Unlurker

Top Gun Traders: Stock Bets and Crypto Culture Take over the Military (wsj.com)

Interesting look at how trading culture has spread into places people do not usually associate with markets. Access to zero-commission apps, constant financial content, and group dynamics can make this kind of behavior grow quickly. It will be worth watching how leadership handles the risk side, since impulsive trading and high stress environments are not a great mix.

I see this in a similar light to the opioid crisis. While it won’t directly kill you like opioid addiction or overdose, economically strip mining Gen Z and Gen Alpha for gains using meme stocks, crypto, sports betting, prediction markets, and similar systems is going to leave us in a bad spot after these enterprises have left with their gains. Indicators to track will be suicide, bankruptcies, domestic violence, etc. Related: The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025 ”Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5770722 - November 19, 2025

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Replacing My Window Manager with Google Chrome (foxmoss.com)

Pyro Desktop! But with Chrome instead of Firefox. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/07/experimental-pyro-project-offers-a-firefox-based-desktop-environment-for-linux/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39541

I'm interested in a how-to which accomplishes the absolute opposite result.

here you go https://plan9.io/magic/man2html/4/webfs

1) uninstall Chrome 2) install it once a year when some backwards website won’t work with anything else. 3) go to 1)

Advent of Sysadmin 2025 (sadservers.com)

imagine typing in a terminal... you want to delete the previous word so press ctrl+w... actually you're in a browser; the window closes... :sadness:

hello, creator here, sorry about that. In this case you can click again on the "Open the Server Terminal in a New Window" button

Here's 12 Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!) challenges, straight from the day job: 1. Get a user to stop logging in as root. 2. Get all users to stop sharing the same login and password for all servers. 3. Get a user to upgrade their app's dependencies to versions newer than 2010. 4. Get a user to use configuration management rather than scp'ing config files from their laptop to the server. 5. Get a user to bake immutable images w/configuration rather than using configuration management. 6. Get a user to switch from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. 7. Get a user to stop keeping one file with all production secrets in S3, and use a secrets vault instead. 8. Convince a user (and management) you need to buy new servers, because although "we haven't had one go down in years", every one has faulty power supply, hard drive, network card, RAM, etc, and the hardware's so old you can't find spare parts. 9. Get management to give you the authority to force users to rotate their AWS access keys which are 8 years old. 10. Get a user to stop using the aws root account's access keys for their application. 11. Get a user to build their application in a container. 12. Get a user to deploy their application without you. After you complete each one, you get a glass of scotch. Happy Holidays!

5. and 6. are a matter of taste (trade-offs), the rest is spot on!

> … from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. Oh, good lord why?

Because sysadmim wants to outsource their responsibilities (and job).

[flagged]

Checking out how the platform works was two clicks away: home -> give me a server. I don't know of any other SaaS which gives you a VM with one click without any registration but we do it. In any case thanks for the feedback, I've put a button on this /advent page for clarity, cheers

Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff? (economist.com)

There is still half an hour until the tank, plenty of time to sell..

No, because the only thing keeping the fed from lowering interest rates and juicing real estate and everything else is a strong labor market.

I think there's something quite interesting (well to me anyway) where if you go by the internet, there is this bloodbath (slight exaggeration perhaps but feels like that) in jobs out in the US, UK, Aus and major European countries (the volume of anecdotes & complaints would suggest a significant downturn in employment) but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along. Not great guns but still ok. The interesting thing is how much is internet chatter a leading signal for this thing now than in previous cycles? Outside of the unique circumstances of covid, we've never had, to my knowledge, a notable downturn when social media, and all the chatter it generates, has been so prominent or mass engaged. How much of it is just internet noise vs canary in the coal mine stuff. Who knows? But curious to find out in coming months/year

Jobless are probably a vocal minority. Nothing paints a picture of recession in reality right now.

I believe you’re in the minority here. Perhaps your experience is different because of your skill set or the market you’re in. Anyone that I know personally who got laid off (in tech) took at least 6 months to find a job. I don’t know about anyone else but that to me is pretty brutal. More so as the people getting laid off are mid career, some with kids. Edit: Add to the above that companies like Walmart are seeing an uptick in high wage earners becoming their customers, and McDonalds seeing a shrinking population of low-wage customers. It’s easy to infer the rest from there. People who used to do well are cutting expenses and those who were already struggling are..I seriously don’t know what they’re doing. Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs. Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-16/mcdonalds-is-losing-its-low-income-customers

McDonald’s is expensive. Much cheaper to cook yourself.

Reality is not particularly rosy for new graduates AFAIK. If I lose my job, I wouldn't be super surprised that I might never get a similar job for the rest of my life -- it is not that I do not have the skills, but 1) the amount of time for a laid off SDE to get a new job could reach to years, not months, so I need to do something else to earn $$$, and 2) why are companies going to hire me, who have gap years and are older, but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary? And yes I believe this time it's going to be different. I believe that if the economy dumps again, we are really going to see more hot wars. It is different from 2001, and different from 2008. We have kicked the can for almost 20 years and I kudos the policy makers who managed to achieve this.

I saw this coming way before AI became a thing around 2016 when I was 42. Software development was becoming a commodity where there were plenty of “good enough” developers where no matter what, it was going to be saturated. If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network. At 51, of my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life. Anecdotally, I found software development adjacent roles quickly when I was looking both last year and the year before.

Software developer salaries went up significantly after 2016 and it was a super hot market for developers in 2020. So whatever you saw wasn’t a good indicator.

>Reality is not particularly rosy for new graduates AFAIK I looked at the statistics[1], and while you could argue new graduates have seen worse (recent grad unemployment is actually lower than much of the 2010s), you can also see that in contrast to previous periods where new grad unemployment is lower than all worker unemployment, this time around new grad unemployment is actually slightly higher. However if you look at the chart this wasn't a post pandemic phenomena. The gap has been closing since the back half of the 2010s, and doesn't show much of a spike after the release of chatgpt, so "AI" isn't a good explanation either. [1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market

There's a recent podcast that talked about this if you have 15 minutes to watch a segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYRCYdxVMaM TL;DR Gen Z is "slightly better off" in pure financial status compared to older generations , even with inflation adjusted. But the distribution on what got cheaper overtime and what got more expensive is causing the true strain among Gen Z. It also helps to explain a bit of a generation clash when you see how older generations can chastise the younger ones over what were "luxuriies" when they were that age. The entire market is flipped.

I have heard that story every few years for the last 30. I know when it is your personal situation things are hard, but your story is nothing new and people recover. Some get back into whatever their degree was, others start a new career and never do. this will happen again.

>and people recover. So you read nothing about how graduates during 2008 pretty much had forever stunted careers? They aren't put on the streets, but it's clear some very long term damage is being done to people simply as a matter of bad luck.

I was going to say this. Money comes, money goes, that’s life. Ideally you’re smart enough to save and invest to weather these storms but for those (like myself) that are still working hard post 40, we know it’s all part of the game. I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.

You telling someone with 50k in debt, turning in 1000's or job apps struggling to find a job they studied 4+ years for and not being able to even pay rent to "just save"... is exactly how we got into this situation to begin with.

We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers. I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.

The comparison to greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense. Corps pay a lot for developers right now because they get more value out of them than they cost. As long as that remains true, devs will be fine.

We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.

New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management. If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI. None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat. Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower. The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment. Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away. Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out. We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(

> I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. "This time it's different." 20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming. Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems. > We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc. We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.

Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood. Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).

A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move. If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit. Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc. Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V. Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies. Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.

This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by a) getting really good at clarifying requirements b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot. This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.

>Junior engineers can fight back against this by Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue. >This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%. And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.

Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now. We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.

I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development. I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc. Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination. Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder. > We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products. It seems to be working… https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2EZqQ-p1XkybYp21llKCfLsME/edit?usp=drivesdk

I mean, :raises_hand:. The issue is that certain types of engineering busywork (i.e. simple frontend/CRUD) are basically just ... automated away by LLMs. Many shops have piles of backlog tickets that we would, previously, hand to a new grad, with the understanding that it might take an hour or two to explain the plan each time, and then the junior engineer might take a few days to knock out what an experienced engineer could knock out in a day or so. All in all, not a bad trade. However, at this point: A) Cursor can do these kind of tasks faster and better than entry-level engineers. So... B) ... Entry-level engineers just feed the work to Cursor... C) ... but this introduces a game of telephone at which point the engineer-in-the-middle can easily make the result worse, instead of better. Again, an enterprising trainee can come up with a variety of ways to add value beyond shoveling work into Cursor, but that takes an above-average amount of talent and initiative. And so: AI claims a few jobs.

Tech is more affected than the rest which is over-represented in discussions. Also people who can’t find a job tend to be more vocal than the rest.

Based on the numbers we had before the BLS clammed up, all sectors except healthcare is going down. But yes, tech is one of the bigger slumps. If your job isn't to help take care of the aging boomer population, you're not having a good time. I work in games and have the occasional slump. But this time is much different. all staffind agencies for temp work in my city pretty much said there's nothing out there. my local area is pretty much a bunch of fractional janitorial roles and that's it.

Since its a Sunday night during a holiday weekend without any big breaking news, I would suspect that's probably just a bunch of people that had automated sales at $90k, or something similar.

A common pattern is: people (I supposed I mean: investors) are somewhat worried that markets are over valued. They ponder, think, research, binge-watch Prof G videos... Then they travel to have Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of in-laws. Market gets discussed over cigars. If they get a confirmation signal from the brother in law attorney or sister in law dentist that they are worried too...then after mulling it over on the flight back to Denver...the market dumps on Monday.

Love that HODL optimism. Looking at the longer charts there seems to be support around $80k so maybe. This could just be holiday shopping. The timing of economics with this though has me worried the support will falter causing a sell off and Monday’s bell will be a bloodbath.

> This could just be holiday shopping. People liquidated $56B in bitcoin for Christmas presents?

> Since 1953 10 out of 11 recessions happened when republicans held power I used to think this was because the party that represents the ruling class didn't know what they were doing. Now I think these economic collapses and ensuing fire sales are not accidents, they know exactly what they're doing.

Recession are a natural part of the business cycle though. Like it's good to have them, Democrats not allowing a recession to occur just makes the next bubble even bigger. And all kinds of inefficient businesses are allow to zombify when the resources could be used elsewhere. Now, the bigger problem is that you're supposed to raise taxes during the boom so that you can run deficits during the recession to recover quickly. Unfortunately we run deficits during the boom so that the crash is even bigger as well ...

yep. Trump added tariffs on physical goods, but there are no taxes on service imports.

Wait until you hear what he did to h1b program!

Section 174's 15 years amortization rule on foreign R&D is a kind of an indirect tax.

I became a USPS mail carrier instead. Certainly less pay but I love being outside and walking. And no Jira, changing the color of that button, or steeping myself in Frank’s eldritch horror code.

Yeah but isn't the pay shit? like making 1/3th is not a win in my books.

> And no Jira Not officially, but once you remove the skills required for the tasks, it's not all that different.

>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold. >I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".

I don't think that's an appropriate conclusion to draw from a single point of data.

Construction, trades, and basically physical-world stuff that AI cannot do are still hiring.

People will roll out the trades whenever employment is mentioned, but do you have tradies in your family? Do you have friends who are tradies? It's not easy to get in, it takes a long time to make journeyman, and work can have seriously spotty periods no matter who you are. Fact of the matter is, it's not really an alternative to anything except other types of bluecollar work.

> I've never experienced a slow down You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?

Nope. Things still break and need repaired no matter how the housing market is.

Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992. Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.” The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line. Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut. Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.

> Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones. It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.

Ftfa (the part I could read) “ growth is buoyed by an exuberant stockmarket and artificial-intelligence investment, while ordinary Americans languish” Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday. If Americans are languishing then shouldn’t holiday spending be down?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipstick_effect

That's not a plan, it's a suicide note with extra steps.

> That's not a plan, it's a suicide note with extra steps. Being an aging human is a suicide note. The extra steps are the entire point of retirement.

Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia (404media.co)

The need to hate on Grokipedia is weird to me. It’s another site on the web. It’s an experiment with LLMs. Who cares? It can be filled with a bunch of nonsense, whatever. The internet is like that. Maybe it’ll actually become something useful. Or it’ll inspire something useful. Regardless, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so these articles just give the project airtime. Even commenters here mention they haven’t heard of it until now.

Imagine the shittiest person you know creating an encyclopedia filled with slop tailored to his biases and "insights", and then the tech community somehow, unfathomably, looking at this turd of a product as an actual authoritative source or "fun experiment". The roots of this tree are poisoned.

Wow. This is so biased. And it's just the first month. > Joe Biden > These outcomes, alongside visible signs of cognitive impairment that prompted his July 2024 decision to forgo reelection, defined a presidency criticized for prioritizing progressive spending over fiscal and security prudence. https://grokipedia.com/page/Joe_Biden > Donald Trump > His first term featured economic policies such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and individual rates for many brackets, contributing to pre-pandemic unemployment lows of 3.5% and stock market gains exceeding 50% on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. https://grokipedia.com/page/Donald_Trump I bet the people contributing to Wikipedia did not consent to this. I certainly had no idea my contributions would be used to bootstrap something like this. Like with the hyperscalers' rip off of Open Source, it turns out that the things you give away can be weaponized against you. I could have never imagined this outcome. Their free labor created something to use against you. Just like those Redis and Elasticsearch commits that now fund a trillion dollar conglomerate's takeover of American journalism and media.

You consented to CC-BY-SA 3.0 (or 2.0)

Nobody dreamed of CC-BY-SA being used like this.

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

Stereo Images of Giant Galaxies (bbc.com)

Will print these tomorrow on a nice inkjet at a size suitable for my antique stereoscope. You can pick up a pair of "stereoscope lenses" and have a few acrylic parts laser-cut to build your own [3]. These actually work well pressed against a computer screen (or an iPad). I designed the acrylic parts [2], built and tested it—included in my Github repo on Stereographer [1]. [1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer/ [2] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer/blob/main/Images/Stereoscope%20Parts.pdf [3] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Stereographer/blob/main/Images/diy_stereoscope.jpeg

On my Meta Quest I am positively begging for decent content worth viewing in 3d. Here we have a bookful of 3d astronomy. Can I not get something like this in VR? Why is VR languishing? How is it that paper and eye-crossing are still the leading technologies for displaying this 3d content?

SpaceEngine is available in VR, you literally can today.

A Love Letter to FreeBSD (tara.sh)

Other than a few niche areas like Netflix and Playstation or even MacOS as some like to often put fourth as examples of how great it is… yeah.

Or that niche app called Whatsapp

As much as I love FreeBSD, the release schedule is a real challenge in production: each point release is only supported for about three months. Since every release includes all ports and packages, you end up having to recertify your main application constantly. Compare this to RedHat: yes, a paid subscription is expensive, but RedHat backports security fixes into the original code, so open source package updates don’t break your application, and critical CVEs are still addressed. Microsoft, for all its faults, provides remarkable stability by supporting backward compatibility to a sometimes ridiculous extent. Is FreeBSD amazing, stable, and an I/O workhorse? Absolutely: just ask Netflix. But is it a good choice for general-purpose, application-focused (as opposed to infrastructure-focused) large deployments? Hm, no ?

each point release is only supported for about three months Where are you getting 3 months from? It's usually 9 months and occasionally 12 months. Also, major versions are supported for 4 years and unless you're messing with kernel APIs nothing should break. (Testing is always good! But going from 14.3 to 14.4 is not a matter of needing lots of extra development work.)

These rose tinted glasses are pretty strong. I found nothing but pain trying to run the BSDs on recent computers/setups. There is 'different' as in 'alternative/edgy', and then there is 'different' as in 'won't implement/yagni' which becomes highly subjective.

I've been running it on most of my personal laptops since around version 10. It's a lot like how Linux felt in the late 90s. Depends on your hardware and what you want to do. But it's solid. If you could handle Linux in the late 90s you can handle it.

I so wish that FreeBSD was GPL. I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that. But I don't like Linux. I use it daily, but I don't like it. I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.

I have seen this particular idea come up a lot lately. Personaly I think Intel's early investment in linux had a lot to do with it. They also sold a compiler and marketed to labs and such which bought chips. So linux compatibility meant a lot to decision makers. AMD the underdog went more in on Linux compat than NVIDIA. Which may have been a business decsion. I dunno, maybe the GPL effect was more a market share thing with developers than a copyleft thing. Nota Bene: I do love copyleft and license all my own projects AGPL

The Linux vs BSD fight happened before NVIDIA vs AMD was a thing.

> but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft No, the success Linux has had is because it ran on the machines people had at home, and was very easy to try out. An instructive example would be my own path into Linux: I started with DJGPP, but got annoyed because it couldn't multi-task (if you started a compilation within an IDE like Emacs, you had to wait until it finished before you could interact with the IDE again). So I wanted a real Unix, or something close enough to it. The best option I found was Slackware. Back then, it could install directly into the MS-DOS partition (within the C:\LINUX directory, through the magic of the UMSDOS filesystem), and boot directly from MS-DOS (through the LOADLIN bootloader). That is: like DJGPP, it could be treated like a normal MS-DOS program (with the only caveat being that you had to reboot to get back to MS-DOS). No need to dedicate a partition to it. No need to take over the MBR or bootloader. It even worked when the disk used Ontrack Disk Manager (for those too young to have heard of it, older BIOS didn't understand large disks, so newer HDDs came bundled with software like that to workaround the BIOS limitations; Linux transparently understood the special partition scheme used by Ontrack). It worked with all the hardware I had, and worked better than MS-DOS; after a while, I noticed I was spending all my time booted into Linux, and only then I dedicated a whole partition to it (and later, the whole disk). Of course, since by then I had already gotten used to Linux, I stayed in the Linux world. What I've read later (somewhere in a couple of HN comments) was that, beyond not having all these cool tricks (UMSDOS, LOADLIN, support for Ontrack partitions), FreeBSD was also picky with its hardware choices. I'm not sure that the hardware I had would have been fully supported, and even if it were, I'd have to dedicate a whole disk (or, at least, a whole partition) to it, and it would also take over the boot process (in a way which probably would be incompatible with Ontrack).

I don’t disagree with what you say. But why did Linux work on all that hardware? I assert that if you trace that line of thinking to its conclusion, the answer is the GPL. Many people and organizations adapted BSD to run on their hardware, but they had no obligation to upstream those drivers. Linux mandated upstreaming (if you wanted to distribute drivers to users).