Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.
Port scanners don't try to ssh into my server with various username/password combinations.
I prefer to hide my port instead of using F2B for a few reasons.
1. Log spam. Looking in my audit logs for anything suspicious is horrendous when there's just megs of login attempts for days.
2. F2B has banned me in the past due to various oopsies on my part. Which is not good when I'm out of town and really need to get into my server.
3. Zero days may be incredibly rare in ssh, but maybe not so much in Immich or any other relatively new software stack being exposed. I'd prefer not to risk it when simple alternatives exist.
Besides the above, using Tailscale gives me other options, such as locking down cloud servers (or other devices I may not have hardware control over) so that they can only be connected to, but not out of.
You can tweak rate thresholds for F2B, so that it blocks the 100-attempts-per-second attackers, but doesn't block your three-attempts-per-minute manual fumbling.
> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.
But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
> New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission.
That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.
And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
It isn't hard to find people with different religious views from their parents, so no, I don't think defaulting a baby to any religion should be a thing.
I'm not so sure. People often trivialize the kinetic energy involved with driving. Yes, a bad lawyer can potentially cause an innocent to be punished if enough other checks and balances fail.
But being behind the wheel of a car is something else. Even a small passenger car is over a ton of metal moving at oftentimes high speeds. Most people don't seem to appreciate the sheer destructive capability driving gives someone.
I'm ignorant here. Why do you say this? From my admittedly uneducated viewpoint, having a board of some type makes sense because I don't care about the results of a test you took fifteen years ago. I care about how you behave today. I'm the case of lawyers, having the courts approve you makes some sense- they're all in the law system. Who would do this for doctors?
Having a diploma is well and good but it seems like we need continued governance and the ability to revoke your license if you're a screw up. It doesn't make much sense to me to have the body approving your immediate start at a practice be different from those that will review your continuation of that practice at a later date.
The issue is not for ongoing malpractices, it's mostly because the medical professional associations do a lot of gatekeeping to restrict the supply of healthcare professionals (and lobby Congress to restrict the number of training positions, known as residencies, to create artificial scarcity).
Yeah, after reading this I was thinking, "how is this different from agents using a combination of tools, resources, and prompts?" They do surprising things sometimes but it's not particularly novel of Claude Code.
i see it as skills being logical grouping of a set of prompts, which achieve a goal. Like my optimize-critical-path skill.
It's more than a single prompt, but less than an entire agent. I find skills to be the tools you use on the fly. Like how I might have a wrench,screw-driver, hammer in my tool box.
tools vs skills is all about context efficiency from what I see. and yes, this isn't novel of claude. but they are the first to offer this abstraction.
My point is that Skills are not the first to do this. Well written MCPs are dynamic workflow engines. Skills are like a more user focused and slimmed down version of MCPs.
It'd be interesting to see a comparison of a well written MCP compared to a skill in terms of task competency.
Now that you mention it, i can see a future where claude may offer a "skills" feature and codex offers a "talent" feature. where they are essentially the same things, but specific to that vendor.
reminds me how each cloud has the same offerings but different products.
It seems like human nature that if you attach a number or score to something, people are going to try and get the most they can.
Which is kinda the point. Nobody wants to lose score, so they don't post horrible comments (usually) and they try to find the most interesting articles to post. That's good for everyone. But it does have the side-effect of people complaining that their karma was "stolen".
In my case I was glad someone else got it out because it was in regards to a civil rights leader being imprisoned. I used "steal" in quotes for a reason, but of course, I will admit, I am a lowly ape. When I see other ape get huge points for same action I wonder what I did wrong, even though I happy for other ape, the best simple word I can come up for it is "steal" as lowly ape brain understand and convey this easily.
Brian is much higher ape, free from these low-level ape impulses so long as he writes them out. I hope to be higher ape someday. Ape work harder to get higher thought like Brian.
I personally don't like using LLMs for doing anything creative, but I find it hilarious how if you're against AI for coding you're considered a Luddite by most in these parts. But blog posts? Now that's too far and you deserve to be lambasted.
At least many of the comments here still seem to be human written and so are much more interesting to read than the increasing number of AI written articles that get linked.
LLMs are worse at things where performance is based on subjective preference, it's as simple as that.
It's not just blog posts: the staunchest AI supporters are the quickest to call out slop in the default aesthetics of vibe-coded websites, or images, or music.
Pretty much anywhere that "taste" is supposed to be involved.
I used to love gog. I purchased a bunch of stuff back when they were talking a big game around supporting Linux with their Galaxy client.
But while gog was talking, Valve was actually doing. Building an actual Linux client. Making multiplayer actually work. Not to mention all the work they've done with Proton and upstreamimg graphics drivers.
I hope gog succeeds. I just value Linux gaming support over not having DRM. It's kinda a idealist vs realist stance for me.
There is only 1 Steam client for Linux, and there will only ever be one client, and that client has had basic issues (context menus being a completely new window that steals focus, comes to mind instantly) that have been unresolved year after year.
For GOG, there are plenty of clients for Linux [1][2][3][4], And they are open source, I can go and talk to the people making these clients directly, I can give feedback, I can make changes to make these clients better (and to a small degree, I already have).
It took me seven tries across two years to get Cyberpunk 2077 playing on Linux using either raw install files with or without Lutris/Bottles, GOG Galaxy in a wine env, or whatever Heroic Launcher offers.
I'm glad it mostly works now, but i would've been better off buying it from Valve. The effort Valve put into making games Just Work is unparalleled. The minor UI issues (like context menus getting rendered in place as windows which breaks niche window managers) are nothing compared to the hours required to brute force the right Wine/Proton setup for every game to make it work.
Most of the games that now work in unofficial GOG launchers only work because Valve paid someone to make games run well on Wine, either by directly using Proton or by using one of the many libraries Valve has directly paid for work for.
Yes. One recipe at the time was broken, the other didn't work. At some point the game got updated and the existing tricks and workarounds to get the game running were no longer enough.
Not when I tried it the first couple of times. At some point Proton (and then probably Wine?) got updated to fix the bug triggered by one of the game updates months before that and it has worked since.
I'm no stranger to messing with Wine to get Windows executables to work. Whatever the GOG release did different, it just didn't work once the intro logos were gone, even with the same Proton version that worked with the Steam version.
Con 1: not all options are all that easy to use or feature complete, making the "choice" a mandatory QA/research task, rather than a way to exercise personal taste/freedom
Con 2: no galaxy-only features like achievements and save file cloud sync
There are tons of Linux games distributed on GOG, and not having to use a proprietary client is one of its great advantages. Not to downplay Valve's contributions (and I may well get a Steam Frame when they come out), but they mostly amount to porting their mandatory DRM-laden client to Linux, and maintaining a fork of Wine that integrates with that client.
Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.
You're fairly significantly downplaying their contributions. They have a substantial amount of FOSS developers under contract working on SDL, DXVK, VKD3D and there's over a dozen people on working on KDE on Valve's dime alone. Proton isn't a fork of Wine, it's a Codeweavers managed project funded by Valve that packages Wine, virtually everything useful ends up going upstream given Codeweavers are also the main contributors to Wine. AMDGPU, NVK, Valve funded. Valve have been funding FEX since it's conception.
That isn't even everything, just what I've been able to confirm either through interviews or conference talks where their involvement has come up. They've quietly been doing a lot for Linux.
Official Linux releases are almost never maintained. I have the same game on Steam and GOG, but the GOG version no longer works. Neither does the Steam version, except if I switch to the Windows version with Proton. Then it works flawlessly (usually faster and better than the Linux version ever did.)
Can you give me an example of what you're referring to? I've got a lot of Linux games from GOG and have never encountered any situation in which the Linux build stopped working, nor any situation in which the Windows build was being updated with new versions without the Linux build also being updated at the same time.
Sadly I've had the same experience. I've had to rebuy a couple games on steam because the older gog version wasn't version compatible with my friend's clients. That really burned my bottom.
Yes, it is so bad that I will no longer buy a game for its Linux release. Almost every single Linux game I have outside of actual Valve titles no longer works. I don't want to hear that they have a Linux release. I want to hear that they have a Windows release that works with Proton. Windows is the only ABI that I can expect to reliably run on Linux.
I've been gaming primarily on Linux for almost 15 years, and buying from GOG as my first choice, and have never encountered a single instance of what you're describing. I don't have a single Linux game on my GOG account that "no longer works", and I have dozens of Linux games there.
In fact the only time I recall a Linux-native game not working out of the box was when I got the game 'The Raven: Legacy of a Master Thief' on Steam, and that was due to some wonky configuration implemented by the game devs.
Do you have any specific examples of this problem?
It doesn’t look like GOG can afford to pay for that work. I think we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux.
Valve started to invest in Linux and open source 10 years before releasing Steam Deck. They started hiring OSS developers back in 2012 and Deck released in 2022:
Saying "we're lucky" makes it sound like Valve's investment in Linux is a happy accident, but as you point out, the Steam Machine was announced in 2013, and back them gaming on Linux was seen as a pie in the sky dream.
Headlines at the time said things like "Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water", there was barely any market demand, and they probably lost a lot on the initial release.
The fact that they still doubled down and spent ten years funding the Linux ecosystem before it made them any money speaks of both a strategic incentive (they don't want Microsoft to hold a sword over their neck) and ideological vision (they want gaming to stay relatively open).
Saying "we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux" is getting the causality backwards at the very least. Valve investing in Linux is what made the Steam Deck's success remotely possible, and it wasn't a sure shot.
I think it's perfectly realistic to think there is a substantial risk of losing library content you've bought on Valve in the next 20 years. Don't know what the odds are, but they're greater than zero.
I personally think that, between the two, gog is far more likely to disappear than steam.
I'm happy both exist. I've nothing against gog (except maybe for their broken promises around Linux support, but I do understand changing market forces) and like I said, I hope they succeed. They've got a good mission.
It's actually mostly the same in both cases. If steam or GOG goes down, you can no longer download the games you bought. But what about the games you have downloaded? Well GOG games will work out of the box, however the steam "DRM" is really just basic protection to stop you from copying the files to your friend's computer, and can easily be removed by already existing tools like Steamless and Goldberg Emulator. So I'm not really that worried about the vast majority of my steam library. The only thing I'd worry about is spiking storage costs when steam's demise seems imminent!
The unfortunate or fortunate reality of network effects also means Steam is usually best suited to preserve content that might otherwise be lost. Both in terms of literally holding the data for longer than the general public (including workshop files), but also by keeping communities active and alive.
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