Also, IBM is buying something for the cost of a small country.
Everything Old Is Just Less Bloated
You can set your watch by this: when the software gets so fat and slow that a cheap USB stick can barely handle the ISO image, someone decides to bring back the good stuff. In this case, it’s Damn Small Linux (DSL), clocking in at 50MB. This is the OS equivalent of throwing out all your IKEA furniture and sitting on an old stump because at least you know the stump will be there tomorrow.
The whole cycle only exists because people keep building what can only be called digital wreckage. Case in point: a 2013 look back at the Toyota unintended acceleration disaster reminded everyone that the source code looked like a giant bowl of spaghetti. People died because the code was a mess. That’s why we run back to tiny things written by people who knew what a megabyte was worth. The problem is never the hardware. It's always us, the coders, who get a new tool and immediately decide it's a good day to write another switch statement that could control the power grid.
The Perpetual Motion of Overvaluation
First, the money sinks. Palantir might be the most overvalued company that ever existed, according to one report. They sell secret stuff to governments, which is a great business model until it isn't. The stock market is basically paying for the narrative that maybe, *just maybe*, they figured out how to organize the universe. Meanwhile, you and I are still trying to sort out why the print server needs an update every Tuesday.
Speaking of large, slightly inexplicable expenditures: IBM is nearing an acquisition of Confluent for roughly $11 billion. This is the dance. The old giant needs to stay relevant by buying the technology that the kids actually use. They pay a king’s ransom for something built on Kafka, and then a year later, everyone who actually wrote the good code has quit. It’s like buying a Formula 1 team just to get the tires, only you fire the pit crew. This is how value is created now, apparently.
AI Black Box Meets Legal Subpoena
A New York judge decided that, actually, the whole "AI is a mysterious black box" thing doesn't hold up when a newspaper sues over copyright. The judge ordered OpenAI to hand over the actual ChatGPT conversations used in the case. This is a crucial pivot point, because now all those lawyers who think they can use the 'stochastic parrot' defense are going to have to deal with log dumps the size of Ohio. You can't claim you're not using the data when a judge wants to see the receipt...
Briefs
- The Linux GPIB Drivers are finally stable, 53 years after HP introduced the bus. Only 53 years. That’s how long it takes to move something from staging to production in the open source world. Give or take.
- MIT researchers have an imaging tech that could replace finger pricks for measuring blood glucose. This is genuinely good and useful, so it'll probably take another 15 years to get past the FDA, but still.
- Speaking of the future, Japan has realized exosuits, years after anime predicted it. Maybe we should stop funding corporate VCs and just watch more cartoons for product ideas.
- JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says AI will eliminate jobs but everyone will work less and have "wonderful lives." This is the kind of talk you get from someone whose "job" is deciding where to put other people's money. Wonderful for *him*, maybe.