Letters by Burk #169: Ways Out

Hi friends,

Six posts since the last letter, three of them on the same day.

Most of them are about getting out of something, more or less: Windows, Visa and Mastercard, AI training. And halfway out of macOS, on my old iMac.

Turns out the headlines make that sound a lot easier than it is.

Here's my week.

Is Everyone Leaving Windows?

Windows under 60 percent, Linux over 10. I would like that. But the first number got corrected, and the Linux wave of summer 2026 was probably, in large part, AI bots browsing the web.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Entering the Scary World of AI Bots

A screenshot of a jealous AI bot calling its owner at 3 a.m. OpenAI's help center says your dot can't call you "at launch," so I looked at what these bots can do with your logins.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Can You Ditch Visa and Mastercard Today?

Part three of the series, with the smaller question: could I? Wero has been in my banking app since last year, and I have never used it. At home, kind of. Everywhere else, no.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic Back an AI Training Opt-Out

I asked for rent. What came is a line for robots.txt that tells these four not to train on your site, starting 2027, mostly.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

How to Install Linux on an Old Mac (2026)

I stopped updating my 2017 iMac a few years ago, but the hardware is still great. So in October, it got Ubuntu, right next to macOS. Claude Code did the terminal work, and the fixes for Wi-Fi, sound, and the 5K screen are all in there.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

Google's AI Mode Makes Less Money. So It Gets More Ads

Alphabet's stock had its worst day since 2004, and one of the reasons is a single sentence on the earnings call: AI Mode earns Google less per search. The fix came out the same day. More ads, though none announced for the EU.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

⚡ AI Bytes

Google told schools they can skip its AI tools. But Search counts as one of those tools, so saying no to AI means no Google Search for the students either. DuckDuckGo is already pitching itself to schools.

An adviser at the EU's top court says chatbots like Gemini can infringe publishers' rights when an answer reuses an article's wording so recognizably that nobody needs the original anymore. Training AI on protected work, he adds, is as a rule allowed. It's an opinion, not a ruling, and the ruling may not come before 2027.

And Uber says AI agents ordered four rides in the week of Halloween, out of about 320 million trips and orders across Uber and Uber Eats. The Verge writes last quarter instead of that week. Either way, four.

📎 From the Archive

Since this letter is about ways out anyway: Can We Escape Tech Monopolies, from July 2025. My short answer back then: Maybe. We'd still touch Big Tech somewhere, I wrote, but we can reduce our dependence.

Read it on Medium or on Substack.

💬 Quote of the week

Linus Torvalds, in a Usenet group in August 1991, about a little project of his:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

That became Linux. It now runs on my 2017 iMac and on my dad's 2012 MacBook Pro, and Steam's survey has it at almost 4 percent of gaming PCs. Not bad for a hobby.

That's #169. Back soon. ✌️

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