670,000 commits. Thats big. But only 2K merges? I assume push straight to master in most cases?
I don't think either SCCS or RCS tracked merges, so everything looks like a new revision.
Readit Newsmprovost commented on A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution spinellis.gr/pubs/conf/20... · Posted by u/lioeters
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mprovost commented on Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia cnbc.com/2025/10/28/nvidi... · Posted by u/kjhughes
Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.
Yes but they're using this fund to prop up their core business (and share price) by artificially creating demand for their own products. Most of the money that they invest comes back to them when these companies buy GPUs.
This is a shorter version of Neal Stephenson's metaphor of Unix as a Hole Hawg drill from "In the Beginning was the Command Line".
What's the relevance of these "as someone who ..." posts? Nobody cares that these tools don't happen to fit into your carefully curated list of tools that you install on remote computers. You can install these on your local computer to reap some benefits.
It's the bean soup theory ("what if I don't like beans") in action.
I know well enough my way around vi, because although XEmacs was my editor during the 1990's when working on UNIX systems, when visiting customers there was a very high probability that they only had ed and vi installed on their server systems.
Many folks nowadays don't get how lucky they are, not having to do UNIX development on a time-sharing system, although cloud systems kind of replicate the experience.
Ed is the standard text editor.
IMO this is very stupid: don't let past dictate future. UNIX is history. History is for historians, it should not be the basis that shapes the environment for engineers living in present.
The point is that we always exist at a point on a continuum, not at some fixed time when the current standard is set in stone. I remember setting up Solaris machines in the early 2000s with the painful SysV tools that they came with and the first thing you would do is download a package of GNU coreutils. Now those utils are "standard", unless of course you're using a Mac. And newer tools are appearing (again, finally) and the folk saying to just stick with the GNU tools because they're everywhere ignore all of the effort that went into making that (mostly) the case. So yes, let's not let the history of the GNU tools dictate how we live in the present.
Google is the only serious competition to Nvidia right now. AI is both a threat to their core business and a core strength of their business. They invented transformers and a cheap inference chip. Their models are top-tier. I think google will be fine.
While they invented transformers, I'm not convinced that they've figured out a way to monetise them in the same way that they spent decades optimising their search results page into a money printing machine. Kodak invented the digital camera...
This reminds me of coding with AI where slightly changing the prompt gives you different code and you don't really understand why but you use it anyway. In this case it's not even the compiler that's adding the incorrect instructions - it's the linker. Someday we'll just trust the AI to spit out working code the same way we assume that the C toolchain produces reasonable assembler. And when it doesn't it's remarkable enough to warrant a blog post and HN discussion.
Good for simple stateless services (web servers, API endpoints, microservices) applications that fit the unikernel model - single-purpose, statically linked Running on one's own Xen hypervisor infrastructure.
https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/