Focusing on the Xbox side- the sensationalist headline masks the real story.

Most of these job losses aren’t layoffs, they are studios being sold or spun off and many/most of those people will keep their jobs.

And on the Xbox side at least, this is a VERY good thing.

Hard truth #1: Xbox is losing money, and MS will not keep subsidizing a money-losing division forever. Xbox needs to be profitable if it is to continue.

The Phil Spencer / GamePass strategy was to adopt the Netflix business model- buy a ton of indie studios, crank out tons of games to fill up GamePass, everybody subscribes. Put simply, this plan failed. A couple AAA games and three pages of games you’ve never heard of from publishers you’ve never heard of is not a compelling value proposition to a gamer who has finite gaming time. Especially when you’re already planning to play other AAA games being released.

The other problem was a stupid organizational structure. Apparently some parts of XBOX had 14 (!) levels of management. Asha wants to cut that to 3-5 levels (which IMHO is the right call). That means a lot of project managers and department heads and the like who don’t really add much overall value but cost a lot and make changes take exponentially longer.

Combine this and you have a large, top-heavy organization that’s producing games that aren’t selling consoles and aren’t selling GamePass subscriptions. Something had to change, and this is it.

Personally I think XBOX is in a better place today than yesterday. The resulting company won’t be trying to develop every game, they will be focusing on bringing in exclusives and hopefully focused on good first party games like Halo. And with much lower costs, hopefully they will be much more profitable to the point that XBOX has a profitable future.

Yeah it’s awful.

I actually found the best peanut butter at a local store. They have a machine that looks like a drink dispenser but it’s full of different kinds of peanuts- you grab a jar and push the button and it grinds the peanuts into peanut butter right there in front of you. Resulting machine looks something like this.
There’s a few different options like plain, honey, spicy, etc. I just get the plain one and stir in some salt when I get home.

If you let it sit for a while it separates (the oil comes to the top and solids sink) but you just stir it up and it’s fine.

Funny thing is- flavor is actually a good bit better than most of what you get in the jar. And there’s zero bullshit, just peanuts and salt to taste which are all you need for great peanut butter.

I’ve not been able to find any solid intel on what actually happened to the wafers.

Thing is though- cutting wafers and packaging can be done at any fab so in theory they could find an older fab with excess capacity and pay them to do some of it.

Binning however requires some more specialized equipment, that from what I understand is more specific to the type of chips you’re making. This is where you test each individual chip- out of a wafer you’ll get some great ones, some good ones, some bad ones, and some that don’t work at all. Thus ‘binning’ is taking a stream of chips and sorting them into bins by their maximum speed, stability, etc.
You might find a fab that has the equipment to bin DRAM chips but not the means to manufacture those chips. Still it seems an odd use of resources to get into the chip production business when your core business has nothing to do with chips.

I’d like to see a lawsuit like this against OpenAI.

They bought a combined total of 40% of the world’s 2026 memory production- not as usable modules, but as finished wafers. Those wafers have to be sliced into individual chips, which are then tested (binned) and packaged into modules, which themselves get mounted on a PCB with some support circuity to make a DIMM.
OpenAI (as far as I know) doesn’t have the equipment to do that.
So chances are those finished wafers are either in the trash or sitting in a warehouse somewhere.

Question becomes- to what end? To drive up prices for other AI companies? To manipulate the market and then sell those wafers in small batches at great premium?

IMHO- unless they can show those wafers have been processed packaged and put in servers, they should also be sued.

More like

• sell company to Sony for hugely inflated price promising to be the linchpin of their live service strategy

• have one game that does okay, another game that everybody hates

• leadership bleeds money through a fire hose

• everyone is surprised when this doesn’t work

Ever look at the back seat of a modern vehicle? It’s almost never a flat bench. There’s indentations, they’re just less deep than the front seat.

actually that little extra material makes a big difference.

Look at it from the side (IE put a camera where your spine would be), same on the bottom where your leg would be. There’s several good square inches of ‘wall’, much more than just a seat belt.

And while it is angled up somewhat, the seat belt is doing a great job pulling you back down into it.

If you mean the middle rear, probably because there’s nothing in front of you. It may be the safest overall, not necessarily the safest in a side impact.

Those are both bucket seats, just to different degrees.

Imagine a camera placed where the spine or leg is looking at the side of the seat. Look at how much exposed surface area faces the camera. Let’s call that surface area the ‘side restraint component’. (IE, if the side panel comes ‘up’ out of the seat 2", and extends out 4", the side restraint component is 2").

On a seat belt, you’ve got about 2" x 4" surface area on each side. So 8 square inches on each side. That’s all a bench seat gives you.

On that car seat you’ve got about 2.5" x 8" on the back, plus an average of let’s call it 2.5" x 4" on the seat. So that’s about 30 square inches on each side.

On the racing seat you’ve got about 14" x 20", but cut in half as a triangle, and let’s say the shoulder bit fills in the missing part by the belt opening. So call that 140 square inches per side.

The car seat may be designed for comfort, but the side bolsters do have a restraint effect.

It’s one of the benefits of a bucket seat, and you’ll note front seats have a bucket shape both on the back and the bottom. This does a LOT to keep a human in place, especially if the seatbelt is holding the human down into the bucket. Lots of surface area on the side of the leg and torso for the bucket shape. OTOH with a bench seat there’s nothing at all keeping the human in place, there’s just the 3 places where the strap crosses the human and those don’t do very much. Seat belts are designed to keep you down in the seat.

This exactly.

Bench seats are great for hanging out with afore mentioned dog and/or girl.
Bench seats are super shitty in any sort of side impact collision. There’s nothing keeping you in place except your safety belt.

I wanna know what’s happening with all those finished wafers they bought.

If they aren’t being made into memory modules I think someone should go to jail.

Understand that people are speaking from frustration. Users are tired. We are sick of having things we don’t want shoved down our throats and told that we want them. This is not just Firefox, this is most software.

If I was Mozilla CEO I know exactly what I would do. I would double down on the users.

Immediately put out a press release that Mozilla will not for as long as I’m in charge make one single dime selling user data. Put in our very corporate charter that we are required to collect as little data as possible to make our products work. Also make a public promise that any AI features which aren’t 100% local will require a very big opt-in and we will try to avoid shipping any such things at all.

Focus on speed. Chrome started getting market share in the first place because they advertised it could render a web page in under 100ms. So that’s what I would shoot for. Screw everything else, the main rendering parts of the browser should be fast, threaded, and stable.

Part of that would be to include some script selection processes in the browser itself. This would partially be like an ad block but more like a priority system. Right now you go to a news website and there’s a good chance you’re pulling tens of megabytes of JavaScript that tracks everything and actually runs a fucking auction in your browser where advertisers are bidding on the right to show you an ad. This does not help the user. So I would focus on developing a system that identifies what JavaScript code renders the bulk of the web page and what is for things like ads, the add code goes dead last. That way the content of the page loads very quickly.

Then I would basically license ublock origin and include that functionality in the browser itself. I would throw Dev time at optimizing the hell out of that. And that would be one of the questions asked at first run, do you want to block advertisements? If user says yes then ublock is enabled. That alone will probably get a shit ton of users, because it will do the same thing as Chrome did years ago, just make the experience of web surfing better.

I would stop reinventing the UI every two years.

I like Roku. Their products have so far had the best functionality.

If they go through with their current plans to turn half the home page into an ad, I’m probably gonna try and sell mine (better to drive down the overall market with more supply).

I pay for a number of streaming services, and I pay extra so I don’t have my time wasted with ads. I don’t want ads in my home. If the device I purchased to bring me ad-free TV is going to itself show me ads, then as far as my needs go it’s no longer fit for purpose.

Honestly the more I think about this the more I think Chromium has become actively harmful to the Internet overall.

The problem isn’t Chromium itself. The problem is that we’re going back to the old days of Internet Explorer, where every popular site is optimized for Internet Explorer (including its non standard quirks) and thus other browsers don’t render it right. And some websites would detect a non-IE useragent and just refuse to load.

The problem is the dependence. Google announces that MV2 is going away and suddenly 5 other ‘independent’ browsers (which are all just Chromium reskins) say ‘yeah it’s going away, sorry too bad so sad but there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it our hands are tied’. No one company should have this much control over the browser ecosystem, not even Google. (or these days, especially not Google since they seem to embrace their shedding of the ‘don’t be evil’ mantra).

I think there’s an opening, but it requires resources. A good web rendering / javascript engine isn’t a weekend project. But I think it’s worth the effort to make a new one. And like Chrome’s origins, it should be focused on speed and efficiency.

I say that as a student of history-- used to be IE for normies and Firefox (with a ton of extensions) for nerds. Then Chrome came along, and could often render a page in under 100ms. So everyone (nerds and normies) adopted it. Only now it’s full of Google bloat, web pages cram megabytes of javascript bullshit (to the point that if you hit a major news site, your browser is literally running a live auction in javascript to see who wins the pleasure of showing you an ad), plus a ton of tracking crap. So unfortunately javascript isn’t going away, but a new rendering engine is necessary.

Ah that’s awesome!!! I’d seen that output before but never saw the story of its input.

Why not? It’s what the rest of the browser world is doing… :P

‘Google’s dumping MV3 support, guess we have to dump it also, too bad so sad guess there’s nothing at all to be done here’.

Jokes aside- I agree giving up (in any regard, including proxy-side filtering) is the wrong answer. But the more I’m thinking about this, the more I’m convinced that the current essentially Internet-wide reliance on Chromium (with a small carve-out for WebKit) is a real problem that needs urgent attention.

Mozilla’s the obvious choice but they seem determined to piss off their users with UI rewrites and blow all their cash on literally everything other than browser development.

Sad thing is there’s a real opening here. I was a mainly Mozilla user years ago. I switched to Chrome because it was fast- there was a youtube ad (which actually aired on TV for a while) showing Chrome rendering a webpage in 100ms. Those days are of course long gone. Partly because Chrome is now bloated with a ton of Google shit, partly because with fast javascript rendering, web developers started treating javascript as ‘free’ so now a news article comes with 10+mb of tracking code that literally runs an auction client side for advertisers to bid on the opportunity to bother you and many of the most basic websites are rendered client-side because why not.
Point is though- come up with a FAST, standards compliant rendering engine that can compete with Chrome, with no bloat, and push it as ‘we are what Chrome was- fast, effective, clean’.

Sadly this is happening.

Example one- Q: How many USB ports does my computer have? A: kill yourself.

Example two- Q: how should I deal with depression? A: jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Example three- Q: Should I run with scissors? A: Yup!

Let’s not forget a healthy diet includes eating rocks.

Or that you should drink urine to pass kidney stones.

Oh I’m not saying it’s an unsolved problem. It’s absolutely been done, both by antivirus programs and commercial firewalls (although the merits of the ladder are open to some debate).

I am just saying it adds a potential complication.