I suspect this might be over thinking it a little. You know those cheap Asian products that have mashup of western pop culture like “Obama - Gotta go fast!” on a picture of Frank Zappa, it is a way of using another culture as a means to grab clout.

So someone made a decent chocolate but with expensive ingredients, so why not name it after the pinnacle of hedonistic hubris. It has nothing to do with Dubai other than 'Dubai = fancy". They have certainly jumped on after the fact like an influencer who accidentally made it big, but it didn’t feel like an industry plant from the beginning.

That said, this fad will pass and you will be able to buy pistachios really cheap afterwards as there will be a glut of them.

I have softened very VERY slightly on AI code. If it can identify genuine issues than that is fine. It is when folks just trust it blindly and just send 50 commits without understanding a thing or even remotely testing it, that is just crazy. But then on the flip side, yeah all the other issues probably aren’t worth it.

It is complicated at times but then things like this always are. The most successful evil always has some claim to virtue.

Alas, occasionally you have to walk with the devil to achieve some good. One just has to weigh up if it is worth it.

I once asked Stallman about how he used to build and run GNU tools before having the Linux kernel. He was using a proprietary Minix system as a means to get work done until there was a better alternative. I mean running a proprietary system is one thing, burning through the amazon with 100 quintillion tokens is very different.

There are folks in the occult space that think LLM’s are possessed by evil spirits. Yeah, I know, make of that what you will.

BUT, when I see folks at the top and the way they talk about this stuff, my rational mind kind of wavers and you see people who are just completely and totally absorbed with these things. Maybe them occult folks are on to something. 🙃

Scary to see, it is like alzheimer’s disease in how it eats away at the persons autonomy below but unlike that disease, it still maintains enough cognition for them to be functional in society. For better or worse.

I use Trisquel, one of the FSF approved distros. So far it seems to have held up well against a lot of the less inviting changes in the Linux space, but it is based on Ubuntu. I do wonder how much longer it will hold up until I end up making the jump to a BSD system. Not the fault of the developers, just that the flow of the base system is too strong to fight against forever.