Years ago I worked for a company that had an application, written in Delphi, running as a DLL in IIS (on Windows obviously). To more easily deliver certain features fast, open source PHP code was run in parallel, e.g. some customer wants a visitor counter, so that just got bolted on using PHP.

There are some absolutely insane systems out there.

It's the same price as a MacBook Neo

> RAM/Chip prices are way, way up

So that cloud providers can have servers and GPUs sitting unpowered in warehouses and datacenters.

Right. The prices are up for Nvidia’s benefit (and Micron, Sandisk by extension).

I know it’s now a trope to say “an incoming Democratic Congress should…” but there are really serious questions to ask about the means by which Nvidia is securing such a radically high value buy-and-hold strategy, and whether it amounts to deceptive channel stuffing.

The whole tech industry is using apparent demand for Blackwell GPUs as a proxy for AI demand, when this is a wholly broken metric because Nvidia seems to be gaming it, and everyone (consumer and business alike) is paying more as a result.

So what happens if AI becomes something that you need to actually pay real money for? Then only Apple, Google and Microsoft can affort to do network exposed software. Smaller companies and solo developers are just f-ed if the price of running LLMs goes up as investor money dries up.

If this continues I'll argue that you have to be absolutely insane to allow network connected electronics into your home in the future. This is Apple, known for locking down their device to the extreme, and yes some people would love to use this for jailbreaking their phones, other organisations want to root your phone for .... other purposes.

Insecure webpages, broken certificates and an insecure PDF library... You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point. Security is no longer something a private individual can deal with.

> You shouldn't have anything more connected than an FM radio at this point.

They can still hack your mind with ads.

We ran a number of tests, including sending a percentage of real traffic to endpoints running AWS-LC and Wolfssl. Technically yes, OpenSSL 3.X is slow, measurably so, but not enough that we wanted to deal with it. That's for our use case, I can easily imagine there being others, where maybe you have different hardware or way more traffic, where it would be worth while. For basic TLS termination in haproxy, it wasn't really worth it to us.

It also depends on exactly which version of OpenSSL. We ran similar tests with multiple versions of openssl. Openssl 3.0, which was the version in the official packages of our LTS distro was unacceptably slow. With 3.4, it was still worse than 1.1.1 but the regression was an acceptable level.

It also definitely depends on your hardware, and how you use it. The main source of the performance regression is more lock contention, so it is more noticeable if you have more threads running on more cores.

I don't know, if you want a cable tv package, where I live, that's even remotely good you're looking at $1250 a year. We have four streaming services and that's still cheaper and I then also have streaming music include.

Ok, that's expensive. Here it is like $60/month, but that also includes broadband internet.

True, we still have Netflix, despite almost never using it, because "we might want to watch something". Frankly the main reason is because my in-laws also use the account and enjoys it.

The lesson I've learned, the same as I learned from Facebook, is "Never sign up to another service ever again". It's much easier to just never sign up than it is to convince the entire family that you should cancel something.

Make you wonder what they've been testing this on. Even NetBSD doesn't have a recent release for Itanium. Crazy that you can run NetBSD 11.0 on HPPA, but not Itanium, given that HPPA is in some sense the pre-cursor to Itanium.

Age is probably less relevant than current installed base/active users

More than likely in "government"; they are always behind and keeping legacy stuff around. I found Windows 1.0 floppies in a drawer, back-in-the-day.

Back in the day? If I ever need SunOS 4 installation tapes, 8” distribution floppies for Intel’s ISIS-II PL/M-80 compiler, or a copy of the Microsoft OS/2 1.10 SDK, I know just the filing cabinet at work where I can find them.

Meanwhile, ISO images of software currently used in production have been memory-holed to free up space on a multiterabyte SAN.

That's awful on multiple levels. Software in use should be easy to grab from the SAN shelf, and multi-terabyte was impressive 2 decades ago.

Honestly more HPPA gear to test against than Itanium

One argument could be that they want to provide an AI solution, but maintain some level of control. Copilot can be bundled in with existing licenses, so it's a easier purchase in some sense.

Across the bridge, in Denmark, we've already seen a number of cases where government employees have use various AIs to help them do their job (and in many case used an AI to fail at doing their job). The result has been information about citizens just being entered into whatever AI the employee fancied, without worry about leaking private and sensitive information. I'm not entirely convinced that the public employees strictly speaking needs an AI, but if they are going to use one regardless, it makes sense that it's one that has been approved, whatever that might mean.