heisig

Oh, it very much is a big deal. In a setting where users can switch models easily and with no downsides, market forces will give us better and cheaper AI over time. If switching models is painful (as in, losing part of your context), the providers can create vendor lock-in, enshittify the user experience, and drive up cost. Even if there are workarounds right now, those AI providers have every incentive to make freedom-seekers more miserable over time.

It is disheartening that some AI companies are now setting the stage for enshittification. I hope we can collectively dodge that bullet.

Let me re-iterate the main lesson of decades of FOSS work: the advantages of open collaboration and knowledge-sharing are so enormous that FOSS software wins out eventually even if financial interest are stacked against it.

I fully agree with this article - please let's skip the chapter of closed and enshittified AI and go for the good stuff directly!

Really good timing for Jolla to produce a new phone :)

I still have fond memories of my 2013 Jolla, and I'm hoping that the 2026 Jolla will be just as lovingly crafted. Most importantly, Jolla is a company that seems to care about me, the user, whereas Apple and Google constantly treat me like a peasant that needs to be governed.

Says the bag of lipids and proteins :)

Unfortunately I would not be surprised if the real death toll is even higher. I have first-hand information. We are talking about indiscriminate shooting with heavy machine guns into peaceful protests, happening in every city of the country. The rule of law has completely broken down. The wounded avoid hospitals because they are afraid of getting killed there.

Unfortunately those videos exist. There are videos of relatives walking for hours from body bag to body bag to find the remains of their lost ones. There are videos of people with heavy machine guns shooting indiscriminately into peaceful protests. There are videos of executions. Everything has been recorded.

There is a reason why the Iranian government cannot activate internet and phones anymore. Once people can communicate again, they will count and document the true scale of events. Right now, it seems the Iranian government would rather give up on internet and telephones altogether than having anyone find out, which tells you just about how bad the situation is.

Let me comment as an SBCL user: This is outstanding work, and I can now remove a lot of performance hacks from my code because the default hash tables became equally fast!

Also, this technique eliminates a number of worst-case scenarios and inefficiencies, which is a boon for any hash table user.

I recently switched to uv, and I cannot praise it enough. With uv, the Python ecosystem finally feels mature and polished rather than like a collection of brittle hacks.

Kudos to the uv developers for creating such an amazing piece of software!

I fully agree. Limiting the amount of copies of software to sell them like a finite good has so many downsides:

1. There may be people who cannot use/afford some software, although there is technically an infinite supply.

2. Collaboration becomes awkward. Either all contributors give up their rights (Open Source), or one contributor holds all the rights and the rest is being treated unfairly. The latter decreases the incentives to make software modular and reusable.

3. The resulting software typically gets worse due to some copyright enforcement mechanisms. For example, no closed source software will ever have a good debugger, because that would allow viewing and changing the source code.

4. It creates a power imbalance between software owners and software users. Nearly all software has to be adapted over time, but the software owner has a monopoly on performing such adaptations. The result is enshittification, surveillance, and basically a return to feudalism where daily life is governed by a small number of overlords.

5. It is not clear how to price software fairly, and there is also little incentive to do so.

6. My impression is that high-quality software converges to formal proof, which is AFAIK not copyrightable.

For all these reasons, I think it is time to consider a world without copyright on software.

To those that worry about salaries in such a world: Negotiate payment in advance (contracts, crowdfunding, bounties, ...), or get a job where software is created as a byproduct (consultant, researcher, tester, ...).

Now Microsoft just sounds like pre-Brexit Britain. Why reflect on your own shortcomings when you can blame the EU instead :)

I suggest Microsoft follows Britain's example and leaves. The main difference is that we Europeans actually miss the Brits, whereas nobody would miss Microsoft and its shoddy products and business practices.

On a more serious note, I fully understand that the Digital Markets Act is causing Microsoft headaches. But I think this headache is well deserved. Big Tech has been building moats where they should have built bridges, and now our computing landscape resembles medieval Germany where everything was at the mercy of a few feudal lords. It is time to drive out those lords and reshape software in a way that empowers, not enslaves.

This paper is from last year, and a lot of interesting things have happened in the meantime:

- The parallel garbage collector is now part of SBCL, but not yet the default. Enabling it is attractive, though, because it has roughly twice the throughput.

- The SBCL maintainers used the parallel GC as reason to make SBCL's memory management overall more modular. This process is still ongoing, but experimenting with different GC strategies on SBCL has never been easier.

- Another GC is already in the works that has virtually zero pause times. Once this is merged, we can finally bury that old myth that Lisp systems stutter (if it hasn't already been buried by the presence of video games written in Lisp, like Kandria)

The parallel GC is an amazing achievement by Hayley Patton. We SBCL users cannot thank her enough for her outstanding work!