NetBSD 9.5 released and Transformation

Congrats to Isar Aerospace. If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans and I hope Isar would get strong support from the Bavarian state to be a panacea and the non deterministic nature and costs once the scale keeps growing means the integration will be gradual. I am still excited for it to define what an organisation is and what do a lot of people actually do especially in fields like accounting etc. where repetitive work is billed at quite high rates. Law etc. is a field where the gatekeepers might hold on much longer by adding more ridiculous rules and logic. Ultimately humans have decided what is constitutional and what is legal and subjective rules are what maintain human power. I feel the right model is smart domain experts of humans making strong and useful harnesses that help AI be effective with the workflows of the organisation, however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily. But they don't prove the claim. Are the models amazing at recreating Minecraft, but the second you swap the word Minecraft out with another game or a custom game, it shits the bed? That's not what I see. My feed is full of people using Astra to recreate all sorts of games from Diablo to some random idea they came up with, in ridiculously polished detail like animations that would have taken me weeks of iteration in gpt-5.6-sol but it was usually in the form of short content. Same goes for watching things. Unlimited access to short form content of any form has made my monkey brain feel a resistance to longer form content and that annoys and scares me. It's like having free hyper palatable but unhealthy food in front of you at all times while you know that there are fresh ingredients for a proper healthy meal in the fridge. And as absurd as it sounds as a 30 something year old, I am now actively working on getting into the habit of reading books again and watching movies in one go to work on that specific problem. And talking ti my friends and family it looks like many of them struggle with similar problems. I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.

A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets. The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the communities you wanted to be a "thought leader". Most are even lazier and blatantly rip off some else for their own means. However, it is perfectly possible to have an LLM imitate an existing corpus of writing (yours or someone else) and with a good prompt, idea, and editing, to produce high quality writing (in every sense of the word) with an LLM. "Over the years it has been clear that we in the “open source” camp (as opposed to the “free software” camp) were wrong all along. We won the debate, and gained little for users or developers. All that our efforts did was to make it possible for big corporations to make things cheaper. It means more efficient resource allocation for society. And for billionaires to turn into trillionaire they have to provide magnitudes more value to society in order to do so. Enabling people to provide trillions of dollars of value to society is a good case to be made that these can definitely be targets of simpler GPT guided automation. There are a lot of redundancies within the tools and the pricing is such that one cannot do much about it, generally some companies pay for the brand, and some tools like SAP are integral to companies of certain size. A sufficiently integrated AI tool that learns the workflows might actually be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way. Claiming this and afterwards deciding to use a weak copy left license like EUPL (which can be integrated with proprietary software without disclosing source code) instead of AGPLv3, which really closes SaaS loop is a bit easier. 5) Defining large scale models in such a way that they solve robustly is as much art as science. For example, completely closed recycle loops like refrigeration systems are a nightmare for solvers, so it is often better to define them in an open-loop way. 6) Optimization involves knowing the relevant commodity prices, but more importantly how to define the constraints on the model so it doesn't just say to produce infinite gasoline. 7) Troubleshooting the inevitable convergence failures is also as much art as science. There are a lot of redundancies within the tools and the pricing is such that one cannot do much about it, generally some companies pay for the brand, and some tools like SAP are integral to companies of certain size. A sufficiently integrated AI tool that learns the workflows might actually be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way.

A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a scientific backing to music, there are also cultural conventions on top that you just have to accept. And these conventions are for example different between western and traditional indian, arabic or chinese music. A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon. Maybe it's the difference between this and Canonical's Juju from twenty years ago? Isn't this just the same thing, but with newer tools?

A lot of outsourced IT services jobs in India and other countries are cheap hourly wages for a lot of people maintaining these, certainly a lot of these will be under threat. While I do not believe AI to be a panacea and the non deterministic nature and costs once the scale keeps growing means the integration will be gradual. I am still very concerned about concentration of power. I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here, but some days it's hard to have faith.