Linux already has its own binary executable format, ELF (that you could just statically link, if you wanted to bundle everything). Also the usual way to indicate that some file is executable on linux systems is just through an execute bit, not through an extension.

But the discussion here is more about how to package properly an application (for updates, app centralized management etc,) than how to deliver an executable on linux.

They are bullshit jobs.

If you want to evaluate danger in a certain domain, hire or contract people in that domain to evaluate.

If you want someone to push their own ideological leanings onto a model, hire a self proclaimed ethicist.

Exactly. It’s no surprise that people just blindly hit accept on permission prompts after the 80th time Claude code asks if it’s allowed to read-only parse a csv.

Another heaping portion of words from a company that has Fable flag a “safety issue” and refuse to answer if you innocuously request something readily answered by a high school chemistry/biology/physics textbook.

This must be similar to what seemingly every documentary on Netflix uses in all their editing when showing any sort of footage taken more than 5 years ago.

Some show will be showing a clip of an interview recorded in 2020, and for some reason it’s edited to appear to be a poorly-stored VHS when the original was almost certainly a 1080p or 4K digital recording.

Let’s not forget the fact that despite their new market cap and being the beneficiary of having a near monopoly on making incredibly complex pickaxes during a gold rush… Nvidia is still the company with a long and consistent history of misleading their customers via marketing. Their greatest hits include:

- The digital equivalent of the VW emissions scandal where drivers detected when they were being benchmarked and altering rendering for better results

- Selling GPUs as having 4gb vram when it was only 3.5gb usable, the remaining 0.5 being absurdly slower and causing performance loss when used

- Using intentionally misleading naming schemes to obfuscate things like memory bus width being drastically different between what superficially appeared to be similarly spec’d cards

A dozen other less egregious but similarly disingenuous decisions

But to be clear, I’m a huge fan and continue to run Nvidia because their products are generally incredible regardless

You forgot their tensor core performance numbers "with sparsity".

That 4gb vram deal sounds ahead of its time. CPU caches are tiered, why not ram? Looking forward to future systems with 8gb ddr6 and 8gb ddr5. "Swapping to ram" would become a thing.

Xbox has that right now. Some memory channels have 1GB chips while some have 2GB chips. So part of your memory space uses all channels and part uses more like half.

That GPU was much worse though. If that .5GB had been moderately slower it wouldn't have gotten the same attention. But because it was a weird backup path to that segment of memory, on a design that normally runs all segments in parallel, it ran at 1/7 the speed of everything else. Overflowing into it was devastating.

There are lots of platforms where RAM is tiered, and operating systems that support it. For example, CLX allows for a "NUMA node without CPU" abstraction; there was a HN article recently about Facebook cooking up their own silicon and Linux patches to implement this so they could expand DDR5 platforms with retired DDR4 memory. Not a new idea...20+ years ago I used mc68k & ns32k BSD systems that had a couple of meg of fast memory onboard and more, slower memory hung off a VMEBus. System tried to keep hot pages in fast memory and it worked reasonably well.

Fun activity: install glasswire on windows for a day or 2, set it to prompt you before any connection is allowed, and watch as about 500 different windows components attempt connections with Microsoft as a result of any and every action. And how many onedrive exes randomly fire off throughout the day despite having never once used it. And how onedrive changes its version number every day when it realizes it can’t connect.

You’re giving me ptsd of LittleSnitch + any Adobe (or microsoft) product.

You seriously can’t even use the machine without blanket, permanent approvals… the endless flood of network requests is paralyzing.

MS Office doesn't need permanent approval. I have Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Autoupdate and Update Assistant blocked from making any outgoing connection (on MacOS). That works for about a month, then I have to unblock briefly to let the licence check work. I don't use Adobe these days.

I got rid of both, not too long ago, but even trying to be careful about approving office chatter got me that read-only license check bar all the time. And getting rid of it meant clearing rules and blanket Approve for a time, or a flood of individual ones.

Also excising Adobe was not simple.

OneDrive is the most annoying of all the apps I never use that was installed alongside an app that I do use. Thankfully, I have now blocked it from notifying me that it can no longer connect to the mother ship.

Office apps no longer autosave unless you have OneDrive installed. So no autosave for me! Instead I save compulsively lie the days of floppy disk PCs.

(Meanwhile Emacs has had autosave since at least 1977)

I remember when Adobe switched to default saving to your cloud profile rather than local. It took digging to get the default switched back to local. I know I'm old, but who wants to save large media files to a cloud like this? It's not like I'm working on a computer in one location, move to another computer entirely. Who sits at a computer to log out the cloud user just to login as yourself? You pop in a USB stick (or other storage) and use whatever account is logged in while saving back to the same storage medium. I know when you are a cloud SaaS, you want all the people to use all your things, but it always felt like a solution looking for a problem. That's a problem for me

Older office 2019 or 21 I think with massgrave.

Libreoffice.

I'm more and more relying less on office nowadays.

Pack-in slopware and it's consequences have been a disaster for the desktop operating system duopoly.

how’s your mandarin?

More like how’s my wallet? I love helping to move the invisible hand of the market. When I go to small brick and mortar stores and one has an item for a higher price I’ll ask if I can have it price matched. If they say no I’ll tell them I’m going over to their competitor right now to make a purchase.

If a Chinese company pays for my Claude tokens I’m both getting directly compensated and forcing Anthropic to lower their prices.

“By virtue of being the good people everything we do is good, and if it happens to be in our best personal and financial interest then that is good too because it enables us to do more good. And if it’s to the detriment to others then it’s because you don’t understand the good behind it. Which is fine, because we’re good and you can trust that what we do is good because what we do is good by virtue of us being the good ones.”

AI will cause mass unemployment, and perhaps even human extinction. Even though our safety record isn't much better, we still have to accelerate. Because if we lead the way, we might just have a slightly better future than extinction. (At the very least, I'll be filthy rich.)

"All of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."

You’ll often find that problems aren’t solved by the people who would find themselves out of work if they solved them.