legacy cruft that’s accumulated over the years, while I still deliver my regular projects on time.

My personal account cost 3 times as much for the same prompt on my work account.

That’s interesting. My employer is too large to use subscriptions and also we have our own harnesses, so they have to pay per token. Some employees spend thousands of dollars (or more) per month, but if they were doing it at home, they’d be easily able to fit the same usage into a $200/m subscription.

I don’t have data to back this up but I’d say thay the majority of their customers aren’t also selling AI services themselves. It’s customers that use AI for their business processes, software development, etc.

AI is an enterprise product

I think Google and Meta are well-positioned to provide AI services to regular people, since they both already have a large user base, existing cash flow from other non-AI products (meaning they can subsidize AI features for as long as they need to), and can probably outlast any startup. Google especially easily have enough paid users and advertisers to cover costs for free users.

Most of thr other AI companies will probably all end up focusing on / pivoting towards enterprise use cases though, for the higher prices and stability of long-term contracts.

Anthropic made a smart business decision to mostly focus on enterprise customers rather than regular consumers. Only around 10% of their revenue comes from their heavily subsidized subscription plans. The remaining 90%ish comes from API and enterprise usage billed at per-token rates, which is a part of the company that’s actually profitable (it’s R&D, hardware, and subscriptions that are costing them a lot of money).

I suspect they’ll discontinue subscriptions some time after their IPO. Even though subscriptions are only responsible for 10% of revenue, they consume 42% of their inference compute power (https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/06/anthropic-claude-subscription-plan-provides-more-value-than-openais-study-says/5301470)

In comparison, around 70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Without subsidized subscriptions, they’d lose most of their customers.

legacy tlds (com, net, org) tend to be more affordable

Verisign are trying their best to make .com and .net less affordable. Their contract with ICANN is on a six year cycle, and it lets them increase the price by up to 7% for the last four years. Two years with no increases, then four years with increases. So far, they’ve always increased it the maximum amount.

Wholesale price has gone up from $6 in 2000 to $7.85 in 2020 (before this contract structure), to $10.26 now, and they’re increasing it to $10.97 on November 1.

Having said that, it’s still better than ccTLDs and newTLDs, where the registry can increase it as much as they want.

Why do the back wheels on American shopping carts not swivel like the front ones do? In Australia we have full 360 degree motion whereas US ones feel they have the turning radius of a truck.

The AI bubble bursting will have a huge effect on the US economy though, so who knows if people will even have the money to afford it. The whole economy is being propped up by AI at the moment.

I don’t think they should be assisted in devouring freely-accessible data in their endeavor

How is this assisting them, though? I see it as two different options:

1. They use the open-source code without giving anything back; or
2. They use the open-source code and help improve the project by reporting security issues.

In any case, a fundamental feature of both free and open-source software is tjsy anyone can use it, regardless of if you like them or agree with them or not, without discrimination. You could instead use a license that forbids AI training, but then your code would no longer be free or open-source.

I was thinking more about automated usage. There’s probably a lot of devices that hit it to check for internet connectivity. The linked article says that most of the traffic is automated and they saved bandwidth by putting some content in a JS file (since most of the automated hits don’t download or run the JS).

probably all the posts in the “fediverse” have been taken already

I don’t doubt this, as it’s trivial to do (by design). You don’t even have to scrape anything.

New posts and comments in a Lemmy community (or Mastodon profile or any other ActivityPub-based Fediverse app) get pushed to every server where federation is allowed and at least one person is subscribed to it. You can spin up your own server, subscribe to a bunch of communities, wait a while, and over time your PostgreSQL database will fill be populated with profiles, posts, comments, etc.