our ad-tech monopolist and burgeoining retail overlords control so much information on our behavioural patterns that they can probably see a crunch coming before anyone else, if they would really want to get in that game.
I used to believe that but having seen repeatedly what happens when small decentralised groups get to decide (cf. HOAs in the US, housing cooperatives in Sweden), it's clear that there are too many nutters in society that seek power for power's sake and adding 20 levels of decentralized decision-making only means we'll have NIMBYs everywhere for anything new.
Having seen government work from the inside, what we need is clearer processes and _more_ centralisation - computers today enable the processing of amazing amounts of data in an extremely short time. Why do we need fourteen regional authorities to handle forms filed in triplicate?
Fable 5 has for me, been surprisingly effective at generalizing and removing duplicate solutions/approaches - things I'd been noting along as my mental TODO once Opus finished generating them, Fable also saw them and prepared a plan to correct them.
Worked pretty well. Also writes lisp a lot better without getting lost in parentheses! I do keep hitting the limit regularly but it is doing a lot of work that would have taken me a long time to write by hand even if per se not super complex.
For the record: you basically take a stick blender, the container that came with it, crack an egg, pour over some lemon juice, then blend while pouring in hot butter (use the microwave!). Takes ca 2 minutes, including the 1 minute 30s of microwaving the butter.
Instant _real_ sauce hollandaise as the stick blender creates a vortex that emulsifies it. No need to hand whisk it over a bain-marie at careful temperatures.
These guys popped up while I was doing some GPU low-level research, they claim to have abstracted a common ISA to all major GPU vendors after careful study and reverse-engineering of things. 11 primitives.
Absolutely. One of the root causes for these terrible tender processes is a fear of in-housing competence and skill for systems.
It's the same reason major govt. IT orgs keep pushing for closed source (recently the Swedish Tax Authority was in the media for _pushing for Office 365_ as necessary for operations), out-sourced designs, big firm purchases over FOSS or real standards.
You need people that care (and they exist, even in the gigantic state orgs.) in positions to make good decisions. Right now, everything is up in the hands of nebulously defined managerial staff with none-to-doubtful technical competence.
Another recent case: the Swedish digital exams platform flopped at a rough cost of a billion SEK. Can't sustain 150K concurrent users, despite paying a "large company". Like, come on.
This keeps happening in Europe with these mega-IT suppliers repeatedly getting exposed using very bad development practices. Sweden most recently had a major breach back in 2024 when the other large IT services supplier TietoEvry had their data centres breached and claimed "not actually an issue of security".
Several government organisations / regional authorities and companies were down. Last I heard several medical journals for whole municipalities were just destroyed.
Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscurity, are suspicious of things like zero-trust, follow outdated engineering practices. Sigh.
Glad to have returned after missing out on FOSDEM for a while. However, I agree with OP on that undeniable success leading to heavy crowding.
I also missed some hacker hardware stands, there were very few this year.
I always enjoyed chatting with people demoing SDR/small cool hardware hacks as a refreshing break from whatever high-tech presentation room I got stuck in for half a day :-)
It would almost be good to ... have a bigger campus.