Are there meaningful updates / improvements for a minimal (no graphical desktop) install?

Wayland isn’t about improving latency, it’s about having something resembling a sane security model.

It’s nice it doesn’t make things any slower, but the truth is: Wayland on today’s hardware is significantly faster than X on 10 year old hardware, and nobody was bitching that X was too laggy in 2016.

Aggregate, because they’re courting billions of potential users, the energy and water consumption of AI agents is concerning.

One project? For a continuous 320-minute (5.33-hour) project using Anthropic’s Claude Fable, the estimated electricity consumption ranges from 203.2 Wh to 406.4 Wh, while the associated water consumption ranges between 0.39 Liters and 0.77 Liters. https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/ai/new-dashboard-estimates-energy-consumption-of-claude-gpt-and-gemini

It takes about 100-150ml of diesel fuel to generate 406 Wh of electricity, you’d be lucky to get an efficient commuter car to travel even 3 miles on that much fuel, and the driver will consume more than 0.77 liters of water during a day, especially if they take a shower.

The growth has been explosive, and the newly added datacenter capacity isn’t being done well or sustainably in a lot of cases, but if you assume that OP’s job could be done well with assistance from Fable if he put in 10x the effort, that’s still likely to land on the net lower impact to the environment than if he commuted to an office for a week to do the same.

The real question, even before LLM “AI”, is: is this a job worth doing? Right now, a lot of people are “playing” with AI doing things they never could attempt before. Some small fraction of that is useful - how small is the question, and how long before we slow down on the frivolous uses?

Before it was debunked, it was “common knowledge” for several months that Microsoft was representing Windows 10 as their last OS, the start of rolling releases that mean you never really get a new OS, you’re constantly getting a new OS. The story kind of faded and the debunk didn’t really reach “awareness threshold” until Win11 was announced.

10 and 11 are both rolling releases, which many Linux Distros have adopted as well, and with the pace of update and patch distribution lately most OSs have at least some of the flavor of a rolling release - 1313 patches from Debian under DSA-6528-1, and new DSAs every few weeks.

My bet is the whole story is fabricated. It’s very plausible, but lacking any real detail.

320 minutes of wall clock time on Fable tells you nothing, cost could be anywhere from $2 to $2000.

Not acknowledging the costs of a programmer’s children is the ultimate late stage capitalism.

It depends on the size / complexity of what they’re trying to port, of course, but it’s not at all unusual for a programmer to be the main income source for a median household and to take a year on a project. Or, be a member of a 5-10 programmer team that takes 2-4 years to develop a project. In a “butts in seats” office world like we mostly had before 2020, that was a LOT of commute miles driven to make that software, way more than $1000, and energy consumption for the households and the offices and their HR, accounting and other administrative overhead…

Maybe you (the Claude porter) should have written a few requirements and specifications to test to first?

1998 a company bought our software that had been developed (part time, by a single programmer) since 1991, first in C/DOS, then refactored into Borland VCL/C++ in 1997. Buyers declared they would refactor it into MFC/Win 32 because it was “easier to hire good MFC/Win 32 programmers than VCL programmers.” So, they went and found two “good MFC programmers.” They assessed the job carefully and declared that it should be about 6 weeks to do the port - just a straight copy of the existing funcfionality into the new API - no need to add features or change anything.

3 months later, they hired 2 additional MFC programmers. The new assessment was that they had made “good progress” and would be done in another 2-4 weeks.

3 months after that, they declared that they had big plans for future development of the software, and they were “90% done with the port” but they’re going to “build up the team” and they hired another 3 programmers with a position open for what would be the 8th member of the team, but they were “looking for just the right candidate” for that spot.

9 months after starting, I casually asked one of the programmers how the port was going and he said: “we’ve got about 80% of the original functionality working in the new system, and most of the development is starting to turn toward newly identified business needs.” “So, you don’t need the other 20% of the original feature set?” “Oh, no, we need that, it’s core to the business case, it’s just taking time to make it happen in MFC.” These were “good programmers” - no turnover, management happy with their efforts.

The original programmer was me, straight out of school, no management or mentor. The spec came from the company owner one feature at a time as ideas hit him I’d basically write them down on an electronic “sticky note” and when it was working to his satisfaction we’d throw that sticky note away, the code was the documentation. Eventually, the industry started requiring documented testing, so we hired an intern from the local college and she made some documents recording her ad-hoc testing of what the owner verbally described to her as the things the software should be doing, but mostly she read the code as her specifications. This was actually state of the art in the 1990s in most places I interacted with.

About 18 months before the 1998 buyers came around, we had another company try to reproduce about 10% of the original program functionality independently as a module in their existing software; this was agreed (insisted by the buyers, actually) to be done without our code to model from - just using our front-end hardware to collect the data. Instead of building a team, they hired a series of programmers, usually in 2s, and they’d usually quit after about 6 months. I think it was the 5th set of 2 programmers there that finally got that feature working.

So, 320 minutes would have been a pretty impressive port effort, but did you really expect the chainsaw to cut the whole forest down and load it onto logging trucks for you?

I wonder, in the “none of it works” area, how many days it would take to write requirements / specifications for what is expected and how long it would take Fable to fix the port to meet all those expectations? Probably quite a bit less than a year for one or two “good developers,” I would guess.

In the early 90s I coded up a fairly massive data analysis suite entirely in C.

Around 1997 I translated it to C++ - the resulting data analysis ran at 1/2 the speed of the C code, but was 300% faster to modify, expand and maintain. And processor speeds were doubling every 9 months anyway.

Me, checking the config file blame for who put in that one bad line…

blame: you wrote the entire config file across the space of 2 months a few lines per commit - except that one bad line that somebody else put in…

No, that’s the Strait formerly known as Hormuz.

Any cartography company with $2B handy to replace the dataset. They’re unlikely to buy it from Google, who is estimated to have already profited $9B from their investment.

People do occasionally travel outside of metro transport coverage.

unhappy that their parking isn’t convenient.

Oh no, not me, I’m perfectly fiiiine walking as far as necessary to get to my apartment from my parking space (says the people who are able to drive home in the middle of the day and park up for the night when everybody else is at work).

It’s not just lack of convenience, it’s behaviors: double parking, congestion, Oh I’m just going in for a second…

I mean, in an ideal world, this is great.

I think it needs a followup to at least track, possibly tax, residents of apartments which lack parking who also own cars. In small numbers it’s no big deal, but it could quickly get out of hand.

King Crimson 1969:

Knowledge is a deadly friend If no one sets the rules The fate of all mankind, I see Is in the hands of fools

…

But I fear tomorrow I’ll be crying

Whether you break up Google, Amazon, Meta, SpaceXitter and the rest or not, you’ve got to have sensible rules, sensibly enforced. We’re already crying.

phone networks stop working when the government broke up Ma Bell in 1983? Or did shit get way cheaper and better

Specifically no, because AT&T didn’t go away, it just got split up and regulated. Shit got cheaper for sure, not always better.

If Google went away, any of those websites that are not actually a part of Google could just go be hosted elsewhere.

Read a little deeper about how so many websites have Google services entwined into all the pages they serve. There would be a billion+ hours of rework to get Google out of all the non-Google services that are in some way dependent on Google/Alphabet services. Sure, we could rebuild everything to not use Google, but would the other services that grow up in its place be better? They’re not likely to be cheaper, and under the current regulatory environment they’d likely develop even deeper invasions of privacy while building out their “modern” Google replacements.

Apple Maps always understands an address I enter correctly (Google Maps does not, sometimes you need to put imaginary spaces in between address characters

That’s an interesting perspective. As Android users my wife and I are used to opening maps and asking for a business by name and general description: Green Grocery on Main Street, or Manuel’s Mexican in Midtown Melbourne and it just looks up the address for us and maps to it. Same for anyone in our contacts, just ask for them by name and the address takes care of itself - we can put in addresses, but our “iPhone friends” are constantly asking for the street address of things because that’s what they have to put in. I guess at least iOS is good at address entry.

Apple Maps has never taken me to the wrong location

Again, we’re biased - people who use Google Maps are led directly to our house with no trouble, people who use Apple Maps end up on the next street over looking at our house across a neighbor’s fenced yard and calling us for more directions. We didn’t have to fix Google Maps to get people arriving at our door, but we were able to tweak the road to look more realistic, Apple has no such user feedback interface, at least not that we could ever access.

switch to a better option. I’ve heard of FOSS maps as well but haven’t tried them out yet.

That’s a nice thought. Do you remember the Google Mapping car fleet driving around for 10 years? I think they’re still doing scaled back maintenance, but that was a tremendously expensive project which gave them data quality that under-funded FOSS projects just can’t even begin to approach. So, there’s an interesting question: when we just Fuck Google, do we steal the data they paid to collect? I mean, we could call it AI training, would that make it O.K.?

they’re already gone from my life

Good for you, that is what you personally control. It is very different from “ending Google.”

Now, try blocking all Google domains and IP addresses from your routing tables and see how you’re loving life. https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500

there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”

No, but you need to be clear: is it Monsanto that never existed, or the whole branch of industrial-scientific pursuit they embody, becasue if Monsanto’s tech and similar didn’t exist, we’d have significantly lower crop yields, higher food prices, arguably better food, but if population grew to the same levels we have today, we’d all be eating significantly less food - which, arguably, might not be a bad thing - but at some point it becomes uncomfortable, and without Monsanto-like tech we’d be near or over that uncomfortable line here at 8.3B population and climbing.

which is essentially your argument.

In your head. In my head: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them is flawed. Which slice of the 8.3 billion global population do you wish were never born - can we start with your mom?

nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have

Well, we can start with that uncomfortable subject you brought up of regulatory capture. If not for Monsanto, Bayer AG and others like them operating with their extensive regulatory capture - other players would have a difficult if not impossible time getting permission to market their products, or even develop them at industrial scale. There’s a huge difference between some PhD at a farm-university splicing glow-genes into brussel sprouts and rolling out genetically engineered seed stock at global scale.

When you say: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them, are you actually saying: we’ll just replace them with nearly identical corporations that do nearly identical things? Separating the useful things that the corporations do from the evil isn’t a simple whack with a machete, the two sides are deeply entwined.

we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks?

I don’t think it’s all that different, whether it’s Monsanto or Google, they’ve been an essential part of the last generation, they have significantly shaped the world we live in, whether you think that’s for better or for worse is moot. Chucking them out and starting over without the things that they currently provide is going to do more immediate harm than good. Yeah, they’ve run amok and they need curtailing, but if you gank Google and their products out of existence, lots of people are going to suffer, and not just the ones that work directly for Google or their trading partners.

What’s your “Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them” morning after plan? To build back Google, but this time we really mean they won’t be evil? You got a clever approach that will stop their replacements from becoming as bad or worse than what we’ve already got? U.S. Federal regulations seem like a bad bet lately.

Trev: One day you’re a big old whale, next minute, fun food.

Mumble: Someone’s gotta stop them.

Barry: Oh, yeah? What’s gonna be your approach?

Mumble: If l could just talk to them. Appeal to their better nature.

Barry: Beauty. When that crafty little trick pays off, you be sure to let us know, won’t you?