Non-technical readers? In my Linux memes community??

AI is creative, in the same sense as creative accounting

You probably know this, but Mint is kind of just Debian with extra stuff (some might call it bloat, but that’s a matter of use case). So a switch to Debian from Mint should be very straightforward, if not seamless. The package manager is the same, and that’s usually the biggest part of switching distros. Debian is also ideal for hosting specifically; many, many production servers run on Debian. It’s also arguably the best-supported distro out there, so whatever question you have had probably already been answered.

TL;DR you should totally try Debian out (especially a headless version). It mostly like won’t be an issue.

I think Microsoft, as they often do, see the writing on the wall—the AI bubble bursting soon, taking AI-only businesses with them. What I see in this is a play to, at best, buy some extra good will with Anthropic so they can be first in line for the acquisition when the latter are tanking, or at worst (and more likely imo), get them dependent on Microsoft for revenue so that they have no other choice to be subsumed by them.

But I’ve been wrong about most economic/political predictions I’ve ever made, so we’ll see!

This is correct on an order of magnitude no single person can really wrap their brains around. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) made $121 billion in 2025. Not gross revenue—net profits (source). This “fine” is about 0.1% of what the execs and shareholders take home. That cost, in their revenue, wouldn’t register as any change within their accounting.

To call it a “rounding error” would be a huge exaggeration.

The truth is: if you have wealthy people asking if a bubble is real, and their friends who benefit from their investment deny it, the bubble it is real.

Damn Paul, from downtown!

Don’t know how much you’re into AI models, but if you’re looking for one to play with locally, a couple open-source and open-weight ones that come to mind are one of DeepSeek’s, or Mistral AI.

Exactly. You know what is frictionless?

1. I type in “Amazon.com”(or any of a dozen different shopping platforms) in my browser
2. I use the site’s search bar to look up the item I want
3. I see which the suits my needs best out of the results
4. I click “buy now”

I’m sorry OpenAI, but there’s really no realistically better way to shop for things online.

This was a delightful read, especially since I agree with the premise fully. Those people need to shut the fuck up.

That’s fair, actually: my project had 2 packages in my node_modules (not my package.json, total dependencies!) in vanilla JS, now it has well over 100. Unreal.

I host my own website, and I decided to rewrite the JS portions in React, in order to learn the framework. Boy was it a learning experience: To do the same thing required 2-4 times the amount of code—and that’s just in the scripts, let alone the all the bloat from the packages and the bundler.

I know this is a bit more radical than cutting out frameworks, but working with the JS ecosystem was such a pain, largely because there’s you need to piece together different software to make a stack work, which may or may not go together well. And since your stack is likely unique, good luck getting help on your problems. It made me miss Rust (albeit most languages do)—in Rust, you have Cargo for everything, and it’s beautiful. Rust has its own difficulties, but they actually feel surmountable compared to the dependency hell of JS.

Hey man, the only people who can challenge the new oligarchs, so it seems, are the old oligarchs. And I say: let them fight!

Ah, that makes a lot more sense lol

Could you show me the place in the study where it says this? I wasn’t able to find it, and this seems pretty important

Love this. This is the kind of stuff sophisticated ML models were born to do!

This is an interesting article, but I can only think of how current tech corporations would be absolutely drooling over the AI trained on financial transactions named Charlie—and very little would likely prevent them from getting their hands on it in the long term.

But, as always, I hope I’m just being paranoid. Best of luck to old TimBL—he’s revolutionized the world once; why not again?