Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
All I care about is my favourite podcast app, Pocket Casts, which Automattic bought in a dumpster fire a few years ago.
But even if I don't personally use WP, the fact that something like 25% of the web runs on software which this lunatic has this much control over, is problematic in itself.
A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down compatibility between ARM and MIPS based routers. I finally took the plunge and bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100.
The thing has 4 cores (no SMT), a 6W TDP and boosts to 3.4 GHz and can support 16GB of ram. The mini pc I bought cost me $200, includes the processor as well 4x Intel 10Gbps Ethernet ports. At 6W, it needs no fan, and the whole chassis is metal and specifically designed to act as a heatsink, which means 0 noise and 0 moving parts.
I ran a power virus on it for a few hours to test the thermals, and on a warm day in Melbourne, after hours of having all 4 cores running full throttle, CPU temperature never exceeded 90 C and the chassis barely hit 55 C.
The best thing about it? Full upstream support for any Linux distro and FreeBSD. No more wondering if this particular Broadcom chipset needs a weird binary blob, no more being hostage to an OEM and having to run old forked kernels.
I installed OPNSense on it, VESA mounted it behind our TV, and it hasn’t been seen or heard since. Not only has it been the most reliable router I’ve ever had at home, it’s providing various other services such as DNS server, apt cache, WireGuard server and client etc for my homelab.
I’ve been waiting for ARM to get here since ARMv8 was announced in 2011, but it just hasn’t happened.
Personally have the same experience too. I am tired trying to find out if the xyzPi of the day boards can do Linux. Vendors should also try harder. There are so many boards that release with half baked implementations or proprietary blobs. x86 always just works. Devices are also almost always just pcie devices even for those mini PCs with lots of interfaces. Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux…
It's also super easy to spec out your own devices in this regime on x86. There are mini itx boards with n100/n305 with pcie slots so you can add your own cards, and the n100 has a surprisingly number of available lanes for its small size.
There just seems to be no viable "just works" solution in the below 10 or 20W range apart from raspberry pi, and Intel n100/n305.
Instead of Raspi I've got a N100 uATX mainboard with N100 (120 EUR). Fortunately it does work with normal 32GB DIMM (55 EUR, those were the days!). But I'm still missing a pico-PSU, which can be powered directly from 220V (for reasonable costs).
Jane Street has unlimited engineers and money to do this.
At least from the sidelines, it looks like they've built/forked most parts of the OCaml ecosystem to make it work (OxCaml, Dune was built by then, custom profilers, custom networking hardware, etc).
Of course a lot of their work is open source and can be used, but I wouldn't assume that it would be worth the effort to do something similar with OCaml yourself. Maybe it is! LLMs go brrr and all that.
Gemma 4 31B as hosted by Cerebras is almost too fast! Like I gave it a few different queries and the response was instant and I thought there was something wrong and there was a glitch and I had to double check that I had actually given it the correct prompt.
Mind you Gemma 4 is still Gemma 4, but the speed was really eye opening. Like a glimpse into the future of AI
I'd been hoping for G4 to be added so I could play around with it. Pretty much spent all of last week doing so. I thought something was short-circuiting due to the speed of response, I'd never seen a model operate that fast.
It can be argued that it’s Docker that is reinventing the wheel and doing its own bespoke process management, journal management etc when all of these are solved problems on Linux. Podman is instead reusing the platform which exists, Quadlets are just reusing systemd, so as a sysadmin I can manage, control and monitor docker containers using the same standard tooling that I already use to manage, control and monitor all the other processes which are running on the system.
Architecturally I find the above argument attractive. The problem is chronology. Docker and docker compose came before systems was ubiquitous and long before Quadlets, so it’s natural to think of Quadlets as reinventing the wheel.
Personally I wish docker had not rejected composition/integration around systemd. Would have made everyone’s job a lot easier in the long term.
> Personally I wish docker had not rejected composition/integration around systemd. Would have made everyone’s job a lot easier in the long term.
It also would have only run on Linux hosts (and not all of those at that), so something else would have been adopted instead. Docker didn't win by being superior to every alternative, it won by being good enough and being everywhere. For portable orchestration, Desktop does ship with kubernetes that's literally one click to enable.
Mullvad CEO is the primary donor to a European political party that supports "re-migration"; a far right policy ideal that is literally about sending migrants back to where they came from.
Land of the free, land of the brave. Free market. Freedom of speech. Market economy.
These words don’t mean what they use to anymore. Newspeak is in full swing. Words still sound the same and are written in the same way but now mean something completely different. If Mao and Stalin were alive, they would be nodding approvingly.
It just makes you think you're a 10x better programmer. In reality you've just given yourself 10x more busywork because "Claude can handle it." For the parts that Claude has actually improved your programming, the open models compete just fine.
For similar reasons, I have been working in the public sector (Australian state government) for the past 5 years and couldn’t be happier.
I’m lucky that I’m in a team which is hands on and does a lot of very interesting things. From building CRUD apps which are used in management and response to bushfires (wildfires) to more interesting things like building a datalake which amalgamates and stores weather data from multiple sources to building near real time CDC pipelines and making our transactional data available to our in house team of data scientists who then use that data to do fascinating stuff that eventually results in for example making sure that our response to bushfires takes into account the impact and safety of endangered species.
And when I look at the underlying data and the trends and and projections of just how bad bushfires are going to get in the next 30 years and how we must be so much nimbler and smarter just to survive, the work takes on a whole new level of meaning.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times the internal bureaucracy absolutely drives me mad. And I am aware that I could be earning much more in the private sector. But I get to work with a team who are really passionate and enthusiastic about their job, and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.
If you had told the teenage Utilitarian me that I would one day work for, and enjoy working for, government, I would have thought hell must have frozen over.
> and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.
You can provide value in the free market, or you can work in a public sector where the people paying your salary have no choice but pay their taxes to cover your salary or risk going to prison.
Pocket Casts was originally developed by a South Australian startup, Shifty Jelly. Sold to a consortium of public broadcasters which included NPR. Then there was a change of heart the the public broadcasters decided that they actually don't want to be in the game, so was divested in a firesale.
Automattic has picked up a few of these assets for peanuts, Tumblr and Pocket Casts are amongst them. All are assets which were once much more high flying, but still have a core of dedicated users/fans.
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