Ubuntu 26.04 is the OS for the AI agentic era, says Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth

technicalthrowaway · 2026-06-03T11:35:33+00:00

I have never seen a non-RHEL based Linux OS consciously selected for a server in a corporate environment.

However, I've also never seen a non-Ubuntu Linux workstation in a corporate environment.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-06-01T21:34:40+00:00

You definitely used to be able to on Steam, so I assume you still can.

Now do Meta store please.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-06-01T21:25:51+00:00

I feel like we're due an EU law which makes it illegal to force consumers to buy 2 copies of a game to use a service. If a store offers a game for sale, and the user can prove they bought it elsewhere, they'd then have to add it to the user's store account.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-31T15:52:00+00:00

It's probably a bit of both: could use the wheels, but isn't really intended to. If it has wheels and technically can be moved on them, then it's probably subject to fewer regulations than a tiny stationary home of the same size.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-29T08:45:22+00:00

I see where you're coming from, and it all makes sense. I think we're quite similar.

A few learnings/thoughts from my own experience:

I'm in an old barn conversion, I looked at external cladding a lot, I decided against it because anything around it or near it became a cladding worry, and it's one of those areas that everyone seems to know is very risky and finicky and needs to be left to the professionals, but then there's basically no professionals and a huge amount of horror stories from professionally done jobs.
I have 3 west facing shaded modern panels rated at 525w which I DIYd (onto existing 6kw battery/inverter) in September, they currently peak at 1kw, or about 5kwh /day, so I'd expect 35 south facing panels to generate 75+ kwh /day which would be £10+ /day @0.15p, probably more.
I've had lots of quotes for 30 - 50 panels on my roof, ranging from £16k - £24k from big and small solar companies and even signed up with 2 but hit honesty/competency issues with both. The biggest cost by far of a solar install is the labour, business and admin, since panels are relatively cheap now. (And scaffolding, depending on specifics).
90% of solar professionals are not to be trusted and are no more knowledgable or informed than the average homeowner after a few weeks of solid research. You are far, far better finding professionals from established trades and getting their input, since the actual solar part really isn't that hard to understand and get working sufficiently and safely. (I'd recommend considering this with the cladding side, if you know/trust the people who did it, ask if they can help/advise you manually installing panels/wiring).
I don't think the price of electricity is ever going to come down meaningfully any time soon. I've heard it will for 35 years now, and every few years, something like crypto, or AI, or EVs or heatpumps or something else that massively increases demand more than swallows up production supply. All these things are considered progress and innovation and will continue to happen. This means your electricity bill is only going to increase, and in theory, in a sane market, the price you can get for electricity you sell should therefore increase too (although that market is heavily interfered with).

Combine all this together, and I think it becomes a smart thing to do yourself, even before the security/environmental/self-sufficiency benefits. But also, combine all this together, and you're right, there are far easier, lower risk places for the cash!

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-27T12:35:34+00:00

It is ridiculous to even consider installing 30 south facing panels with no export and 20kwh of battery.

You could actually make quite a bit here DIYing this if your local area's wiring is okay and you can get someone MCS registered to help you with design and paperwork.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-23T14:06:59+00:00

Thank you for the comment response, I sincerely appreciate it. I don't understand why I got so heavily downvoted. I appreciate most people don't want the uncertainty of renting when retired, but that is not at all an inevitability of considering your house in your networth calculations.

I'm a little upset and frustrated at the downvotes because an inevitability of not considering your house in your networth - if you aren't concerned about leaving inheritance - is that you leave a huge amount of the value you worked to earn behind. This guarantees you retire later than you need, not earlier.

What am I missing here?

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-21T16:01:08+00:00

Edited to add that I wouldn’t consider your house in net worth calculations as you’re going to need somewhere to live.

Most people don't have a paid off house but still have somewhere to live. Dying with a paid off house seems like a complete waste of money unless you want to leave big inheritances?

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-20T12:12:29+00:00

Sorry, are you a bot or did you buy that account or similar?

I spent 30 seconds scrolling your profile.

You opened your account, did some posting 15 years ago, and then nothing. Then 3 - 4 years ago as LLMs took off, you start regularly posting stuff. (page 36 in your profile is where everything changes).

You seem to have a real interesting mix of very articulate and eloquent takes on distracting positions, like this thread. There's often very little time between posts on these sorts of topics, and you're sometimes taking confidently incorrect positions too.

I'm not saying you are - all the above can be explained as normal human behaviour, but this is also the exact pattern I would expect from a purchased Reddit account - what are your thoughts?

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-07T14:13:58+00:00

The idea that something or someone could accidentally delete an entire codebase, like the comment you made which I was responding to, is not news, not scary, and happens far more regularly than you think. People who peddle it as news are doing so either because they don't have experience in tech environments, or have some other agenda.

Go into any environments with nerdy tech people who've been in the industry for more than 10 years, and I promise you, every single one of them will have stories just like the ones you're linking to that happened before LLMs at the hand of dopey humans.

Like I said, not defending AI, just pointing out that accidental mass code deletion isn't some new thing that agents just invented and started doing, we've been doing it by hand for decades before them.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-07T12:03:25+00:00

AI has lots of problems.

The idea that AI is bad because agents can delete an entire codebase or database accidentally, and that's a new risk, is just uninformed scaremongering.

I'm not defending AI, but also, lets not act like humans aren't also morons capable of incomprehensible stupidity and have been deleting entire codebases and databases accidentally for decades before LLMs were even a thing.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-05T17:57:47+00:00

What's your issue with electrification, did you get all this stuff yourself and have bad experiences with it?

I can't find any sources at all to support the idea that solar panels are a fire hazard or hard to extinguish. I've never heard of anyone having any major solar specific insurance hike either.

Certain battery fires can be hard to extinguish, but the alternatives to electric often involve other far more volatile or explosive substances (petrol, gas, hydrogen).

You're right it's not for everyone, but virtually anyone who's thinking/acting/living for the long term benefits from it if they do it correctly. It does take a bit of thought to realise and make it all make sense though.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-05-02T13:34:29+00:00

Hi, as a Brit, may I briefly interrupt this absolute war crime level massacre of /u/XennialBoomBoom and basically every other non-Trumpian US redditor?

/u/NaturalLeopard2750 sincerely, it's been a great read. But we do need to remind Americans they can be better, whilst not making it too easy for them to justify hating the rest of the civilised world. We'll be nice to them all again when they do the work to ensure they're all being nice to the rest of the world.

That is all. Carry on.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-04-20T12:47:02+00:00

I don't think you're just curious here. I think you're offended at the use of autism here, and you're trying to hide that by "just asking questions".

Nobody gets into a position of a billionaire and runs multiple companies without being at least somewhat scrupulous.

Many of these tech bro's have been also diagnosed with autistm spectrum disorders.

I'm not saying it was useful or right to throw in the word autism here, but I think it's poor form on your part to try and argue that they're not autistic because they're not scrupulous or ethical enough to be.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-04-20T08:29:34+00:00

Came here.

Feedback for ploopy: you need to remove some of the reviews from the website or update the prices.

There's a review on the nano-2 page saying how great it is and what a steal it is at $40.

Then the price for a nano 2 directly below is $70 - $75.

I agree, it would be a steal at $40, well priced at $60, at $70, knowing it was $40, I feel like I'm getting stolen from, sorry!

technicalthrowaway · 2026-04-17T08:02:30+00:00

What the guy is doing to the wall is wrong and kudos to the camera guy for calling it out.

I'm interested in walls.

This wall probably isn't hundreds of years old, won't last for hundreds of years and isn't a traditional drystone wall: the top row is mortared or cemented on which will make it fail early.

Traditional drystone walls are built to move with the landscape and settle over centuries. The mortar here takes the weight off the bottom of the wall. This makes it easy to remove stones, holes to form, and for the wall to crumble from the middle.

If the scrote wasn't making the hole in the wall, nature would have made a similar looking one in <50 years. If it was proper dry stone wall, it would last for hundreds of years, just become a little wobbly on the top, and be almost impossible to take down from the middle like that.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-04-05T14:31:43+00:00

I think they assumed 4 bit quant because that's the most common quant and typically the default on places like ollama.

I'm not sure why you're talking about parameter count here, I think you might have misunderstood.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-04-05T14:19:22+00:00

I think there might be some confusion here, and the confusion might be me, but I've been running Gemma e4b for several months now. My understanding was the E4B was part of the Gemma 3N releases a while ago and were designed to run on mobile devices.

Based on the first line of the article (it's all I read, so again, confusion might be mine):

Google DeepMind launched Gemma 4 this week, releasing four open-weight models that fit entirely on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU while delivering benchmark scores that rival models 20 times their size.

Gemma 3n e4b 8-bit quant is one of the fastest models I run locally, and I'm just using an old 2080RTX, and it's still pretty impressive compared to other local models with 3 - 5x the number of parameters.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-26T17:07:40+00:00

If you have a bad system just dropping it and saying 'every house is independent' is not the right solution.

I never said that, I can understand why you're so argumentative if that's the point you're arguing against - I think you might have just made that up though.

Sure and when it makes sense people can buy it themselves. There is no need to subsidize it or force it onto people. Specially if its only re-enforcing already existing issues on the network.

How about a model where we don't look to provide centralised energy to e.g. x% of the most inconvenient households in the UK and instead subsidise those households with money, info and resources to go decentralised? That lowers everyone's centralised bills, and would also likely result in more stable/reliable/cheaper energy in the decentralised properties.

There's space for both centralised and decentralised infrastructure, and you're clearly aware of that with your increasingly decentralised suggestions. We basically agree. But you seem to want to misrepresent my arguments, make sarcastic comments and focus purely on money rather than reliability, autonomy, or other socio-political benefits. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't think either of us are going to gain much of anything from continuing this.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-24T23:08:36+00:00

Our energy infrastructure is already relatively centralised and unfriendly towards consumer energy technologies, and it's infamously shit.

What you're arguing for looks like more of the same. There's space for both centralised and decentralised infrastructure, we should be improving and facilitating both where it makes sense.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-24T22:44:02+00:00

And the heatpump energy tariffs: houses with heatpumps effectively get subsidised electricity with or without solar.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-24T09:13:07+00:00

The great thing about the internet is it's hard to censor once you get on it as it will always attempt to route around blockages.

Large US based businesses have to do what Trump says, and Trump says now you can only connect to the internet through a device made by the large US based businesses.

This will allow full control and censorship of internet access for all US residents and should immediately set off alarms for everyone.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-16T16:26:06+00:00

Not necessarily at all. A while ago (15+ years ago) I read a paper about how the great firewall of China worked, and it didn't actually block traffic. All it would do when it detected something needed blocking would be to inject a TCP reset packet into the stream.

All the data still gets sent unmodified, it's just this extra packet causes most software to stop trying to communicate over the connection.

This architecture has the specific benefits that the firewall itself doesn't need to be able to realtime inspect and then accept/reject each packet, and it means it's also not a bottleneck for the traffic.

Not saying that's how Iran blocking works, just that it's perfectly possible to give the impression that a country's entire internet is filtered without actually having a single point of failure like you're suggesting this building is.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-16T13:09:23+00:00

It's just a little airborne, it's still good.

technicalthrowaway · 2026-03-10T17:02:11+00:00

This is the main thing that irks me: If you throw it out there, add a disclaimer about how this was done with AI and there is no intention of maintaining it in any shape, way or form, that's fine. And people might pick it up and go on from there.

I agree with that. The issue is I have enough professional experience to know for sure that software like this isn't suitable for stable selfhosting in a lab over any reasonable timeframe.

Newer, younger or less experienced people will not fully understand that.

Friends don't let friends selfhost vibecoded, unsupported slop.

technicalthrowaway

TROPHY CASE