Since this is commercial and has been rolling along for a few years now I infer that there are still customers out there, who in some incredible fashion, cannot get off of OS/2. And, based on what features ArcaOS concentrates on, they must be stuck on 32bit with pretty old, yet hard to emulate well, services: SCSI for example.
I envisage a 1996-era Gateway PC in the bowels of Madison Square Garden controlling the light show for Aerosmith or something. But then my mind goes, really? There's no path to Windows, or Linux, after 30 years?
I can understand people staying on z/OS, or even AS/400, but OS/2?
Lost the source code to your elevator control app? Stuck on OS/2. Guy who wrote it is dead, never used source control, you don’t use it in new installations but those old elevators still have to run and the PC hardware has long died and is irreplaceable? Then you have no choice but call ArcaOS.
I’ve seen more than one place where that scenario or something similar has occurred.
Is this really surprising? London picks up all the advantages of the UK (legal system is sound, eg in contract law, native speakers of English, the lingua franca of business, strong university tradition) and adds in its special sauce: access to the City, global-tier culture, excellent public transport (I know we moan about it, but it really is excellent), and a timezone location that easily serves the US and Asia markets.
The awkwardness for founders in London is that when they want to IPO, London doesnt have nearly as deep a pool of capital as the US, so they are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table.
US founders have essentially outsourced risk to London.
> What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.
Maybe the UK has been run by blithering idiots but the business environment and regulations are still among the most attractive in Europe... not sure what that says about the other European countries.
In Germany you need 25k$ and 6-12 months to establish the equivalent of an LLC. This is because Germany hates limited liability. It would prefer you to operate as a sole trader with unlimited liability, and then not do things that generate liability. Needless to say, this is scary for programmers.
Indeed, I can't speak for how other European countries work but if the Labour/Conservative/Whitehall nomenklatura is producing better results than your political system, something is very very wrong
Startups might thrive there, but business investment in England (particularly in mature businesses) has not exactly been lively ever since Brexit. I can't recall the last time I heard someone talking favorably about investing in England, or at all, really.
> Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people
Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places.
The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Target cities become “culturally diverse” due to the arrival of migrant labor. The migrant labor itself is not seeking this diversity out for its own sake. New migrants have their movements facilitated by networks of already-landed migrants, who provide knowledge of the immigration process, employment opportunities, and material assistance to their coethnics.
These people are not moving to London because they can find people like themselves there (there are already plenty in their country of origin), nor are they moving to London because they want to experience other cultures (this was a form of conspicuous consumption that went out of fashion years ago). At best you could say they hope that the relative ethnic heterogeneity will distract from their own foreignness, but that still doesn’t amount to being drawn to diversity.
> This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA
The USA was never a colony of britain. The american colonies were.
> The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity
Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
What becomes a "tech capital" is primarily a political decision. If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
> The USA was never a colony of britain. The american colonies were.
This is inane.
> Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
This doesn’t logically follow, but even if it did, Tokyo is an attractive destination for immigrants, even with the Japanese being notoriously xenophobic. Japan is homogenous and economically prosperous, the difference is that it restricts migrants from entering. Singapore has a huge population of day laborers that live in Malaysia and commute to Singapore. The majority of Dubai’s population is comprised of foreign laborers.
> If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
And how do those decisions get made in the absence of a cohesive society capable of making them?
To add on this, ethnic heterogeneity (and ethnic enclaves) is one of the shallowest forms of diversity. If you examine the diversity regarding district characteristics and architecture, shopping options, subcultures, etc, many homogenous cities like Tokyo or Hong Kong are far greater and accommodating than London in diversity.
And I would say that one reason for that is the elements I mention is something an individual can take seriously and integrate into their own world, while enclaves stay perpetually from the vantage of exoticism rather than integration.
Is it really coming down? Only in London, UK, Europe, or more or less globally? Where are you getting this from?
I am not sure everything else is reasonable if groceries alone have been going up by as much as 100% throughout the world, heh. Maybe on an SWE salary it is reasonable, sure.
I was going to reply to grandparent that only flat prices are coming down because of rising service charge costs, and being hard to mortgage because of cladding issues.
But after some research it is indeed true that house prices are, to a lesser extent, also going down, at least in real terms, if not nominal.
In multiple UK regions, but the most expensive ones and London the most.
Its coming down but from a very high level in London.
I do not know about other countries, but movements do tend to be wide spread (at least across similar economies). We are seeing higher interest rates in a lot of countries and they are the main determinant of the multiple of income properties sell at.
Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?
Across most of the world, people who do not share a common native language will speak English to each other. London is no different.
What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.
I was going to add "coming into a pub in Wales and complaining about the occupants switching to Welsh", but that is a slightly different scenario. Partly because Welsh is much rarer.
No. I think it's easy to underestimate what an incredible superpower native English fluency is, and the lengths that immigrants will go to ensure that their children are fluent in it. That alone stops monolingual enclaves persisting.
The net (and the UK has decades of experience in this, eg with the South Asian immigrants that arrived in the 1950s-1970s) is that while the first generation may only get to decent levels of English, their children are bilingual or monolingual in English, not monolingual in their ancestral tongue.
Occasionally you will get someone with a political axe to grind who visits an area with a lot of immigrants, doesnt hear a lot of English, and posits that there are ethnic monolingual enclaves where they cannot go. I think this is more likely to be a failure of understanding.
There are shops elsewhere in Europe with Arabic signs. You can go there and buy things. They're not outside of the ordinary statistical distribution of shops.
I don't think so. Like sure, if you're a Bangladeshi living in Tower Hamlets you could probably get away with a limited life speaking only Bengali, but you could say the same about Spanish in swathes of the US. Realistically, you need English.
I have done a lot of social work with Bangladeshi community. What many people don't know that the Bangladeshi wives who come as dependants speak better English than their husbands and sometimes as good as the natives.
I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?
I am not making any points. I have just heard this take a lot of times and I have not been around London for over 10 years. If there is a point, it is not mine.
As for its relevance: "native speakers on English", etc.
I don't know what >1M subscribers have got to do anything. It is the case that many YouTubers pushing a specific propaganda have >1M subscribers. YouTube may be a little better than Twitter or Facebook but if you land upon any propaganda, the algorithm will loop you in and keep supplying more and more propaganda videos. 1M subscribers or 1000 subscribers doesn't matter once you are stuck in the loop.
I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.
FWIW, people here illegally are already not eligible for Medicaid, [0] so it's hard to see why ICE having access to a roster of Medicaid enrollees would help them with their stated mission of enforcing removal orders.
Then again, we have ICE shooting American citizens in the streets, so I guess the law is whatever they decide it is, not least because our legislative branch is uninterested in laws.
> FWIW, people here illegally are already not eligible for Medicaid, [0] so it's hard to see why ICE having access to a roster of Medicaid enrollees would help them with their stated mission of enforcing removal orders.
Presumably, it's because a lot of them are getting Medicaid despite not being eligible to. Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
> Presumably, it's because a lot of them are getting Medicaid despite not being eligible to
How would this even work? You can’t just start billing things to Medicaid if you’re ineligible for it. That would be like you deciding to bill United Healthcare for something despite not being a customer. How is this hypothetical fraud supposed to work? What am I missing?
> Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
ICE isn’t auditing Medicaid. They’re trying to use records to find people to detain and deport which is an orthogonal dataset.
The only plausible explanation is that they’re using medical records as an additional source of data on people who live in houses that they’re raiding or looking at.
Which is insane. Imagine police rolling up to your front door on suspicion of something and loading up a system which has your medical records.
> Presumably, it's because a lot of them are getting Medicaid despite not being eligible to
Why are you presuming this? There is no evidence this is happening in any widespread fashion.
> Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
If it is being honest about it's intention, yes. I think we have seen an absolute mountain of evidence that this administration does "audits" as massive data collection waves to suit any and every purpose they want, though.
If this was about fixing things being done incorrectly, DHHS should be doing the audit, not DHS. Perhaps the latter doesn't understand the difference between the two, though, not noticing they're missing an H in their abbreviation.
> There is no evidence this is happening in any widespread fashion.
Isn't the point of this data so that they can uncover exactly that? It'd be silly to say you're not allowed to look for evidence of anything unless you already have evidence of it. Also, the qualifier "in any widespread fashion" is weasel words. It makes me think you already know it is happening, and the only remaining question is to what scale.
How exactly would non-citizens, who do not have social security numbers or other valid identifying documents, receive medicaid? It's difficult enough for qualified people to get it. It would seem fairly difficult to pass the registration process without having a valid SSN. Furthermore, if someone was able to fraudulently sign up - say by using a stolen identity, then wouldn't the data in the system look valid and therefore not really show up on an audit?
And as the GP pointed out, it makes no sense to put the president's paramilitary agency¹ in charge of such an audit, rather than qualified auditors, perhaps from the HHS² OIG³.
The FBI was investigating the daycare fraud in February 2025. Unfortunately, some of the investigators got moved off this investigation to do anti-immigration work instead, reported by NYT last week.
if there are massive frauds, DOGE should've revealed that. The fact that people keep spewing no investigation while there should be several times shows how ignorant people is.
Except DOGE had nothing to do with removing corruption and waste. It was about removing anyone opposed to Trump, removing people who might be pro LGBTQ, and removing barriers to Trump's administration and his friends committing massive fraud
It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ...
> a random YouTuber started knocking on quality learing center doors
"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."
Oh no, that doesn't sound like a "massive Somali fraud", does it?
(Also he's not "a random YouTuber" - he's a former prankster turned full MAGA right-wing agitator[1] and that should tell you all you need to know about his credentials and honesty.)
> It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ..
Those trials are for a completely separate fraud!
In spite of some overlap between the supposed food distribution sites for Feeding Our Future and the recent childcare center fraud, they're actually not the same fraud, uh, "event".
"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."
There is no fraud there which means the only -actual- fraud people can be complaining about re: Somalis in Minnesota must be the Feeding Our Future one.
Unless they're not complaining about that and are just making stuff up, obvs.
That is false. There has been lots of prosecution of fraud in Minnesota including by Somalis. When a random YouTuber started accusing places without much evidence this blew up but didn't do anything to help actual investigations of corruptions. It did help Trump push his racist agenda and claim we need to deport Somalis because of actions of a handful of individuals. Which is nonsense not only when one compares it to the massive corruption from the Trump administration but when one realizes most Somalis Americans already have citizenship and a good deal are born in the US
Are you being sincere with this comment? I’m in disbelief you could post this with good faith, but this forum requires me to respond to you with the assumption that you’re posting in good faith.
First of all, the investigation for the fraud had already wrapped up years ago, with many charged. You’re falling for the propaganda that this was ongoing and swept under the rug, as pretense that apparently an occupying force is necessary because Somalians are fraudulent criminals (racist AF), despite the incredible amount of fraud (including Medicare fraud!) within the ruling party at the moment.
Second of all, the ringleader was a white woman who was convicted for this fraud, presumably preying on desperate immigrants, maybe even convincing them that “fraud was the American way”, I mean look at the president - how could fraud not be the American way?
Third of all, that YouTuber has a less than room temperature IQ, and was going around to closed daycares to prove that… they weren’t open? The rightwing grift is so powerful and so lucrative that this absolute imbecile can make it big by giving other imbeciles a justification for their deep-seated racism. Honestly, go listen to interviews with this guy. It’s astounding that anyone trusts any content he puts out, because that’s just what it is - content, not investigative journalism.
Anyway, I guess since some Somalians were involved in fraud we get to occupy cities, tearing anyone brown with an accent away from their family, maybe allowing them to prove citizenship (maybe not), and begin shooting anyone who adds friction to that process (civil disobedience)? That’s the implication of your comment.
Tell me when we can start prosecuting fraud when it’s attached to an (R), by the way.
What amazes me about MAGA is that some claim to like Star Trek.
This is from "Way of the Warrior", when the dominion had managed to con the Klingons into invading Cardassia.
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We have orders to search all vessels attempting to leave Bajoran space.
KIRA: Search them for what?
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: For shape-shifters. Each ship will be scanned, its cargo searched, and its crewmembers and passengers subjected to genetic testing.
SISKO: On whose authority?
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: On the authority of Gowron and the Klingon High Council.
KIRA: The Klingon High Council has no jurisdiction over ships in Bajoran space.
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.
SISKO: Do you have any evidence that there are changelings aboard this particular ship?
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?
KIRA: Commander, Bajoran law strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels in our territory.
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: I have my orders.
Compared to
ICE: We have orders to search all people attempting to live in America
Search them for what?
ICE: For illegal immigrants. Each center will be scanned, it's users searched, and their finances and medical history subjected to AI pattern recognition
On whose authority?
ICE: On the authority of Trump and the Federal Government
Trump has no jurisdiction over people in Minnesota
ICE: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.
Do you have any evidence that there are illegal immigrants in this particular learning center?
ICE: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?
The Constitution strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels
ICE: I have my orders.
*Technically this point in the episode it was after the Dominion/Russia interference with the high placed Dominion/Russian asset, but before the Klingons/America invaded Cardassia/Greenland.
bear in mind that ICE are forcibly deporting people in the process of applying for green cards whose lawyers have assured them that a lapsed VISA isn't an issue (it never used to be) as they have married an American citizen and maybe even have children with them.
A robotics engineer from Germany was forcibly deported a few months back because ICE were waiting for him at the immigration office when he went to visit to further the application.
Literally would not matter if he were violent prior to being shot. By the time that they shot him, he was face down on the floor and disarmed. That’s illegal in basically any context. It’s an execution.
He opposed ICE by ... peacefully kneeling over, surrendering his arms, offering his head for execution, and going out with a quiet whimper.
It's likely a strong moral boost to ICE; I think he helped than more than hurt them. They're emboldened now that they know their opponents will just hand over their guns and die.
And yet we do nothing to punish the actual criminals, the employees who knowingly higher then abuse them. Why don't we deport Trump, Trump tower wouldn't even be around without polish workers who were here illegally
This is very elegant, but is treading some ground that for various reasons never got commercial traction.
- Cisco tried distributed BNG about ten years ago, their "cnBNG" running on their x86 UCS server line. See [0]
- A UK company called Metaswitch tried doing this with eBPF and some home-grown tech (VPP meets fd.io and special sauce) in about 2018. Interestingly they pivoted the tech to work on 5G where blazing fast user plane is essential [1]. They got bought by Microsoft, ground into glass, and wiped out five years later.
- There was a lot of talk in ~2020 about whether wireline (fiber) and wireless (5G cellular) infrastructures could converge, with the BNG becoming another node in the system, like an AGF, and authenticating users against a UDR. 5G was already very distributed and it made a lot of sense at least on market-techture slide decks.[2]
Looking back, the difficulty making this commercial was not splitting up the function, making it performant, or running it disagg on commodity hardware. The difficulty was finding a set of anchor customers who were experiencing such pain on their existing BNG that they would be prepared to jump ship from their big iron to something new knowing full well that the new system would only support 10% of what their old Lucent 7750s or Ericsson boxes could do.
Taking disagg as an example, it makes little sense unless your network is above a certain size. But if you run a big network, like DT or AT&T, say, then you will demand hundreds of features be present before you will look at an alternative. Does it work with my OSS. Does it support all the features of RFC XYZ and the special tweaks that only we have. Will it keep the three-letter agencies happy when they serve a warrant. Can it pass muster with my security people. Can the developer survive working with my procurement people long enough to make enough money to fund development.
No disruptive vendor --none-- has ever made it past this barrier into the network core, despite operators saying for years that they want to work with disruptors. That's why Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei reign supreme and telcos haven't innovated in decades.
In ossified companies like telcos there's also the issue that the limitations of the existing equipment are being worked around with people. Those people derive their salaries from it, their manager derives his salary + prestige from managing such a headcount, and so on.
While the top brass might indeed be interested and benefit from more automation and a network that mostly runs itself, it's a bad deal for effectively everyone else in the company, so any attempts in that direction will never end up anywhere.
That's why legacy companies have been talking about "digital transformation" for decades now, yet it never progresses past simply digitizing the paperwork (and often creating more of it due to reduced friction), because enough people derive their job from said paperwork to make actual digital transformation politically untenable and impossible to deliver due to constant sabotage.
I mean, you see this with MikroTik all the time. The recent L3HW-enabled devices (up to 400G now) are so good it's crazy, and European onshore manufacturing, too. However, it doesn't support a subset of legacy "Enterprise" features, even though there's always a way to do the same thing using different architecture to how ISP guys have been trained many years ago, so instead we hear all the time that it's inadequate.
5G is a breath of fresh air in the sense that a lot of new techniques and broadly-applicable architectures were introduced to ISP's. I'm telling you, they HATED it. They absolutely hate learning new thing and that may as well be the largest blocker for disruptive players in the market.
I love this you and the other guy conspiracy lol. Telco bas, Ericsson bad. Okay if your stuff is so good why is it not dominant? Ah yes its all a conspiracy.
"Hate learning new stuff" = This ISP, LTE, NR stuff is all fairly new lol
Not all ISP's are like that. MikroTik is used by many ISP's in Europe. Dominant? Not yet, but it's getting there! U.S. is not really popular these days, you know? Trust in the pesky, backdoored Cisco switches is at an all-time low, cost notwithstanding. This is pushing telcos to consider alternative architectures that do not require certain proprietary features pushed by the big-three switch and router manufacturers.
Black American English has "true dat", which before it was a 1990s catchphrase was also used to express both emphasis as well as resignation to a state of affairs, eg "I need to get a job!" "True dat"
- Japanese consumer goods were perceived as junk until the tipping point was reached, and then they were perceived as high-quality, easily equalling or surpassing Western goods. That took ~30 years (1950 to 1980, say). Older readers will recall the controversy over Akio Morita's (Morita-san being the founder of Sony) statements in the book "The Japan that can Say No" (edit: see [0]), which seems strangely prescient in the sense that it ignited a lot of (US) debate around dependence on foreign semiconductors.
- Then there was Taiwan, again, a 30 year cycle from about 1970 to 2000. Taiwan used to be known for cheap textiles, consumer dross, and suchlike. Not now...
My point is that the way to get better at products is to make them and make them and make them, and eventually an export-led country reaches a tipping point where the consumers flip over, and their perception changes.
Exactly, I grew up during the beginning if the Japanese auto boom in the US. My grandfather was one of the first people in his group to buy one of the Japanese cars when they became highly reliable and his friend heckled him about it for awhile. Until that is he wasn't constantly repairing the thing. It got much better gas mileage. Wasn't getting ate up by rust. And it ran well over 150k miles, when US cars typically fell apart before 100k miles.
Rinse and repeat for Korean cars. And now China are deep into their cycle too. They're already producing high quality, at half the price, and I've noticed that the quality narrative is changing.
Regardless of where they are perception wise, the long term lesson is clear - local manufacturers may ride the "quality" bandwagon for a while, but ultimately it's a losing strategy.
ICE cars, and manufacturers who don't gave an EV strategy are already inside their Kodak moment. It's fairly obvious that at some point "all" cars will be EV, just like "all" cameras are digital. Those who remain ICE only will fade into obscurity.
Unfortunately the politicians in the US right now are driving a narrative away from EVs (and Tesla has become semi-toxic). Which in turn affects local manufacturers planning near term sales. By the time the mood swings it may be hard to catch up.
Or maybe not. Maybe they come late to the party simply skipping a bunch of iterations, going straight to great, cheap, reliable. Time will tell I guess.
My last few cars have been Hyundai's. Unfortunately my driving habits don't allow full EV driving, but I did go with one of their (non-plugin) hybrids.
And almost all of my family has moved to Hyundai over time. The pure US car companies have been dumping out total crap for the longest time, it's an easy sale for almost anything else.
Some TV is already like this. I recall critics of Teletubbies complaining about the repeated statements and actions (Tinky-Winky says "Again! Again!"). Then I spent time in Asia and all their popular entertainment (eg Running Man) continually repeats the last 10 seconds of each action. It's crazy making to me, but it evidently is what the viewers like.
The "user" is only half of a human anyway, 50% is the max consciousness people spend on whatever Netflix they have running as background noise. That's the target audience Netflix is optimizing for: half-humans. Saves them lots of bandwidth, expenses for quality, and yes, it needs a solid amount of exposition[0] to work.
I envisage a 1996-era Gateway PC in the bowels of Madison Square Garden controlling the light show for Aerosmith or something. But then my mind goes, really? There's no path to Windows, or Linux, after 30 years?
I can understand people staying on z/OS, or even AS/400, but OS/2?
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