t has been over 5 years since its release and Vista 11 is pegged at measly 15.6% in the US, whereas GNU/Linux grows a lot.

In North America, GNU/Linux is exceptionally dominant (more so than other continents). I wonder why.

EFL Cup

think we might go to the park after all, as it’s sunny unlike what the forecast said. Tonight, next to the park, Manchester City plays its first cup match for this season and Enzo’s first with this club.

Next week marks 23 years since I started my Ph.D. program. That decision I made (to turn down a job offer from London) has aged well. This year is very rewarding and productive. I still have lots of time for sports.

Silent layoffs

here are LOTS of Microsoft layoffs right now. Insiders know it, but they cannot speak about it (too risky). Media does not report these. It’ll conveniently – in an arse-covering fashion – dismiss that as “rumours” and say, no WARN notices. But Microsoft bypasses the law. It says, “we’ll fire you unless you agree to this ‘voluntary exit’ agreement, then sign an NDA to keep quiet and outwardly happy about it.”

Same for PIPs and LITE.

IBM and Microsoft have TENS OF THOUSANDS of layoffs this year. Unlike Oracle, they hide these.

Below are articles from 2026:

Techrights still growing

recently remembered that next month it is Wikileaks’ 20-year anniversary – one month before Techrights’.

Techrights is not a site anymore. Techrights is many things, including a community. The community is probably as old as its IRC presence, i.e. it goes back to 2008.

The Cyber Show (cybershow.uk) has been very active in techrights.org IRC (irc.techrights.org) lately and we forge alliances with groups whose missions overlap ours.

Plan to go to the park won’t work

planned to take Rianne to the park today (to feed the birds), but after the weather forecast said sunny afternoon, then (last night) sunny morning, it now seems to suggest little sun and instead light rain.

The likely implication is, I’ll write and publish more articles today. I have some good topic on the way, including material about the Linux kernel.

Same thing Evri does with its bots!

2 days ago: Ebay Uses Bots (Slop) to Give Users a Lot of Work

This has impacted many people, and one of them wrote:

Following on from my last post. Yesterday, I received a message
from Ebay with apparantly-good news:

Thanks again for reporting the listing(s) you found. We wanted to
let you know that we closed your report for the below referenced
listing(s). These listings have not been removed.

[With the listing I'd appealed the removal of listed below]

Well it’s a bit weird, my “appeal” has become a “report”, which
makes it sound like I’d reported myself for a voilation in the
first place. But I’m getting used to really weird uses of English
these days so the final statement “These listings have not been
removed” sounded good enough.

Only it was wrong! If I go to the listing link, it still returns
their 404 page “We looked everywhere!”, and when logged in it still
shows as being hidden as a “listing with issues”, with the option
to “appeal” still greyed out since my first appeal/”report”.

So it seems I’ve got the old beaurocratic “Bugger off!” after only
my first complaint to them. Yet they’re preventing themselves from
making ~$40 in fees if they’d just let the transaction go ahead on
Ebay, when I never suggested anything different anyway. It’s
basically costing them $40 just to piss me off for no reason.

But the message does at least admit to coming from the kind of
intellect I suspected was behind this complete insanity:

This determination was made using automation or artificial
intelligence.

I have an image in my mind now of going to Ebay HQ in the USA just
to find all the doors locked, and peeking through the dusty windows
to see endless rows of abandoned office cubicles, the only life
being the lights flashing from long rows of server racks hastily
installed in the corner of the room. Of course it’s probably really
all in some anonymous datacentre, costing a fortune for a net
result that’s barely distinguishable from cats walking over the old
human staff’s keyboards. Meanwhile their main competitor, Amazon
(which I refuse to even buy things from), is one of the companies
actually running such datacentres and selling AI.

Of course like Ebay’s old human staff, the AI still won’t let
anyone talk back.

Please don’t reply to this message. It was sent from an address
that doesn’t accept incoming email.

I’ve got to wonder how AI still took six days to respond to my
appeal though. Is it really now not even any faster than an
office full of over-worked humans, or just trying too hard to
emulate them?

Anyway the case with the keyboard seems settled, albeit
senselessly. Unless the buyer does contact me directly by email
before the end of the week I think I’ll give up and use it myself.
Mind you the way things are looking with all this devolving
technology and political/economic instability I’m increasingly
tempted to make the most of society while it still functions and go
off on a long break, driving around rural Australia spending my
money before it all becomes worthless in the aftermath of the
impending societal breakdown. But that’s probably an overreaction.

– The Free Thinker

Animations that are simple work, the plot/story matters more than CG brute force

t is midnight now, so tomorrow is our anniversary and we plan to watch an old film in the weekend. We’ll be busy celebrating until Monday. Our life is simple, so we enjoy simple things; a simple life must not be conflated with a lack of productivity.

It’s sad that the “modern” and “digital” society (consumption oriented) wants us to think that the more gets wasted, the better it’ll be.

This is a fallacy.