They’re offering a 5 seat SUV body as well. Not a minivan, but, closer.

So historically, lice and other parasites were a major vector for diseases like typhus. Particularly when a group of people were forced to sleep in close proximity, such as soldiers in barracks, refugees in tents, a community in a cold climate that would cram in to a single winter shelter, or travelers in a bunk house.

Shaving hair in general was an important method for reducing transmission, as it reduced the space they could hide in. Regular washing of the body. Clean beds with frequently replaced fillers (like straw) and bed linings laundered regularly and between separate users.

One reason many early modern soldiers are depicted as clean shaven was because it became a mandatory practice in many armies to minimize spread of disease. As regular washing, separated sleeping quarters, and regularly washed bedding was not practical for such a large group on the move. Even now, many militaries will shave new recruits to the scalp, to make sure they don’t bring any hair borne parasites in to the barracks. (Later on face shaving became extra important as a way to ensure gas masks would seal properly)

Lots of ways this was mitigated. It’s fairly rare these days due to most people regularly washing, getting parasites like bed bugs or lice exterminated the moment they’re found, and beds that are much less suited to harboring them.

But a lot of the hang ups around body hair are cultural hangers on from a time when this was a much more significant issue. In all likelihood it would become an issue again if society as a whole slackened on many of these practices at once.

There are immutable/atomic distos downstream of Debian and Arch as well.

But I’m just not convinced atomic or immutable systems really bring anything to the table in regards to a daily driver. Like, the problems they solve are not that prevalent in my experience, and the limitations seem very extreme.

you’d probably want to change over to that kernel after getting the system running with the standard kernel rather than starting with it. Since most of the additional support is for ancillary things like multi touch support.

Something you couldn’t really do with something like bazzite as it is immutable.

Bazzite is an immutable distro, which is great for something like a console or a hand held, where it’s only really supposed to do one thing, but not really advisable for a daily driver system. it’s not unreasonable that someone might want to change some core element of their system, and an immutable distro makes that super difficult to do.

The newer packages come from it using DNF package manager via being based on fedora. So if the issue is old packages then Fedora or something Arch based would probably a better suggestion then bazzite which is for a very specific use case. But realistically, outdated packages is not usually due to using the APT package manager, usually it comes from getting an unofficial package that isn’t being maintained well, usually from a “software store” or “software center” that allows unofficial packages to be listed. Flat pack (what bazzite defaults to using in its software store I think) has less of this issue, but there are plenty of poorly maintained flat packs out there that will cause this issue as well. Out dated packages are just the risk of relying on an GUI program for interacting with the package manager at the moment.

I’d say that unless you want a “game console” like experience, bazzite is maybe not the right option. It’s not bad but if you want a daily driver computer it’s probably not what you’re looking for.

It’s fedora based, so if you’re curious about it, I’d just suggest using fedora. The big difference between it and Debian being the DNF package manager vs the APT package manager.

For the secure boot issues, Debian derived systems shouldn’t have any specific issues, but it does require some extra steps on set up to get working properly, ones that are not going to be obvious at first glance In the documentation but should be fairly easy to do in the live boot session before instal.

Also, I’m confused as to why you would download a kernel from GitHub? if you want to install Mint or Ubuntu, you should probably just use one of the ISO images they offer on their websites, write it to some sort of storage medium (probably flash drive), boot from that and then configure the install in the live session.

Yah, given that “training models” doesn’t stop when the model is finished and released. Like, a released model needs to be continuously tweaked to keep it up to date or to deal with problems that have occurred. Even if that’s not literally tokens used by customers, it is compute being used to provide service to customers.

And that’s just assuming that they’re not just hiding some compute costs used to service customer demand inside the R&D budget. “Oh, you see, this pool of customers are being served with an experimental version, so any compute here is actually R&D, any API fees or subscription payments made by them of course get counted towards normal revenue.”

So the the operating expense was greater than their revenue from operations by about 2, but it seems like they’re minimizing it by hiding the cost of some of the compute inside marketing and training costs. This is something that a few AI companies in China have been caught doing to make it seem like they’re doing better than they are. So they could be incinerating money at an even faster rate than they just admitted.

I mean, it’s built on chrome, like opera and edge, so if Google is on the war path they’re probably not safe long term.

I suppose they could hard fork the web engine, but, that means they gotta develop a web engine which is a whole other can of worms.

If Google is out for blood on this, only browsers built on WebKit or Gecko would be safe.

I mean. I’d argue that the group that more frequently questions its positions and beliefs based on new evidence without killing a significant portion of a country, is a safer source for interpreting the world than the group that killed 40% of Germany when one assumption, regarding the authority of the bishop of Rome, was in dispute for the first time in several centuries.

I think a lot of people will brush it off what ever happens with SpaceX because Xai is the weakest of the big model providers. I don’t think we’ll even get to the openAI IPO. I think the S1 or IPO from anthropic will be the real kicker, because they’re the darling at the moment. The one that seems to have the most momentum and business customers.

If their S1 turns out to be utter dog water and/or their IPO flops, that’s when the real panic comes. When people say “oh crap, these GPU data centers don’t have customers that can make money”, and that narrative will hit all the people building data center and all the people selling hardware to them. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, that’s like… what, 25% of the S&P 500? That seems like a big enough hit to catch a lot of other stuff in the blast radius.

i looked up the story I had read a while back, and sundar was not the head of ads, but had just become the ceo after having been on the board of directors, and the issue was kicked up to him when Ben Gomes refused implement changes that Prabhakar Raghavan of ads wanted. later Gomes left the company and was replaced by Raghavan as head of search.

This all coming from internal emails and memos that were released as part of the anti trust case summarized in this piece which does a very good job of sourcing individual claims by pointing to specific emails and memos, although, the author is very… passionate in their coverage.

Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary

Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning, due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the head of search now.

Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.

To clarify why the S1s are so important here. There are a ton of laws that prevent companies that have their shares bought and sold on public stock markets from outright lying about the state of their business to the public. This is to ensure that companies can’t just lie to push up share prices.

Since the most important model providers are currently private, they have not been bound by these laws and have basically been allowed to say what ever they want. With them going public, and the release of the S1s, they need to publicly display accurate financials, not just vague and un verifiable numbers.

The question of “is this just a fad or is this a revolutionary technology that will reshape the economy” is easily answered if we have accurate accounting of the costs to run these business.

This stuff has been there. Just not much reporting or investigation has been done on it, instead a lot of news outlets focused on interviews with the heads of these companies and thoughtlessly reiterated press releases. Those who have criticized it have mainly just done so in ways that play in to the narrative convenient for the industry “but what if it’s TOO good?”.

The failure of tech journalism on this topic has been frankly catastrophic.

To break even on operating expenses, not even counting debt payments, depreciated capital value, or future recapitalization costs.

Just gotta configure and tweak until it gives outputs you find indistinguishable from correct. Just gotta train it to gaslight you properly. Come on don’t you want to be given and endless stream of stuff that looks correct?

The data center builders and operators are running behind on basically every data center project, massive amounts of Blackwell are just sitting in warehouses right now because they loose money the moment they’re plugged in. New IT load for the operators isn’t even a third of the capacity of the chips sold to these companies. Most of the companies that got switched over to token billing by the model providers are pulling back and freaking out over a yearly “AI budget” annihilated in a quarter. The model providers wouldn’t have swapped to token based billing for enterprise clients if they didn’t have to. They’ve been pumping demand with hype and by selling at a fraction of operational costs. Reporting non-gap EBITA to hide what a mess the financials are.

The SpaceX S1 alone shows how insanely cash incinerating it all is. Can’t wait to see Anthropic and OpeAIs S1s. It’s gonna be hilarious.

The fact that they tried to get the rules changed so they could get listed on index’s as soon as they IPOd means they’re out of willing creditors and out of cash. They were attempting to dump equity on to 401Ks to pay out the private bag-holders who have been funding them to sell model access at massively discounted rates.

Even if people host models them selves, the era of constant slop deluge is over simply because all the players giving away access for essentially free are about to go belly up or pivot away from it to other business models.

Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?

Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.