Some drunks in a gnu-shaped echo chamber concluded that the world is gnu-shaped. That's not much a joke, if there is one here. Such presently popular axioms as "unix means linux" or "the userland must be gnu" or "bash is installed" can be shown as poor foundations to reason from by using a unix system that violates all those assumptions. That the XCDD comic did not define what a unix system is is another concern; there are various definitions, some of which would exclude both linux and OpenBSD.
> This completely explains why so many engineers are skeptical of AI while so many managers embrace it: The engineers are the ones who understand it.
Curiously some Feynman chap reported that several NASA engineers put the chance of the Challenger going kablooie—an untechnical term for rapid unscheduled deconstruction, which the Challenger had then just recently exhibited—at 1 in 200, or so, while the manager said, after some prevarications—"weaseled" is Feynman's term—that the chance was 1 in 100,000 with 100% confidence.
Right now? John McCarthy invented the term in order to get a grant, or in other words it was a marketing buzzword from day zero. He says so himself in the lighthill debate, and then the audience breaks out into hoots and howls.
> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”
Except when something really does need more RAM, and fails. LLVM for example having, somehow, become a bit chonky and now fails to compile on 32-bit OpenBSD systems because it wants more memory than is available. Less bloated software of course does not suffer from this problem, and continues to run on still functional 32-bit systems.
> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.
Xorg is using 92M, irssi 21M (bloated, but I've been lazy about finding something leaner), xenodm 12M. That's the top three. Oh, Windows? Yeah. About that. Best you can hope for is not to catch too much of the splatter. (What passes for Mac OS X these days also seems fairly dismal.)
> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.
Paperclips were hung on the rack doors to make it easier to poke the wee little red reset button when some poorly written software went all gibblesquik (as poorly written software is wont to do) and the OOM killer could not cope and, whelp, reset time. Elsewhere, RAM is explicitly rationed—perhaps certain aspects of timesharing have been somewhat forgotten in this benighted era of bloat?—and malloc will return NULL, something certain programmers often fail to check for, which is generally followed by the kernel taking the error-ridden code out back and shooting it.
> Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.
This is a remarkably useless argument; "any" could be anything whatsoever, for example that the fuzzy logic of some prior AI craze ended up in certain rice cookers, while ignoring that the remaining 99.8881118881118883479075520881451666355133056640625 (or so) percent of AI is some combination of grift, wishful thinking, or both.
The sending IP remains very relevant; it may be in a third-party blacklist (RBL) or site local blacklist due to prior spam from said IP or even nearby IP(s). Let's have a look through /var/log/maillog... okay that didn't take long.
Spammers can setup DMARC, and have too many domains, so blocking by IP or ASN remains relevant (no legit email from that spammy country? Ban the country!). Reverse DNS is also important, as spammers have sent too much spam (shocking, I know) that some users complain about, a lot, so: no valid reverse DNS, no service. IP addresses or domains that are "too new" may also be a problem, or some sites will want you to fill out random webforms or talk to their support idiots (Hi, Microsoft! No, me logging into some cloud thing of yours was utterly irrelevant to the problem), and all this and more amounts to a lot of rakes you need to not step on to get email setup right.
Yes, I self-host email. Gmail was routing OpenBSD mailing list traffic to the spam "folder", and self-hosting that email was easier than fighting with some rink-a-dink web UI.
Oh, one time about half the customers were in Google and the other half in Microsoft and Google and Microsoft were having some mail snit so yeah good luck getting some of those mails through. That took a while to clear up, and what can you do?
Manifestations of the inevitable are older than what sillyvalley is cooking with (or coked up on), even older than the Manifest Destiny. Some pin it to the Renaissance, as opposed to the "dark ages" prior. Tagging the prior age dark (dark... that must be bad, right? We don't want to be on the bad team, right?) of course is a rhetorical move.
Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but that's a different rant, though one very much related to the Old Web or the smolweb.
