I would rather say UNIX won the server room, Linux just happens to be the UNIX clone most people hack on nowadays, and can change tomorrow as companies take over and people like Linus eventually pass the torch.
You can already see that on embedded, other FOSS OSes are being adopted, without GPL licensing, like Zephyr, NutXX, FreeRTOS,...
Correct, but who 25 years ago could have imagined they’d have gone so far as to roll their own? I remember the Balmer days.
But the fact that they’re rolling a distro tells me they’re likely also writing software for Linux. I’m sure their Azure Linux contains apps they wrote and maintain, used by the OS.
Then there’s Microsoft apps on Android, with Linux under the covers.
I develop C#/F# applications in Windows that run on Mac OS, iOS, Linux, and Windows. It's by far the best environment for this sort of thing. You can get native performance in a much lighter environment than those crappy electron apps.
I personally am itching for more hardware H.264 or even H.265. There's the ESP32-P4 but it requires a second ESP32 to handle the WiFi. I got it working, but it feels like a hack, and the BOM cost is more than 2x a single chip.
Course more PSRAM and hardware encoding would drive up the price...
It's funny to me that he wrote the song to prove that his fans would buy any American-sounding song no matter the lyrics, but it was such a banger that even we in America love to listen to it. Backfired in the best way possible.
Happened to me. CoPilot changing prices prompted me to cancel my CoPilot subscription and install a local coding model running entirely in VRAM. Will call Claude APIs when I get really stuck, but I should be able to handle 80% of my needs with a dumber local model.
For a long time, too. Programming languages rarely change much, techniques rarely change, so I should be able to use said model for I hope at least five years; and if at any time they optimize local models to cram even more intelligence into the same amount of VRAM, I can upgrade to that.
> Will call Claude APIs when I get really stuck, but I should be able to handle 80% of my needs with a dumber local model.
I experiment with all of the local models I can fit into 32GB of VRAM and I have subscriptions to multiple SOTA providers.
The difference between them is very large, unfortunately. The local models can handle small tasks and refactoring mostly okay, but doing anything challenging with them becomes a waste of time. Unfortunately the waste isn’t immediately obvious because they will come back with something that looks like it works, but then on closer examination I need to throw it out and reset them in a usable direction.
Old hardware is surprisingly effective. I've been considering a side hustle selling offline AI to local businesses who are privacy-sensitive. Medical, legal, places like that.
At the low end, I'd use old Xeons with gobs of DDR3, install some V100s, run a smaller agent for general chat inquiries, and a frontier model for the deeper stuff, with a router that passes between them depending on the complexity.
The frontier model would perform very slowly, but if it's a deep task the user can submit it in a batch in the evening e.g. "Correlate all of these cases and look for patterns" then receive the output with morning coffee.
Of course, AI helped me work out a plan for this. Haha
“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.” ~Linus Torvalds
In this case, an entire freaking distro.
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