Last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner that investors are overexcited about AI models. "Someone" will lose a "phenomenal amount of money," he said, according to The Verge. The statement came as his company negotiates a secondary share sale at a $500 billion valuation—up from $300 billion just months earlier.

"Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes," Altman told the journalists, comparing the current market to the dot-com crash of the 1990s. Wired reported that he also predicted his company will spend "trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future" and that ChatGPT will soon serve "billions of people a day."

For context, Facebook serves about 3 billion monthly active users. Altman's projection would require ChatGPT to reach nearly half the world's population as daily users (not monthly, like Facebook), which is an extraordinarily optimistic outlook.

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The Arch Linux project is especially well-known in the Linux community for two things: its rolling-release model and the quality of the documentation in the ArchWiki. No matter which Linux distribution one uses, the odds are that eventually the ArchWiki's documentation will prove useful. The Debian project recognized this and has sought to improve its own documentation game by inviting ArchWiki maintainers Jakub Klinkovský and Vladimir Lavallade to DebConf25 in Brest, France, to speak about how Arch manages its wiki. The talk has already borne fruit with the launch of an effort to revamp the Debian wiki.

Klinkovský and Lavallade were introduced by Debian developer Thomas Lange, who said that he had the idea to invite the pair to DebConf. Klinkovský said that he had been a maintainer of the wiki since about 2014, and that he is also a package maintainer for Arch Linux. He added that he contributes to many other projects "wherever I can". For his part, Lavallade said that he has contributed to the wiki since 2021, but he had only recently joined the maintenance team: "I know just enough to be dangerous."

Lavallade said that the talk was a good opportunity to cross-pollinate with another distribution, and to do some self-reflection on how the wiki team operates. They would explain how the wiki is run using the SWOT analysis format, with a focus on the content and how the maintenance team keeps the quality of pages as high as it can. "SWOT", for those who have been fortunate enough not to have encountered the acronym through corporate meetings, is short for "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats". SWOT analysis is generally used for decision-making processes to help analyze the current state and identify what an organization needs to improve.

ArchWiki:About

The ArchWiki was established in 2004; the project originally used PhpWiki as its backend—but Klinkovský said that it was quickly migrated to MediaWiki, which is still in use today. The wiki maintenance and translation teams were established "about 2010". The maintenance team is responsible for the contribution guidelines, style conventions, organization, and anything else that contributors need to know.

Today, the wiki has more than 4,000 topic pages; it has close to 30,000 pages if one counts talk pages, redirects, and help pages. "We are still quite a small wiki compared to Wikipedia", Klinkovský said.

He displayed a slide, part of which is shown below, with graphs showing the number of edits and active users per month. The full set of slides is available online as well.

Since 2006, the wiki has had more than 840,000 edits by more than 86,000 editors; the project is averaging more than 2,000 edits by about 300 active contributors each month. Klinkovský noted that this "used to be quite a larger number".

Strengths

Lavallade had a short list of the "best user-facing qualities" of the ArchWiki, which are the project's strengths. The first was "comprehensive content and a very large coverage of various topics". He said this included not just how to run Arch Linux, but how to run important software on the distribution.

The next was having high-quality and up-to-date content. Given that Arch is a rolling-release distribution, he said, every page has to be updated to reflect the latest package provided with the distribution. That is only possible thanks to "a very involved community"; he noted that most of the edits on the ArchWiki were made by contributors outside the maintenance team.

All of that brought him to the last strength he wanted to discuss: its reach beyond the Arch community. He pulled up a slide that included a quote from Edward Snowden, which said:

Is it just me, or have search results become absolute garbage for basically every site? It's nearly impossible to discover useful information these days (outside the ArchWiki).

Contribution and content guidelines

The contribution guidelines and processes have a lot to do with the quality of the content on the wiki. Contributors, he said, have to follow three fundamental rules. The first is that they must use the edit summary to explain what has been done and why. The second rule is that contributors should not make complex edits all at once. As much as possible, Lavallade said, contributors should do "some kind of atomic editing" where each change is independent of the other ones. He did not go into specifics on this during the talk, but the guidelines have examples of best practices. The third rule is that major changes or rewrites should be announced on a topic's talk page to give others who are watching the topic a chance to weigh in.

The team also has three major content guidelines that Lavallade highlighted. One that is likely familiar to anyone contributing to technical documentation is the don't repeat yourself (DRY) principle. A topic should only exist in one place, rather than being repeated on multiple pages. He also said that the ArchWiki employed a "simple, but not stupid" approach to the documentation. This means that the documentation should be simple to read and maintain, but not offer too much hand-holding. Users also need to be willing to learn; they may need to read through more than one page to find the information they need to do something.

The final guideline is that everything is Arch-centric. Content on the site may be useful for users running different Linux distributions, and contributions are welcome that may apply to other distributions, but "something that will not work on Arch as-is is not something we will be hosting on our site". That, he said, allowed the maintenance team to be focused on the content Arch provides and helps to keep maintenance more manageable.

Maintenance

Speaking of maintenance, Klinkovský said, the project has tools and templates to help make life easier for contributors. A reviewer might apply an accuracy template, for instance, which will add it to a page that lists all content that has been flagged as possibly inaccurate. The templates are usually used and acted on by people, but the project also has bots that can add some templates (such as dead link) and even fix some problems.

The review process is an important part of maintenance, he said. Everyone can participate in review, not just the maintainers of the wiki. He explained that it was not possible for the maintenance team to review everything, so much of the review is done by people interested in specific topics who watch pages to see when changes were made. If people spot errors, they are empowered to fix them on their own, or to use the templates to flag them for others to address. Maintainers are there, he said, "to make some authoritative decisions when needed, and mediate disputes if they came up".

Klinkovský referred to watching and reviewing content on the wiki as "patrolling", and said there were some basic rules that should be followed, starting with "assume good faith". Most people do something because they think it is right; the maintainers rarely see outright vandalism on the wiki.

The second rule, he said, is "when in doubt, discuss changes with others before making a hasty decision". If a change must be reverted, then a reviewer should always explain why it was reverted. This gives the original contributor a chance to come back and fix the problem or address it in a different way. Lastly, Klinkovský said, they wanted to avoid edit wars: "the worst thing that can happen on a wiki is a few people just reverting their changes after each other".

Preventing edit wars and encouraging contributions was, Lavallade said, part of the broader topic of community management. The team tries to encourage contributors to not only make one change, but to learn the guidelines and keep contributing—and then help teach others the guidelines.

Arch has support forums, such as IRC, and when people ask for help there they are pointed to the wiki "because there is always the solution on the ArchWiki". In the rare event that the wiki does not have the solution, he said, "we gently point them to where the page with the content needs to be" and invite the user to add it even if it's not perfect the first time. That helps to reinforce the idea that the wiki is a collaborative work that everyone should feel welcome to add to.

Weaknesses

Lavallade said that the contribution model also illustrated one of ArchWiki's weaknesses: there is a lot to learn about contributing to the wiki, and newcomers can get tripped up. For example, he said that the DRY principle was difficult for new contributors. Or a newcomer might add a large chunk of content into a page that should be broken up into several pages.

The MediaWiki markup language is another hurdle for new contributors. He called the markup "antiquated", and acknowledged that the style conventions for the ArchWiki are not obvious either. It can take a lot of reading, cross-referencing, and back-and-forth discussions for a new contributor to make a content contribution correctly.

MediaWiki has a lot of strengths, Klinkovský said; it is battle-proven software, it is the de facto standard platform for wikis, and it has a nice API that can be used for integration with external applications such as bots. But MediaWiki is a weakness as well, he said. The platform is primarily developed for Wikipedia, and its developers are from Wikipedia. "Sometimes their decisions don't suit us", he said, and there was little way to make things exactly as the ArchWiki maintenance team might want.

The primary weakness, though, was that its markup language is "very weird and hard to understand both for humans and machines". In 2025, most people know and write Markdown daily, but MediaWiki markup is different. It is weird and fragile; changing a single token can completely break a page. It is also, he said, difficult to write a proper or robust parser for the language. This is particularly true because there is no formal specification of the language, just the reference implementation in the form of MediaWiki. That can change at any time: "so even if you had a perfect parser one day, it might not work the same or perfectly the next day".

Since ArchWiki is developed by volunteer contributors, its content is essentially driven by popularity; people generally only edit the content that they have an interest in. Klinkovský said that this was not a weakness, necessarily, but it was related to some weaknesses. For example, some pages were edited frequently while others were not touched for years due to lack of interest. To a reader, it is not obvious whether page content is stale or recently updated.

There is also no perfect way to ensure that content makes its way to the wiki. He noted that people might solve their problem in a discussion on Arch's forums, but that the solution might never end up on the wiki.

Opportunities and threats

Klinkovský said that they had also identified several areas of opportunity—such as community involvement and support tools for editors—where the ArchWiki's work could be improved.

Lavallade said that one example of community involvement would be to work with derivatives from Arch Linux, such as SteamOS or Arch ports to CPU architectures other than x86-64. Currently, Arch is only supported on x86-64, he noted, but the project has passed an RFC to expand the number of architectures that would be supported.

Right now, the project has two tools for editors to use to make their work a bit easier: wiki-scripts and Wiki Monkey. Klinkovský explained that wiki-scripts was a collection of Python scripts used to automate common actions, such as checking if links actually work. Wiki Monkey is an interactive JavaScript tool that runs in the web browser, he said, and can help contributors improve content. For example, it has plugins to expand contractions, fix headers, convert HTML <code> tags into proper MediaWiki markup, and more.

There is much more that could be added or improved, he said, like linting software for grammar issues. The team might also consider incorporating machine learning or AI techniques into the editor workflow, "but this needs to be done carefully so we don't cause more trouble than we have right now". The trouble the team has with AI right now will probably sound familiar to anyone running an open-source project today; specifically, AI-generated content that is not up to par and scraper bots.

People have already tried contributing to ArchWiki using AI, but Klinkovský pointed out that "current models are obviously not trained on our style guidelines, because the content does not fit". Using AI for problem solving also prevents people from fully understanding a solution or how things work. That may be a problem for the whole of society, he said, not just ArchWiki.

The scraper bot problem is a more immediate concern, in that the project had to put the wiki behind Anubis in the early part of the year for about two months. Currently they do not need to use it, Klinkovský said, but they have it on standby if the bots come back. "So this is still a threat and we cannot consider it solved."

Another, non-technical, threat that the project faces is burnout. Lavallade said that contributor burnout is a real problem, and that people who have stayed a long while "usually start with a good, strong string of changes, but they end up tapering their amount of contributions". Everyone, he said, ends up running out of steam at some point. Because of that, there is a need to keep bringing in new contributors to replace people who have moved on.

Questions

One member of the audience wanted to know if there was a dedicated chat room for the wiki to discuss changes coming in. Lavallade said that there is an #archlinux-wiki room on Libera.Chat, and anyone is welcome there. However, the team frequently redirects conversations about changes to the talk pages on the wiki to ensure that everyone interested in a topic can discuss the change.

Steve McIntyre had two questions. He was curious about how many maintainers the ArchWiki had and what kind of hardware or setup was on the backend of the wiki "is this like, one virtual machine, or a cluster?" Klinkovský said that there were about 30 to 50 maintainers at the moment. As far as the setup, he said he was not on Arch's DevOps team and didn't know all the details, but he did know it was just one virtual machine "in the cloud".

Another person wanted to know if the team would choose MediaWiki again if they were building the wiki today. Klinkovský did not quite answer directly, but he said that if a project does not like the markup language used by MediaWiki then it should look to a solution that uses Markdown. But, if a project needs all of the other features MediaWiki has, "like plugins or the API for writing bots and so on", then MediaWiki is the best from all of the wiki software available.

One audience member pointed out that the chart seemed to show a spike in activity beginning with COVID and a steady decline since. They asked if the team had noticed that, and what they were doing about it. Klinkovský said that they had not looked at that problem as a whole team, or discussed what they could do about it. He said that if Arch added new architectures or accepted contributions from Arch-derivative distributions, it might reverse the trend.

Lange closed the session by saying that he thought it was funny that the presenters had said they wanted ArchWiki to be Arch-centric: "I think you failed, because a lot of other people are reading your really great, big wiki".

Debian embraces MediaWiki

The session seems to have been a success in that it has helped to inspire the Debian project to revamp its own wiki. Immediately after the ArchWiki presentation, there was a Debian wiki BoF where it was decided to use MediaWiki. Debian currently uses the MoinMoin 1.9 branch, which depends on Python 2.7.

Since DebConf25, members of the wiki team have worked with the Debian's system administrators team to put up wiki2025.debian.org to eventually replace the current wiki. They have also created a new debian-wiki mailing list and decided to change the content licensing policy for material contributed to the wiki. Changes submitted to the wiki after July 24 are now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license unless otherwise noted.

If Debian can sustain the activity that has gone into the wiki revamp since DebConf25, its wiki might give the ArchWiki project a run for its money. In that case, given that ArchWiki has proven such a good resource for Linux users regardless of distribution, everybody will win.

[Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for funding my travel to Brest for DebConf25.]

We have the first teaser for the second season of Netflix's live-action series adaptation of One Piece, subtitled Into the Grand Line. The streaming platform also released some first-look images and announced that the series has been renewed for a third season.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the original One Piece manga debuted in 1997, following the adventures of one Monkey D. Luffy, who heads a motley crew called the Straw Hat Pirates. There's swordsman Roronoa Zoro, thief and navigator Nami, sniper and compulsive liar Usopp, and a cook named Sanji. They're searching for the legendary One Piece, a mythical treasure that would make anyone who possesses it King of the Pirates. Monkey wants to be the Pirate King, but so do a host of other pirates with their own ships and crews.

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We all know how to find our favorite shows and blockbuster films on mainstream streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+. But even as streaming has opened the door to millions of hours of on-demand entertainment, it can still feel like there’s nothing fresh or exciting to watch anymore.

If you agree, it’s time to check out some of the more niche streaming services available, where you can find remarkable content unlikely to be available elsewhere.

This article breaks down the best streaming services you likely aren’t watching. From cinematic masterpieces to guilty pleasures, these services offer refreshing takes on streaming that make online content bingeing feel new again.

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The US economy is bending — but not yet breaking — beneath the weight of President Donald Trump’s nationalist agenda.

That is the story told by an avalanche of economic data released last week. 

According to those new figures, employers are pulling back on hiring to a dramatic (and unexpected) degree, economic growth is slowing, and consumer prices are rising. And there are strong indications that Trump’s trade and immigration policies are driving all of these trends. 

While last week’s data provides little sign of an imminent recession or inflationary crisis, protectionism is still imposing a heavy toll on US households and businesses. And if hiring continues to slow — while firms’ input costs persistently rise — there is some risk that economic growth could stall out completely.  

Unfortunately, Trump chose to compound that risk on Thursday by doubling down on his radical trade restrictions, imposing tariffs of between 10 percent and 50 percent on the imports of all foreign countries. 

Here is a quick overview of America’s darkening economic picture. 

American employers are pulling back on hiring

America’s labor market is much weaker than previously thought, a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report revealed on Friday. US employers added 73,000 jobs in July, far fewer than the 104,000 that economists expected.

More alarmingly, the report suggested that job growth was markedly weaker in May and June than the government had previously believed. The BLS always revises its estimates of monthly employment gains, once more data becomes available. Usually, these updates do not fundamentally change the labor market outlook. This time, they did. 

The government initially thought that employers had added 144,000 jobs in May and 147,000 in June; it now believes that they added just 19,000 during the first month and 14,000 during the second. (Trump responded to this unwelcome information by declaring it fraudulent and firing the head of the BLS.)

This updated data suggests that Trump’s tariffs (and tariff threats) have had a detrimental impact on hiring. After he unveiled his plans for sweeping universal tariffs on April 1, employment in America’s manufacturing and “trade and transport” industries abruptly declined:

Trump’s supporters may find it surprising that the enactment of broad tariffs would coincide with a reduction in manufacturing employment. After all, Trump has often described his trade policies as a strategy for creating factory jobs.

But the recent contraction in manufacturing employment makes perfect sense: Trump engineered a large increase in US producers’ costs by making foreign-made metal, lumber, semiconductors, and myriad other industrial materials more expensive. This makes it harder for US manufacturers to expand hiring or gain global market share, as they are now less cost-competitive than rivals in countries without large tariffs.

As trade-sensitive sectors have shed workers, employment growth has become almost entirely dependent on the health care sector, which has accounted for nearly all of the economy’s new jobs added in the past three months. 

Economic growth is losing steam (and becoming more and more dependent on the AI boom)

The latest data on US economic growth tells a similarly disquieting story. 

America’s gross domestic product officially grew at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, after decreasing by 0.5 percent in the first quarter. But both of those figures are misleading. This is because Trump’s trade policies have greatly exacerbated well-known flaws in the government’s approach to calculating GDP. The reasons for this are a bit complex, but the upshot is that the government likely underestimated growth in the first quarter and overestimated it in the second, due to massive, tariff-induced swings in US imports.

Thus, to get a clear picture of the economy’s growth rate, it’s best to look at GDP trends over the first two quarters combined. And over the first half of this year, America’s gross domestic product expanded at a 1.2 percent annualized clip — a much slower pace than both its growth rate in 2024 (2.8 percent) and forecasters’ expectations for 2025 GDP growth when Trump was elected last November (2.1 percent).

As with employment gains, America’s GDP growth is highly imbalanced: An explosion in AI infrastructure spending is playing an outsize part in sustaining our economic expansion. Over the past six months, the artificial intelligence buildout has contributed more to American economic growth than all of consumer spending, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims. Should anything cause America’s tech companies to pull back on data center construction, the US economy could quickly sputter.

Trump’s trade and immigration policies likely explain the bulk of this slowdown in growth. Through ramped-up internal enforcement and restrictions on legal immigration, Trump has succeeded in shrinking America’s foreign-born labor force while deterring the arrival of new migrants. Largely as a result of his policies, America has shed 1.7 million immigrant workers since March. Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve of Dallas estimated that Trump’s immigration policies will lower annual GDP growth by about 0.8 percentage points. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs are almost certainly dampening both consumer spending (by generating high prices that deter shoppers) and business investment (by raising input costs and uncertainty). As of last Wednesday, Yale’s Budget Lab estimated that Trump’s tariffs would lower real GDP growth annually by 0.5 percentage points. Trump’s most recent batch of duties will almost certainly lower growth even further. 

Prices are rebounding

Typically, when economic growth slows, inflation tends to cool. After all, lower consumer spending and business investment translates into reduced demand for goods and services. And when the demand declines, sellers are often forced to cut prices.

Yet inflation in the US today is actually accelerating, even as growth slackens. Consumer prices in June were 2.6 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to Commerce Department data released last week. 

Food and energy prices tend to shift volatilely, so economists often focus on “core” inflation, which excludes both categories. And core prices in June were 2.8 percent higher than 12 months earlier.

Both of these rates were higher than they had been in May. And the underlying data strongly indicates that Trump’s tariffs are largely responsible for inflation’s resurgence. 

Over the past three months, the prices of non-housing services (such as air travel or car insurance) grew at a 1.85 percent annualized rate. That’s an encouraging data point, as services had been the major driver of inflation last year. 

But a sharp rise in goods prices counteracted that disinflation, with core goods prices climbing at a 3.7 percent annualized clip in the second quarter. And price growth has been concentrated in trade-sensitive goods, such as home furnishings and electronics. 

In short, the data suggests that America plausibly would have enjoyed a return to the Fed’s 2 percent target inflation rate this year, had Trump not manufactured a surge in the cost of imported goods. 

The risk of a recession is rising

America’s economy still shows some signs of life. 

The unemployment rate remains at 4.2 percent, a relatively low level by historic standards. And after falling by 0.3 percent in May, inflation-adjusted consumer spending ticked up by 0.1 percent in June. Meanwhile, aggregate weekly payrolls — the sum of all wages paid to private-sector workers in a given week — was 5.3 percent higher in July than one year earlier. This represents an improvement relative to June, when total weekly wages were up just 4.5 percent on the year.

US consumers still boast significant spending power. The AI arms race doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon. And Trump’s recent package of tax cuts — while detrimental to growth in the long term — could boost demand in the short run. Perhaps for these reasons, betting markets currently give the US economy an 85 percent chance of avoiding a recession by year’s end.

Nevertheless, America’s economic outlook is much gloomier than it was one week ago. Trump’s trade policies have already nudged the US toward stagflation, a simultaneous rise in inflation and stagnation of growth. And most of Trump’s tariffs have yet to actually take effect.

Many sectors are already responding to rising import costs by shedding payroll. If that trend continues, and unemployment rises, consumer spending will likely dip. Faced with less demand, more employers will need to lay off staff, which would further erode spending. A recessionary spiral could ensue.

The Federal Reserve may try to preempt that dynamic by cutting interest rates in September. But if Trump’s tariffs continue to lift consumer prices, the central bank could find itself at an impasse: The Fed normally raises interest rates when prices are too high, and cuts them when job growth is too slow. If both those conditions prevail at once, the Fed will find itself with no good options.

Regardless, this much is clear: Americans are already less prosperous and economically secure than we would have been, had Trump not curtailed our nation’s access to foreign-made goods and immigrant workers.