It was easy to ignore before it "raised" around 15 million dollars. That's a lot of money to be throwing around a mostly-donation based ecosystem.
I'm already seeing discussions on the mise[0] Github discussions about Omarchy specific changes and designs. I'm not saying anything about these specific changes and they seem mostly distro-agnostic for now, but it goes to show how it can affect other distros/software even if you don't use it.
[0] mise is being sponsored by the Omacon foundation, which is what all this money is technically going to. It also happens to be the only "independent" tool being sponsored by the foundation, as the hyperland dev is essentially contracted by them and the QuickShell dev was hired by DHH.
> I don't even know what hyperland and quickshell are. I don't use mise because it seems to solve problems I solve with containers.
Okay? Your lack of awareness of the tools does not change the fact that 15 millions dollars that is supposed to "support the linux desktop", but right now is mostly funding its own distro.
> 15 millions dollars that is supposed to "support the linux desktop", but right now is mostly funding its own distro.
There is no general destination to support Linux Desktop. Linux Foundation is not that, in addition to having more money than they need, and spending less than 5% of their budget on actual kernel.
The only way to support Linux and its desktop is to support individual project. Be they separate or part of some distro. That's the beauty of Linux and open-source - all the features and efforts are dynamically leaking elsewhere in the ecosystem.
DHH never promised to support outside projects. Omarchy Foundation is supposed to support Linux via developing Omarchy, putting all the money there, not by having a tax-evation foundation with high-paid executives, distributing a tiny percentage of the budget to some general unmeasurable cause.
Hence why DHH supports Hyprland and not Niri. He said that directly.
> Also, Japan doesn't actually have a 'colonial history' having never been colonized by another nation.
It was never colonized but I've often heard it talked about in a similar way due to the effects of the Commodore Perry and the post WWII occupation (i.e. see their infamous pornography laws), as well as neighboring affects from China's colonial history.
The infamous 'anti-pornography laws' actually predate Perry by a significant period of time. Those were a Tokugawa era law originally. Post WWII occupation has had very little actual impact on Japanese culture, no matter how impactful the occupiers think they were.
It's the first time I've seen this put forward, I thought the effects of occupation were obvious and undeniable. To me at least there is a clear influence in art/music/cinema, technology, and food. Though over time, it fuses to the point of being its own thing.
Certainly the impacts of American culture from Hollywood and Elvis are impactful, but that effect has reached nearly every corner of the world. One memorable point is Richard Gere finding himself recognized as "Officer Gentleman" in one of the most remote jungle villages in Papua New Guinea that only had one TV set for the whole tribe. However, the Japanese social and legal reformation following the end of the war took as much influence from the greater western world as from the US. Half of the country used primarily German technology imports for developing it's power grid, and this legacy remains today, as there is a division into 60Hz and 50Hz regions of roughly equal size.
Japan adopted a very English form of democracy, uses a similarly English approach to the division of public and private education, and while the Meiji Restoration did away with legal and formal caste divisions, there is still a strong hierarchy of culture which instead of feudalism, uses financial means as a basis for class. Much of the former Samurai class was in unique position to transition into the merchant class at the time of Meiji and thus the system changed but also stayed the same.
The Japanese have been adept at both appearing to be influenced from the outside and remaining unchanged on the inside. There is a concept that is central to Japanese culture and consciousness, which is a duality of existence called Tatemae and Honne. This mistakenly gets conflated with Yin and Yang, but is wholly unrelated. This duality is the 'view from the outside' and the 'internal truth' and is the societal construct which underpins the strong tendency to reduce public conflict and direct contradiction. The Japan that is visible to the outside, between individuals and among nations, is highly influenced by this concept and is why Japan can appear to be influenced and changed, and can at the same time cling to traditions and customs which are rooted firmly and unchanged since the 16th and 17th centuries. It means that the same 'James Dean' lookalike rebellious youth groups in places like Shinjuku and Akihabara can exist, and yet most of them do 'grow up' and go to work in an office as a 'Salaryman' even if they still dress up and hang out on the one day off they get every week.
The influence of foreign food is much in this same vein, Tempura being an excellent exemplar. Originating with Portuguese sailors centuries ago, it has been embraced and taken on such change as to become recognizably Japanese cuisine around the world. Ramen as well, unmistakably Chinese in origin, yet integrated and given a truly Japanese transformation until it is nearly wholly identified with the Japanese menu.
These foreign influences do appear, but only when they are in tune with, and can be adapted to fit the underlying 'core truth' of Japanese culture. The Tatemae may shift and appear to have changed, the Honne remains stable and forms a durable foundation, for individuals and for society as a whole. And so, for the occupiers it may appear as if they have made a significant influence on the whole of Japanese society, and they may perceive themselves as somehow similar in effect to 'colonial influences' while at the same time, having had no more real impact to the formal and traditional activities of society than a new coat of paint or sponsorship label has on the driving characteristics of a race car.
This is exactly what I meant, and Japan is not special in this regard. In nearly all cases, with a few exceptions, external influences are molded and integrated into the underlying culture.
It's the same story with American influence on Filipino culture, which was significant but still integrated, or "in tune" as you say.
Another good example is French influence on Vietnamese culture, which appears more seamless to me than American influence on Japan. It's a few generations older, so it makes sense.
>Japan has ultra processed foods and they don't seem to have an obesity epidemic.
Most of that's from a much stronger national guidance on weight control + societal expectations, but IIRC they also are gaining weight. Their ultra processed foods (in the salt and preservative sense) are also why they have one of the highest rates of stomach cancer.
> They also don't have a marijuana epidemic.
Not sure if I'd categorize the US as in a marijuana epidemic (and this is coming from someone who doesn't consume it and dislikes being around it) but even if we were, the states with the highest marijuana usage (west coast and NE) and the states with the highest obesity rates (deep south) are almost non-overlapping circles. If we're tying a drug to be obesity rates I'd be much more willing to believe it's the American propensity to chug large amounts of cheap 100-120 calories a pop beer.
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.
Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
Why not? The code is famously convoluted and slow (see: dfhack). It's still an amazing accomplishment, but that doesn't make the code itself a challenge frontier models today aren't up to.
The decline of the classic US fast food restaurants (McD's, Wendy's, BK) has been matched by gas station food getting better and better. The 7-11 breakfast sandwiches are pretty good these days and sometimes the hamburgers even taste like real meat :) .
As someone who A) likes to drink and B) gets truly horrendous hangovers (all-day, barely can get out of bed since age 22 hangovers) I've been pretty disappointed with the lack of research in hangovers. There's a "Alcohol Hangover Research Group" that meets yearly that I keep up with it but nothing major yet.
Personally my pet theory (as mentioned in the article) is there's more of an immune system reaction then people think. This would explain some of the difference in hangover sensitively and reactions, plus from my personal "experiments" I've noticed pseudoephedrine+painkiller really clears my hangovers up sometimes, much like a bad head cold. On the other hand, it doesn't work every time making me thing that some hangovers are immune-system based, some acetaldehyde based, some dehydration, etc. Plus there's the effects of the beverages drunk and low level gluten or hops intolerance.
DHM-based (Cheers and Zaca usually) and Zbiotics are the best preventatives I've tried so far; they won't stop everything but I do feel a bit better the next day after taking them compared to without. All three are very expensive unfortunately and none are better than the greatest preventative of all: drinking water throughout the night :) .
At the very least, the main guy behind this is pat-s who was originally a WoodpeckerCI dev and has been in and around Codeberg/Forgejo/Woodpecker for a while so I trust he knows his stuff. His work on CrowCI (Woodpecker fork) has been great.
I also swear I've read that same "buy a hetzener dedi install forgejo" etc etc line before, but maybe it's just you're not the only person cynical about the situation.
"bold-faced lie" and "bald-faced lie" are both valid expressions. The original expression is "bare-faced lie" but they're all pretty similar to each other.
Yes but only one of them makes most people who hear it think you don’t know the expression you’re trying to use. There’s no objective reason it has to be this way, but it is, and at least personally I appreciate being told when I’ve got something stuck to my back.
I don't really know why I should care what expression I'm trying to use (or what someone else is trying to use) as long as the intent is understood. If anything, people who are needlessly pedantic about the way I express things that they clearly understood are people I'm happy to get signal from so that I can minimize my need to interact with them going forward; it's much nicer to find out from something inane like this than to wait until we have a communication problem about something actually important.
bold-faced lie is just the usual English drift that was actually questioned as incorrect when it first surfaced. If a lie is bold, you don't have to suggest that the user's face is bold when doing it. You can in thirty seconds of google searching find numerous sources explaining that "bold-faced" is a malapropism.
It's the usual English drift perhaps, but "bold faced lie" has been used since the 17th century, which is also apparent from "thirty seconds of Google searching". Three hundred years is enough usage for me to count it as correct.
On a side note, "bold faced" does not mean the persons face is bold, only that it is said boldly, which implies a level of rudeness that "bald-faced" or "bare-faced" does not.
Modern references seem to align (for instance, Garner's): Bald-faced and bare-faced have slightly different connotation than bold-faced. Despite "bold-faced lie" being in somewhat common use, "bald-faced lie" is more common (over 2x according to google stats), and overwhelmingly agreed upon as the "literate" choice, unless an author intends to refer to the sort of lie that would headline an article.
> Generally, something to be avoided by people striving for clearer communication
Their communication seemed pretty clear to me. If anyone actually claims that they didn't understand what they meant but would have understood it by using the other form of the expression, I think that's a bold-faced lie.
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.
[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.
What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Just make them pay!
Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.
I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.
Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.
It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.
My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .
> when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa.
That's assuming they have so few alternatives that opening with that wouldn't cause them to just cross you off their list.
Convincing your competitors to do that while you don't tends to be pretty profitable though, which is one of the reasons that strategy has so many champions.
> So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents.
This is actually what happens in most places. It's even what happens in many cases when the data centers are given a discount, because the "amortize fixed costs over more units of generation" thing still happens.
Higher rates are essentially a time lag. You want to add load to the grid today but it will take five years to add that much new generation and in the meantime the only way to make a higher demand curve match up with the existing supply curve is at a temporarily higher price.
You could raise the price of electricity on only the data center by so much that it removes the increase in demand, but what that actually means is not building it there, and then it also isn't there after generation catches up and the local power company would have been able to spread their fixed costs over more units.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
Data centers are asset dense. A large one would have a value of e.g. a billion dollars while the neighboring plot of land has an assessment value of a million dollars. That's why they offer tax incentives -- a tenth of the rate on 1000 times the assessment value is a huge revenue win over the 100% of nothing you get if they build it somewhere else.
Or to put it another way, it allows the towns with a higher mill rate to keep themselves in the running instead of being excluded from the outset.
>What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.
Noise, pollution, energy costs (which you cover in your comment!) and water usage / contamination. I don't want more of those things. I don't want a bunch of strip malls of golf courses in my community, either.
Both of these are complaints about gas turbines rather than data centers.
Data centers can pretty easily do the opposite by offering to curtail load during energy supply shortfalls, both through region shifting and by temporarily operating backup generators, which allows the grid to add more renewable generation without having intermittency issues, and thereby operate fewer gas turbines.
Obviously you have to actually do it that way, but that's the point -- the focus of noise and pollution concerns should be directed towards how power is being generated.
> water usage / contamination
Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
> energy costs
Energy costs are supply and demand. The econ 101 explanation is generally pretty accurate for supply -- if there isn't enough supply then prices go up. This is why NIMBYs screw everyone (including themselves). If you can't build more of something then you have to pay more for whatever already exists.
Demand is more complicated. Econ 101 usually applies in the immediate term, higher prices don't increase supply instantaneously so an immediate increase in demand tends to create an immediate increase in price. But then you can increase supply, and what does that do?
You now have higher volume, more economies of scale, more units to amortize fixed costs over. The ultimate effect of an increase in demand is usually a reduction in the unit price. The exceptions are the things where supply is highly inelastic, like land (as opposed to housing units), which is not the case with power generation.
Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators are preventing supply from increasing. In which case you should be focused on fixing that.
>Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.
Is it more than zero? I need to eat (although I do wish we all paid more for cleaner and more ethical food) but I explicitly don't want data centers.
I think this compares to pesticide to control malaria vs. herbicide to to prevent me from noticing two kinds of grass. Both put poison in the environment, but spraying for malaria has a clear benefit to outweigh its costs. But spraying herbicides so my lawn "looks nice" is really only a downside. What are the benefits to more data centers?
>Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators
If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group. Do you have any suggestions?
This is like complaining that Fox News offices use water in their restrooms because you don't like their reporting. It's transparently not about that.
> I need to eat
Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?
> What are the benefits to more data centers?
Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.
> If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group.
NIMBY and regulatory capture are both descriptions of behavior rather than group identities.
>This is like complaining that Fox News offices use water in their restrooms because you don't like their reporting. It's transparently not about that.
If Fox news were trying to put a huge bathroom next to my property I certainly would care, though.
> Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?
The only alfalfa I have right now is made of little pellets that I give to my chickens.
> Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.
I don't see how this is a benefit to building more data centers. This sounds like an explanation of how you might mitigate their impact.
> NIMBY
I'm not interested in this term until you'll happily accept a carpet factory next to you that poisons your water for years. There is TONS of stuff that no sane person would want in their back yards.
They don't pay as much. They get their electricity at industrial bulk rates while we pay the residential rate. Their demands require more power lines to be run, but those costs are spread out and blended with consumers. It's a legal form of stealing.
> I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax.
This seems naive. You are missing the point. If you don't offer tax incentives, then you don't get data centers (or other important industrial facilities). The internal United States market competition to attract these projects is intense. If you look at when a major foreign auto manuf wants to build a new plant in the US, there is a line of communities hat-in-hand offering all kinds of tax rebates and cheap loans.
> Loudo[u]n County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?
I looked up the reason why Loudoun County has so many data centers: (1) favorable zoning laws passed in year 2000 and (2) sales tax break specific to data centers.
Consider that the stance now is banning data centers. That's the context of the discussion.
The county's other option is to simply price data centers. Yes, that means they might not win the data center. If the data center can get better terms elsewhere, they do that. If the town doesn't want to concede on price, then fine.
People seem to be mad that data centers show up with less perceived value to the community than they want, so why would they care if the data center builds elsewhere because they don't agree to their price? The position strictly Pareto dominates the ban stance: at worst, they get no data center (same as ban), at best, they get a bunch of tax money.
Please educate me on how I'm "missing the point" because of how "naive" I am!
Because people don't like living next to them. They're loud, they're large and monotonous, they don't provide many jobs after construction, they use a lot electricity and decent amount of water, and the ones that rely on fossil fuels pollute.
That plus all the tech bros have gone out of their way to advertise loudly AI as a replacement for humans. So why would a community of humans want to support that?
> they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities
Data centers pay Loudoun County, Virginia $26 in taxes for every $1 in services they consume - nearly $1.3 billion, 45% of the county's budget - which is why Loudoun homeowners pay the lowest property tax rate in Northern Virginia.
Loudoun County is a very rich part of NOVA and was able to fight for those concessions, as well as being in a very desirable part of the country for those DC's to built in (close to major infrastructure but still undeveloped at the time) so they had a better position to argue from.
Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, while Loundoun County gets the tax benefits the whole area is affected by the DC's power consumption due to the regional power grid and shared infrastructure (i.e. the Potomoc) so part of my already high power bills was due to the data centers there and I got minimal benefits.
Yes. See my other comment about how Oregon was able to solve the power problem. The residents of Oregon will be paying LOWER prices than before the data centers.
The data center problem seems to be merely a government corruption problem. Which is a problem, of course, but not limited to data centers.
Alas, something like that wouldn't have helped me either as I was on the other side of the river :) . But yeah some sort of regional coordination between local governments or something like that would fix or at least help the problem.
Like I said in my original comment, I think really the problem is just the scale of the build out. Before the AI boom DCs were being built slowly enough that it wasn't a problem and/or costs could be amortized over time. But cost sharing agreements and subsidization needs to be done before the DCs are built the they're certainly not going to push for it, so the people need to. Lower state taxes in the future due to DCs subsidizing power is (sincerely) great and all, but it doesn't do shit for the families deciding between food and heating their house in the winter before those benefits kick in.
Wait… large customers move in and your rate goes up?
Forget about it. These AI companies could really help themselves by subsidizing local rates. Imagine if a large AI datacenter moved in AND your rate dropped by $70!
Oregon just passed a law saying data centers will pay more for electricity than normal people, and the math says that everyone's rates will be going down.
So, again, I think it depends on whether you live in a red or blue state.
"HB 3546 creates a new classification for data centers, cryptocurrency and other large industrial energy users using more than 20 megawatts, or 20 million watts of power, to pay for their share of electricity use and costs."
> You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply!
they want to, hence all the natural gas turbines. However, and this is pretty funny, you don't just order those using doordash or turn up a knob like on AWS. It takes years, if not decades, for those things to get manufactured, delivered, installed, and on line. He who shall not be be named here mentioned in a interview how all these software guys are going to get painful lesson in hardware when they start trying to build behind the meter power generation.
It does take time to build capacity. But if I build a new office building I’m simply not allowed to open it up and park in the neighborhood driveways today because I have a plan to build a parking structure eventually.
> The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.
You view this as a measure of data center construction, I view this as a measure of how challenging we've made it to do absolutely anything in the US unless there are massive stacked financial incentives in favor of it.
While the rest of systemd is actually pretty modular, journald is unfortunately the only other required component. You can not run systemd without journald running in some way; closest you can get is setting Storage=none and forwarding the logs elsewhere.
journald is in a weird state where its "good enough" and mandatory that most people forget how bad it is until something like this pops up.
Normally I'm pretty happy with systemd and its many components; I even willingly run systemd-resolved, which is probably the other most hated component. But journald makes a lot of weird choices and if I could drop it I would in a heartbeat.
I'm already seeing discussions on the mise[0] Github discussions about Omarchy specific changes and designs. I'm not saying anything about these specific changes and they seem mostly distro-agnostic for now, but it goes to show how it can affect other distros/software even if you don't use it.
[0] mise is being sponsored by the Omacon foundation, which is what all this money is technically going to. It also happens to be the only "independent" tool being sponsored by the foundation, as the hyperland dev is essentially contracted by them and the QuickShell dev was hired by DHH.
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