I do agree that the overall tendency towards cloud has made things much more complicated and expensive than they need to be in many cases. Cloud has its place, but so do simple server instances. Many projects won't reach any kind of scale that would exceed the capabilities of a medium-sized VPS. We're running a page with 600k users at work that could easily fit on a 30€ VPS. Instead, we moved to AWS and are now paying 800€ for it. No benefits whatsoever.
So yea, stick with what worked for decades if you don't see a reason not to.
Also, I remember reading that StackOverflow runs on a bunch of super powerful root servers?
What the hell. First, I thought this was crazy. How could you do anything crazy with curl? But of course, curling a bash script opens lots of opportunities. Given the right permissions, you could run an enterprise Jira server via only a curl to a bash script.
Still cool that people find more ways to play doom, but calling it "via curl" seems a little missleading to me. "Playing doom via a simple bash script" would have felt more appropriate.
I find it quite irritating that the Linux Foundation posts this and gives Anthropic free marketing. Yes, they offer credits for open-source, and yes, it can help making open-source more secure, but still.. feels off. Like I expected such a blog post from Anthropic, not from the Linux Foundation.
> "Cameron Stanley, the Defense Department’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, who spoke at Palantir’s conference, said that what Maven was doing was “revolutionary.” Human involvement amounted to “left click, right click, left click,” he said."
Nice, that sounds really desirable. Now we can kill people with left click, right click, left click. Seeing how lazy we get when using AI and how we just move the thought process to AI, great times ahead!
What I'm taking issue in is the many opinions on how to build something really useful yourself. I love Obsidian, because it does what it does great - taking notes, easy and fast navigation, no bullshit. What I don't like is the urge to do so many things with it, todos, libraries, etc. Obsidian wasn't built for this. I had spent months improving my Obsidian setup when finally I realized I don't want to spend all this time on making a note-taking tool do something else. As a dev, naturally, I started developing my own stuff to be perfect for me, but not everybody can do that. Technical users might like spending hours implementing the perfect system for their lifes, but I think for everybody else it should be so much easier.
I think you're right. Even though France might not have done much yet, it's a sign many people will read about and maybe think Linux is a good alternative. That's a win in my book.
AI and cloud are another thing altogether. Mistral is alright, open-source AI models are alright, but overall I think they can't compete yet. And I don't think there are fully capable cloud alternatives to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud yet. EU pushing Nextcloud-based alternatives really doesn't fuel confidence honestly. I mean Nextcloud is fine, but that's not the big alternative push we need here.
Really though, how many companies actually need Azure, AWS? In my experience in SME's there is _so_ much overcomplication, over-provisioning and overspending going on because there has been a default assumption that US cloud==lower risk.
Governments properly mandating that data be held in the EU, or even in orgs with proper EU entities and checks and balances against US interference in time of conflict would change the game. This is what the EU should be working on... a data residency regime that allows us to use AWS but creates a firewall that allows us to take operational control of the servers if the US continues on it's current path.
Wait, do we not want incompetent users on Linux? That's a weird take. Linux is not for elite technologically profound users, it's for everybody. If things don't work for non-technical users, we should strive to make it better?
As if Linux devs just sat and did nothing for the last 30 years... Linux today is the best they could do and it's not even at the Win95 functional level.
No, we don't want incompetent users on Linux. It's going to be something like eternal september.
Europe as a whole doesn't have or not have a spine.. it'a a huge, complicated accumulation of interests with an insane bureaucratic apparatus behind it.
The bureaucratic apparatus in the EU has a reputation for being complex, but a lot of that seems to be bullshit stories written by people like Johnson in the 20 years leading up to Brexit. I've yet to see much evidence it's more complex or corrupt than Federal government in the US, for example.
So yea, stick with what worked for decades if you don't see a reason not to. Also, I remember reading that StackOverflow runs on a bunch of super powerful root servers?
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