two open source stories

story number 2: why support the Linux desktop?

Amazon Chime is shutting down. Did anyone use it? I get invited to a lot of video conferences, and I never got invited to an Amazon Chime meeting. Even though Amazon.com is normally really good at SaaS, this one didn’t take off. What happened?

It looks like Amazon Chime was an interesting example of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s intransigent minority effect.

The system requirements for Amazon Chime look pretty reasonable, right? Should get 95% of the client systems out there. The number of desktop Linux users is pretty small. But if you have 20 meetings a week, at 95% compatibility you’re going to average a compatibility issue every week. Even worse, the people you most want to make a good first impression on are the people whose client platform you’re least likely to know.

And if you do IT support for a company with 100 people organizing meetings, Amazon Chime is going to cause way too many support issues to put up with. Taleb uses the examples of kosher and halal food—only a small fraction of the population will only eat kosher or halal, but when planning food for a large group, the most practical choice is to satisfy the minority.

The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.

Anyway, something to keep in mind in the future for anyone considering moving the support desktop Linux or support Firefox tickets to backlog. None of the successful video conferencing platforms give me any grief for my Linux/Firefox/privacy nerdery client-side setup.

Distributions quote of the week

Distributions quote of the week [LWN.net]

Bonus links

Liam Proven and Thomas Claburn cover the latest web browser surveillance drama: Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about selling data), and we don’t buy data about you, he said. We changed our language because some jurisdictions define sell more broadly than most people would usually understand that word. (Don’t forget to turn off advertising features in Firefox.)

David Roberts interviews Mustafa Amjad and Waqas Moosa about Pakistan’s solar boom. What has prompted this explosion of distributed solar is some combination of punishingly high prices for grid power and solar panels getting very, very, very cheap. A glut of Chinese overcapacity means that the price of panels in Pakistan has gone from 24 cents a watt to 10 cents a watt in just the past year or two. Distributed solar is breaking over Pakistan like a tidal wave, despite utilities and a grid that do not seem entirely prepared for it.

AI and Esoteric Fascism by Baldur Bjarnason. When I first began to look into Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Model back in 2022, it quickly became obvious that much of the rhetoric around LLMs was… weird. Or, if we’re being plain-spoken, much of what the executives and engineers at the organisations making these systems were saying was outright weirdo cult shit…

Poll: Small business owners feel more uncertain about the future The NFIB said small business owners are feeling less confident about investing in their business due to uncertain business conditions in the coming months.

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds by Bret Hubert. With all sorts of magic legal spells like DPIAs and DTIAs, organizations attempt to justify transferring our data and processes to the US. There is a whole industry that has been aiding and abetting this process for years. People also fool themselves that special keys and “servers in the EU” will get you “a safe space” within the American cloud. It won’t.

Max Murphy says Goodbye Surveillance Capitalism, Hello Surveillance Fascism Surveillance fascism thrives where corporate greed and state power merge.

This came out in 2020 but worth re-reading today: Puncturing the Paradox: Group Cohesion and the Generational Myth by Harry Guild. The highest group cohesion by profession is in Marketing. This is advertising’s biggest problem in a single chart. This is the monoculture. How can we possibly understand, represent and sell to an entire country when we exist in such a bubble? We like to style ourselves as free thinkers, mavericks and crazies, but the grim truth is that we’re a more insular profession than farming and boast more conformists than the military.

Tech continues to be political by Miriam Eric Suzanne. Maybe we should consider the beliefs and assumptions that have been built into a technology before we embrace it? But we often prefer to treat each new toy as as an abstract and unmotivated opportunity. If only the good people like ourselves would get involved early, we can surely teach everyone else to use it ethically!

Important reminder at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well Because LLMs get catastrophically wrong answers on topics I know well, I do not trust them at all on topics I don’t already know. And if you do trust them, I urge you to spend five minutes asking your favourite one about something you know in detail. (This is a big part of the reason I don’t use LLMs for search or research. A lot of the material isn’t just wrong, but reflects old, wrong, but often repeated assumptions that you need to know a lot about a field to know not to apply.)

Wendy Davis covers Meta Sued Over Discriminatory College Ads. A civil rights group has sued Meta Platforms over ad algorithms that allegedly discriminate by disproportionately serving ads for for-profit colleges to Black users and ads for public colleges to white users. Situations like this are a big part of the reason why people should stop putting privacy-enhancing advertising technologies in web browsers—they mainly obfuscate discrimination and fraud.)

Cities Can Cost Effectively Start Their Own Utilities Now by Kevin Burke. Most PG&E ratepayers don’t understand how much higher the rates they pay are than what it actually costs PG&E to generate and transmit the electricity to their house. When I looked into this recently I was shocked. The average PG&E electricity charge now starts at 40 cents per kilowatt hour and goes up from there. Silicon Valley Power, Santa Clara’s utility company, is getting power to customers for 17 cents per kilowatt hour. Sacramento’s utility company charges about the same.

Pluralistic: MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing (04 Feb 2025) by Cory Doctorow. The rise of the far right can’t be separated from the history of MLMs.

Jeffrey Emanuel covers A bear case for Nvidia: competition from hardware startups, inference-heavy “reasoning” models, DeepSeek’s training and inference efficiency breakthroughs, more. There are certainly many historical cases where a very important new technology changed the world, but the main winners were not the companies that seemed the most promising during the initial stages of the process.

Three years on, Europe looks to Ukraine for the future of defense tech by Mike Butcher. But in order to invest in the right technology, Europe will have to look to Ukraine, because that is where future wars are being fought right now. TechCrunch recently put a call out for Ukrainian dual-use and defense tech startups to update us on what they are working on. Below is what they sent us, in their own words. Related: Ukrainian Drones Flew 500 Miles And, In A Single Strike, Damaged 5% Of Russia’s Oil Refining Capacity by David Axe. (Drones are getting longer ranges and better autonomy, fast. Fossil fuel infrastructure is not getting any better protected or faster to repair. In the near future, you’re only going to be in the oil or gas business if nobody who is good at ML and model airplanes has a strong objection to you being in the oil or gas business.)