Each time I visit Liam Proven’s articles for The Reg, I can find some real fun—even if this wasn’t the intended effect. Let me show you the latest crop.

As part of the not-so-interesting article “Ubuntu 27.04 may bring a preview of the long-awaited Core Desktop,” this paragraph made my day:

It’s still much too easy to break any ordinary desktop Linux distro. In this vulture’s extensive personal experience, the Btrfs filesystem is especially vulnerable. In four years of daily-driving a Btrfs-based distro in the 20-teens, we saw more crashes due to corrupted Btrfs volumes than in the previous two decades. However, all the vendors of Btrfs-based OSes are resolute in their denial about its real problems, which means they never get fixed. SteamOS and KDE Linux both use dual read-only Btrfs partitions, which update one another ChromeOS-style. This may be the only way to battle-harden this problematic filesystem. Canonical, on the other hand, offers integrated OpenZFS. We’ve been using ZFS since before the COVID pandemic, and it has yet to lose a single byte of data for us.

What?! But I thought Btrfs was the best filesystem in the known universe! Copy-on-write, easy backups, the need to keep at least a quarter of the partition free, shortened SSD life… sorry, the last one wasn’t advertised.

🤯

In a comment to another uninteresting article, “AlpineBSD announced – an AI-free FOSS OS,” the same Liam Proven:

I think it’s great that some people are saying no to LLM use and forking projects to keep them handcrafted.

I am very happy for the botlickers to stride boldly off into the bright machine-assisted future that they envision.

Me, personally, I think that in a year or so, the entire LLM bubble will collapse and all the cloud LLM vendors will vanish like the morning dew on a hot day. There is, tragically, a significant chance the PROC will invade the ROC and even if big China fails to successfully annex little China, the chip makers will be disrupted.

But it’s not just Taiwan. The AMOC is teetering on collapse. Much of the tropics is going to become uninhabitable well within a human generation (that’s 25Y for reference). A lot of chips are made in the tropics, in Thailand and Malaysia.

That is going to get disrupted too.

Computers and their parts may never get cheap again.

They may never get faster again.

They may start getting slower. We will have to keep using older, slower ones for longer.

The sloppers are going to find that their costs go up by a factor of 10, then another one, and then another one.

Suddenly LLM-assisted dev will get much harder and slower and more expensive. The fancy GPUs and the CPUs with tensor accelerators will not come. Local LLMs will not get faster. Their training will become insupportably expensive.

This problem is self-limiting.

The people with the skills to do dev and debug the old way, by eye and by hand, with their carefully-cultivated slop-free codebases, will end up winning.

And if I am wrong? Great. Free software for everyone and the bots can ensmarten themselves, embiggen their artificial minds, and solve global warming and take us to Mars. Yay, hurrah, cheers, doubles all round!

🤯

But smart governments and regulators are unprepared for the Apocalypse—or maybe they are knowingly sabotaging their countries? Here’s an example from an article that, this time, was not written by Liam: “Landline phones will switch off across Britland in 100 days, no extensions.”

Openreach has issued a stark reminder to customers that the legacy phone network is being officially switched off on January 31, and says the deadline will not be postponed.

The infrastructure arm of BT Group, Britain’s biggest telecoms biz, circulated the warning this week in a letter to comms providers that use its network to deliver their services.

It informs them that any customers still on legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN) connections are at risk of disruption when these are retired at the end of January, 2027.

The switch-off could affect businesses and consumers alike. Beyond the plain old telephone, systems that rely on PSTN connectivity include point-of-sale terminals, fire and security alarms, and personal care alarms for elderly and vulnerable people.

The move is part of a wider government scheme to get the UK onto all-digital high-speed networks running on fiber-optic infrastructure, and the legacy phone service – with its dependency on copper cabling – was standing in the way.

Many households have now ditched landline handsets and instead use only mobile phones, yet for those who still want a landline, the changeover means plugging the phone into the back of a broadband router to access a Digital Voice service.

Marvelous!

A few selected comments:

● Given the way the world has changed recently the decision to turn off the copper phone network is looking more stupid every day.

● Yes, there will no longer be a contingency once / if the Russians snip the various cables around Airstrip One. POTS should be kept for at least back-up purposes for such and even lesser emergencies.

I expect that quite a few people will be returning to using CB radio and similar networks for such contingency planning, even going the full monty and being licensed radio hams along with seriously big twigs in the gardens and roofs.

● The old system had a lot of resilience – stacks of led-acid batteries at the exchange could keep things running for a few days. Now, if there were a significant power outage, landlines die instantly. Mobile masts tend to have 1 to 8 hours of battery. Who knows how long all the network equipment between your business and the cloud will keep going and then there’s the cloud itself.

● Storm Desmond in 2015 disrupted power to wide area’s in Cumbria and especially the city of Lancaster for several days.

There was a study done and it found that mobile masts only lasted about an hour (if at all – many relied on internet links that dies with the power), the BT street boxes were all gone on a few hours. As for DAB Radio and Terrestrial TV – forget it.

The local radio station that was on an upper story of its building with a generator and FM Radio mast was the only means of getting information out to people, and the only means of getting information to the radio station was by analogue phones or boat.

We have some battery backup in our home for the OR Fibre box, Sky hub and cordless phones base station (along with the Wi-Fi and network switch) but that will only last for a few hours. That’s OK for short outages whilst they fix the cable down the street but a major storm like Desmond will be a big wake up call but by then it will be too late.

● I still use my analogue landline fairly regularly, and definitely need to keep the number. However I’ve not yet heard anything about the switch-off from my provider (UW). Thankfully my VDSL connection is pretty solid, so digital voice should be OK, but the lack of communication is concerning.

● Come on now, the plans were on display for nine months, in the cellar, with no working lights and missing stairs, in a locked filing cabinet in a disused toilet.

● We use our landline only for voice and have poor Mobile phone reception. (I have a Mobile router which is a lot more sensitive but is data only, and mains powered). Being crumbly old things, we need emergency comms.

So we contacted BT. They understood that they had no alternative solution. So they let on that our local exchange will be staying in business, and our landline will keep its +48V for the foreseeable.

If you too have special dependencies on that landline, get on to your provider and/or BT now, before it is too late.

Maybe our civilization needs to disappear. We’re way too dumb.