A basic Google search leads me to this article [0].
> On March 27, 2026, Start9 CEO Matt Hill hosted a private unveiling of StartOS 0.4.0, the next major version of the operating system that powers the Start9 Server One. During that same session, Hill also gave viewers a first look at StartWrt, the router’s dedicated operating system. StartWrt is Start9’s fork of OpenWrt with a modern GUI that reimagines the router experience from first principles. The interface is sleek, modern, and a clear departure from the technical admin panels that define most open source router software today.
> Where OpenWrt’s default LuCI interface is functional but technical, StartWrt presented a clean, modern interface designed for users who have never configured a VLAN or written a firewall rule.
When you consider the circumstances a fork is the only thing here that makes sense. You can't just open a pull request to OpenWRT where you are like "Here is our purpose built simplified GUI we designed for our router, please merge."
> When you consider the circumstances a fork is the only thing here that makes sense.
No, because a fork and an overlay are not the same thing. Getting your custom frontend has nothing to do with sharing the maintenance burden on all the grit behind it.
If they maintain only an overlay, what is the burden? Or you mean freeloading by pushing the burden of maintenance to openwrt project? They also don't suffer all the grit of pull request begging.
This really depends on what exactly they're using the word "fork" for here.
All I'm saying is that a full-on fork is not the right thing to do when all you're trying to do is have your own frontend, or modify a small number of packages.
It's not really a binary concept either. It's a scale from "immediate & transparent overlay" (not keeping anything from OpenWrt vendored and just piling on top) all the way to "hard fork" (one-time hard break from source) with lots of steps inbetween.
Also, wtf is "pull request begging"? If you can't get pull requests merged, that normally means the target project doesn't have enough maintainers. In turn, that means you should be going around reviewing pull requests on your own initiative. You don't need anyone's permission to make comments on other people's pull requests (at least not in general.) Just do it. I mean, yeah, some projects have very high or maybe even obnoxious requirements, but in my experience that's very rare and happens primarily with "enterprise" / "corporate" things. Unless proven otherwise, I'll assume most FOSS projects are at least trying to make things work collectively. OpenWrt certainly does.
> designed for users who have never configured a VLAN
And then your ISP's setup instructions tell you "configure VLAN 6 with PPPOE MTU 1500" (this is literally what my ISP requires).
I get that the average person has no clue what VLAN means, but if an ISP requires that clients configure VLAN 6 and a router doesn't expose that setting, the owner of that router is going to be very unhappy.
> designed for users who have never configured a VLAN or written a firewall rule.
I always get the impression that when things are designed this way, you can't configure a VLAN or write a firewall rule, and so far I've never been proven wrong. :/
I doubt this from Start9, but it does usually at least mean that figuring out how to do so manually means not just reading docs for the upstream packages, but also figuring out what changes they made to smooth over it all.
This has always been my reason to avoid StartOS for running a Bitcoin node. When you're dealing with contentious forks (like we are right now) it's helpful to be able to get as low level as you want without realizing that things have all been hidden from you.
That said it depends on exactly what you're doing. Their server having a jitsi server that just works is nothing to shake a stick at. Nor is Start Tunnel making the server accessible over the Internet without any port forwarding required to the casual user.
Honestly, I'm not buying this. This is an ultra niche market and they are trying to target customers outside the product niche with this fork.
If I'm looking for a consumer friendly router, I'll go with an option that is cheap and capable, I don't care about the OS being open source and if I cared about it being open source, I'd prefer it if they don't fork the software in a way that splits the community and where the fork is dependent on their commercial success to the point where I might be stuck with the hardware and no upstream support.
Terence Tao had a nice talk from the Future of Mathematics conference posted yesterday [0] that shapes a lot of my own feelings on this matter.
The short of it is he argues how first to correctness shouldn't be the only goal / isn't a great optimisation incentive. Presentation and digestibility of correct results is a missing 1/3 when you've finished generation and verification. I completely agree with him. You don't just need an AI generated proof of the Reimann Hypothesis. You would really like it to be intentional and structured for others to understand.
A really beautiful quote I learned of in the talk is this:
> "We are not trying to meet some abstract production quota of definitions, theorems, and proofs. The measure of our success is whether what we do enables people to understand and think more clearly and effectively about math." - William Thurston
Ya, I think this totally makes sense. Just to be clear though, I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing. A proof of the Riemann hypothesis that’s obtuse and basically unreadable is a great step on the path to a proof that is enlightening and clear. If ai provides correct-but-annoying results, I’m confident humans can still learn benefit from that marginal result.
The only thing that can actually introduce competition in RAM is some form of government backing around national security concerns. China has been doing this for some time though so there will probably be major Chinese supply coming in the medium term.
In Canada all news gets some amount of government grants and funding. Plus there are various tax programs and breaks related to news to help support them.
People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all.
In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly.
I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this.
For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.
Ironically the few people not scamming you for cache reads are Deepseek.
Everyone else charges a ridiculous amount but Deepseeks API is $0.003625 / M tok.
I'm surprised no one talks about this because of how significant it is. GPT 5.5 for example costs a ridiculous $0.50 / M tok cached. It's literally almost 140 times cheaper which matters a lot for tool calls.
doesn't matter when subscriptions get cache reads for free, it is only really worth it if it's x340 cheaper otherwise I'd be paying $120 a day, 90% of the cost being cache reads for any top level opensource model.
The details are secret. It very well could be wasted GPU time but Anthropic could have made a killer offering as well.
I'm just speculating, but a particularly killer offering Elon wouldnt be able to refuse would be if Anthropic agreed to give them some training data / technology.
> American Efficient then used that sales data to calculate the energy savings from the anticipated use of the lighting and appliances, entering those projected savings into “capacity auctions.”
> At capacity auctions, grid operators pay for the ability of traditional power suppliers and utilities— as well as energy-efficiency aggregators like American Efficient—to produce power when needed.
The home depot example shows it more succinctly. How does American Efficient sending a small check to home depot mean that they get to bid for having produced capacity?
If I squint I can almost imagine the goal of this setup. If you want people to use less power you could definitely promote energy efficient appliances and lighting via market forces.
But doing so at capacity auctions seems ridiculous. If your power company wants it then they should cut checks directly to the consumer as a discount/subsidy on energy efficient appliances.
10M tokens of raw execution traces to grep through is slop. The tasks are fizzbuzz, palindrome, list reversal, and sum-even. The palindrome challenge is literaly this:
> Is the word "racecar" a palindrome? Answer with exactly one lowercase word: "yes" or "no". Print only the answer.
> On March 27, 2026, Start9 CEO Matt Hill hosted a private unveiling of StartOS 0.4.0, the next major version of the operating system that powers the Start9 Server One. During that same session, Hill also gave viewers a first look at StartWrt, the router’s dedicated operating system. StartWrt is Start9’s fork of OpenWrt with a modern GUI that reimagines the router experience from first principles. The interface is sleek, modern, and a clear departure from the technical admin panels that define most open source router software today.
> Where OpenWrt’s default LuCI interface is functional but technical, StartWrt presented a clean, modern interface designed for users who have never configured a VLAN or written a firewall rule.
When you consider the circumstances a fork is the only thing here that makes sense. You can't just open a pull request to OpenWRT where you are like "Here is our purpose built simplified GUI we designed for our router, please merge."
[0] https://www.solosatoshi.com/start9-announces-fully-open-sour...
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