Oracle Database is still the gold standard for data in an enterprise setting. Postgres is great, but it doesn't have the clustering or replication capabilities, or support, that Oracle does.
When you're talking about business, the software itself doesn't really matter at all. Accountability is everything. There has to be a throat you can choke, an ass you can drag onto the carpet, when it fails. That is the reason why Oracle persists as an organization: they assume accountability for the data storage layer, freeing their clients to worry about other things.
This also has implications for developers grousing about "being an accountability sink" for AI-generated code. Being an accountability sink is the business and as Larry has demonstrated, quite lucrative indeed. Developing the code is a side effect that can now be done close to 100% by machine.
I bought a "mini retro TV" device from China. It's basically a cheap motherboard from an Android TV device MacGyvered into a case with its own small LCD display. It's got two old-timey toggle switches in the back: one for power and one for input select which doesn't work. I figured out what device it originally came from and put a build of Armbian for that device on it. I won't let its stock Android OS connect to the internet or my network for all the tea in—er, well...
I think you have the etymology wrong, although there was (schizophrenic) racism involved in the coining of the term. The "glow" part doesn't come from the fact that they're white (or not dark), it comes from Terry Davis saying that "CIA n*'s glow in the dark" (i.e. are obviously spotted and can't hide their identities).
To white supremacists that means “to rape and murder the innocent and lawful and dance in the streets in victory, there is nothing you can do about it!” And I’m sure a dozen of you will argue that it’s a beatnik prose for a fun time.
The world! Including the parts we ignore or pretend to do without.
The term itself has nothing to do with jews, but its a fun self-report you think jews are disproportionately federal agents, the group constantly mired in human rights controversies towards minorities and abnormal connections to pedophiliac islands as of late.
That does not change the fact that it still has nothing to do with jews.
You are simply incorrect, there's no two ways about it.
I referred to the article on urban dictionary as it's the 'only' real source for slang definitions on the internet. Obviously I knew about the term from before then, it originated from Terry Davis who's not exactly unknown on the internet.
If you'd prefer to see it used in the wild, feel free to browse the unfiltered sewage pipe that is 4chan or xitter and you'll see that yet again, the specific term "glowies" has nothing to do with jews. Maybe some people that use the term are antisemetic, but that does not change its definition.
Also, I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment.
You are over confident in your sources. There are things polite and agreeable to write, and there are things which will not be remembered openly in this way.
I can accept there are many truths, some settle over the other.
The White Devil boogieman is real, and celebrating modern cultural victories, feeding upon our self lies. This is one of their tells.
> Glower is a slang for a Federal Agent, usually used for one in disguise over the internet.
> The slang comes from a racist rant by the coder of TempleOS Terry A. Davis.
"The CIA n*gg*rs glow in the dark, you can see them when you are driving. You just gotta run 'em over with your car."
Seems possible to me that somebody might use the terms interchangeably but I’m no expert on slurs. Lol at “horseshoe theory is when somebody has heard a slur”
I've had computers with interfaces that vanished before. I've found that disabling NetworkMangler or whatever, and just raw-dogging a wpa_supplicant.conf with whatever wifi networks I'm likely to be interested in, cures the problem in near 100% of cases. Yes, it means having to sudo and change the config whenever I connect to a new wifi network. For me this is not a big deal.
GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.
The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!
[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.
Yeah a lot of this comes down to the mindset one came into computers with.
While I have no aversion to CLI use, editing config files, etc where that is the best way to do things, my introduction to computing was Classic Mac OS. As such my platonic ideal OS looks a lot like Classic Mac OS without its well-known weaknesses: practically nothing is hidden or obfuscated away from the user, the filesystem is laid out for humans before computers and is easily navigable by even non-technical users, GUI control panels are treated as canonical configuration rather than a loosely bolted-on layer, and extending and customizing the system is as simple as moving files in/out of designated directories (e.g. /System Folder/Extensions/).
It’s a vastly different mindset than is found on any *nix-based system, and as well as modern macOS works for me even it still doesn’t meet that standard.
I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.
What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later! Also 16-bit ISA would have too many address lines for this thing.)
The Tandy 2000 had four custom slots that only accepted their own card format. Here again it was doomed to failure and it's kind if a shame because the cards were easy as balls to install: the cards were mounted on metal trays and slid in horizontally, guided by rails in the chassis, and did not require the cover of the machine to be removed for insertion or removal.
Only a few expansion options were available, all from Radio Shack: a color graphics option (640x400x8 colors in 1983!) for which you had to procure the matching monitor, a memory expansion (up to two could be installed for a total of 768k, by stacking RAM chips some aftermarket vendors got this to 896k), a bus mouse adapter/real-time clock combo board, and I believe an external hard disk controller. One expansion, the "TV/Joystick expansion" which would give the 2000 composite out and access to joysticks for gaming, was planned but (to my knowledge) never released. As far as I know only one graphical game saw commercial release for the 2000: a special build of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Yeah, but it cost as much as a whole Tandy 2000 with the color graphics option!
The PGC was perhaps the first GPU for PC systems. It had its own 8086 processor on board, which would accept graphics commands through a ring buffer shared with the host system, and the 8086 would translate those into frame buffer operations it needed to perform. A few years back some clever git found an exploit to allow arbitrary code to be run on the PGC's 8086.
The Tandy 2000's color graphics was not spectacularly great by any means, nowhere near comparable to high-end solutions like the PGC. It was a 96 KiB framebuffer divided into 3 bitplanes, only one of which was mapped into system memory at any one time. You changed which plane was accessible by poking one of the video registers. There were also some palette registers that let you change which 8 (out of the standard IRGB 16-color set) were visible on the screen at once. Since drawing a full-color display meant 3 plane selects followed by 3 writes to video RAM, it was slow to produce such a display and there were "temporal color fringe" artifacts as the writes to different planes were momentarily visible. But it was still great for CAD and DTP applications, especially for the money, and good enough that Microsoft used it as a development platform to build a color GUI for Windows, while Macintosh was still committed to producing the best looking, black and white display they could for the money.
One of the upshots of "pacing the frontier" is that we are all going to have to accept that compute will be a regulated, restricted resource. This includes both "how-much" restrictions (high-performance computers just won't be available to the public) and "what-kind" restrictions (software and hardware features will enforce policies on what software you may run, much like a game console or iPhone).
Back in the 2000s, one of my favorite programmers from the Before Times—Fabrice Bellard—came up with an algorithm for computing digits of pi that was so much better than the state of the art, he beat with a $3000 PC the record for speed of pi calculation, which had been established with a supercomputer.
Some bright spark—maybe they'll have Claude assist, maybe it'll trigger Claude's safety locks, I dunno—is going to derive a way to do transformer or other frontier AI inference in a really efficient manner on consumer hardware, making local models practical to run on the PCs people have today and nearly, if not actually, competitive with today's frontier models. "There is another theory which states that this has already happened"—perhaps several times already, and we just need a few more goes of the cycle. I find that for supposedly a crowd of the smartest dudes in the room, people in the Valley like to do things the stupid way around, by sheer fucking brute force: scale up massively, burn billions and trillions of VCbux on capex, aggressively conserve developer effort at the expense of everybody's CPU time and storage capacity—yours, your cloud provider's, your customers'... So I suspect, but at this time cannot prove, that there's a whole lot of headroom for optimization of AI inference, which has the potential to put some truly powerful models in the hands of ordinary people.
And that's very dangerous, because so much for pacing the frontier! If Joe Schmoe can build a mini-AI lab in his mancave, he can then gain access to a model that gives him all the big scary things Dario and Sam are worried about: instructions on how to build bombs or bioweapons, child porn generation, human sacrifice, cats living with dogs, mass hysteria! If you're concerned about an AI-mediated workplace panopticon, Joe Schmoe could, in principle, build one of those for his auto body shop with a local model. The only way to stop Joe from doing so is to stop Joe from acquiring the equipment it would take to run such a model.
Pacing the frontier is at least as much about pacing what you can compute as it is about what goes on in billion-dollar data centers. Any argument for limiting AI growth and development—and admittedly, there are some strong ones—is an argument against general purpose computing. So if we're really going to regulate AI, bend over for the laws that mandate OS/firmware/hardware-enforced restrictions on what binaries your computer may run. And so long open source. Oh well, those laws were coming anyway; that's what the age verification thing is all about. Society has determined that people can't be trusted with computers.
I don’t buy it. Your premise suggests new inference would make SoTA models performant on hardware that we already have in our hands. To prevent us from running local models, we would literally be forced to turn over existing hardware with such capabilities, prevented from building such machines without a suitable license, and so on. That sounds a lot like attempts at gun confiscation, and the result being that only criminals have weapons. This is not the way.
I believe that models on the level of the frontier if not now, then ~6-12 months ago, may well run on a box you can get at Best Buy. And that yes, this along with age verification and the copyright lobby will add to the push to restrict the hardware people are able to procure and operate. It will be difficult to confiscate old PCs, but a "Cash for Clunkers" style program can get lots of them off the market. And, by law and by convention, the modern internet will just refuse to talk to them.
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