Somehow that got me thinking of Roku’s Basilisk again. If you don’t know that, I’m sorry for mentioning. :) But it’s also a cool thought experiment.

She was hired as a contractor by Valve to work on Linux graphics driver related stuff. Valve knows who the experts are. And yes her work is amazing.

Still needs to drop much more.

Piracy indicates a service problem. That’s all.

I’m fairly sure that they know this will eventually happen. Windows pretty much only exists for them to milk their user base further, while they’re still “hooked” on it. I’m fairly certain that MS knows that Windows isn’t worth long-term investments anymore. So this is the enshittify-and-milk-users phase of the Windows decline. MS already positioned itself so that it doesn’t NEED Windows to be successful. They make most of their money with cloud services these days. And they are internally building up Linux knowledge by having created their in-house Azure Linux distribution as well as hiring some prominent Linux ecosystem developers like the systemd author. Plus, they ported .NET and Powershell 7+ to cross-platform. They will have no problems if, say, in 10 years, Windows loses its dominance. In the meantime, the poor Windows users who still use this clownware are fair game.

“current gov allows us to do anything so we don’t care anymore because that’s cheaper”

Those parental rules are basically just age dependent.

As a kid, you have the time but not the money.

As an adult, you have the money but not the time.

Somewhat related, there’s also a fun Nazi-killing movie called Sisu. (But only part 1, part 2 is against Soviets)

It’s completely over the top and unrealistic action, but fun.

It’s not just Russian propaganda anymore. It got adopted more widely in an effort to establish oligarchies in the West as well.

It’s useful for the super-rich because staying on the path of democracy and regulation hurts their profits, and it’s useful for Putin because it destabilizes Europe when European countries turn more isolated and separated with right-wing nationalist leaderships.

Yes, it’s great if you like immersive horror style games with great atmosphere. And with beautiful graphics.

There’s also the very valid situation of a game you previously liked becoming noticeably worse after some update or addon, which might cause a previous recommendation and engagement to flip.

Don’t see an issue here. The advantages of the Steam Machine is that it requires no assembly, looks nice and is optimized for standing in a living room. If you build it DIY you’ll as usual have lower costs, more performance, but higher assembly time and probably also less good looks. People who value performance or price over the rest will do it DIY, otherwise they’ll take the pre-built option.

I was a bit disappointed with desktop Linux during the late 90s and early 00s because many applications within the typical ecosystem weren’t great or mature yet (I still shudder when thinking about the amount of time I spent trying to get audio to work nicely across OSS, alsa, artsd, esound, … this was before pulseaudio or pipewire, obviously), and then I temporarily switched back to Windows as a primary OS just because of gaming compatibility. But since the mid-10s or so, Linux grew to become very capable for at least casual gaming as well. So there was no need for Windows anymore and I just wiped it off of every device, leaving Linux as the only OS. This was also during a time where Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and later 11 showed up and this really showed to me that Windows was doomed to die a long-winded death. The last decent version of Windows was 7.

It was funny (and untrue) when desktop Linux was constantly at ~1% market share. But now with desktop Linux slowly but constantly rising, it’s actually true!

They probably reached their goal. It was never about efficiency. That was just the PR spin to sell it to the public. It was about getting rid of pesky regulatory bodies which stood in the way of making more money. Especially those who hindered Musk’s companies.

The USA is currently experiencing the end phase of capitalism: massive corruption turning into open corruption with an economic oligarch class fusing with the government, massive income gaps and problems for regular citizens, class and culture wars plus reappearance of fascism to keep the population busy with culture wars among themselves instead of uniting against the exploiters, and so on. But it just started in USA. It’s already swapping over to other western democratic countries as well.

You becoming a neo-nazi by constantly being served right-wing propaganda on company-controlled social media channels is better for their business than if you were a neutral, critical thinker. It’s why Twitter was worth the 40 billion for Musk. Not because he expects it to ever repay itself. But because he can produce more loyalists by influencing what the algorithm shows and hides for you. Nazis are great for them because they’re busy fighting against other parts of the population while giving the wealthy class a free pass to do what they want. Which is more money, more influence, more exploitation.

Overexplaining it might scare away non-technical users. Just compare it to well-known social media but say it 's independent and more like e-mail in the sense that everyone can choose a different server with different rules but they all talk to each other. No one company controls everything. And that the algorithms aren’t secret or manipulative. Basically, just tell them the main advantages in an easy to understand way.

What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

Stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. It’s actually a very relevant term. In a lot of contexts. It’s when people influence you to either fear, have uncertainty about, or doubt something. Sometimes this happens without any intent, for example if you’re unsure about some new situation or thing, you tend to first view it more negatively because you have some fear or doubts about it (which might not be warranted). But sometimes, it can have malicious intent (e.g. right-wing extremists spreading FUD about human subgroups they don’t like. Usually the first step before more aggressive behavior happens).

It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.

In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.