It was, in many ways, all the worst parts of their previous games compiled in to one, with none of the redeeming elements. Like, it seems the internal decision makers have an extremely distorted view of why they have been successful in the past, and the actual production line seemed completely disorganized and dysfunctional. The design and goals were bad, and the execution was bad.

They should have learned from the criticism of oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4 and 76, but it seems like they discarded all criticism(genuine or otherwise) on the grounds that the games were successful. And only listened to praise (whether it was wide spread, or from a narrow audience).

Maybe because it wasn’t a success they’ll actually listen to criticism and take the time to sort through it, or maybe they’ll just assume the issue was the space theme and will continue down the procedural shooter looter slop path.

Anthropic is just trying to cover their ass from liability.

Ether the user who put the bot in a position to do something illegal is liable, or the person who made the bot that did something illegal is liable. But 90% of the reason hegseth want to use the bots is to avoid liability when doing illegal stuff, and if anthropic is saying “hey it’s not our fault if you break the law using our product, we told you not to use it like that” then they’re basically denying the main use case for hegseth, who really really wants a get out of jail free card for breaking the law.

Most people I’ve talked to in real life have complained about how large phones are and wish there were still smaller phones available. Maybe I’m just some gravitational nexus of small phone likers, but I think there is some other factor at play other than consumer preference.

Perhaps the issue is that they sell too well and canibalize the larger phone market, which probably has higher margins, sales people at stores often also get payed a commission so they probably have an incentive to nudge people towards larger phones.

Any job that can be done by an LLM wasn’t a job that needed to get done In the first place.

any manager who tries to replace an actually useful job with an LLM is going to get bit in the ass as productivity slows to a crawl. Other people will hav to step in to clean up the mess and basically do the work that should have been done by the person replaced. Most of the jobs being “replaced by AI” are actually just routine layoffs or companies correcting from over hiring.

I’ve read a story the other day from someone who said they left Amazon due to what a mess it was becoming internally. How increasingly managers were hiring people they didn’t need so their team would be bigger and they would seem more important. This is a well known phenomenon. I suspect a lot of people who did this and created a mess are using the excuse of “embracing AI” to give them selves an off ramp from the mess they created by bloating their departments.

“I’m helping development of a foss project!”

doesn’t write a single line of code, just submits claude code without reviewing it or even testing

On the one hand, I’m skeptical of the assertions that pen and paper is inherently a better way to take notes and learn.

But I do agree with the general aversion to a lot of ed tech. So much effort to shove kids faces in front of softwear and hardware that was sold to administrators by marketing teams from big tech companies. So many opportunities for those tech companies to exploit local school districts, ether to extract unreasonable profits, or for access to a mailable locked in user base.

If a school is going to go all in teaching with computers, they need to be carefully choosing what they use and not just adopting a premade package from some tech company.

So many extra moving parts, so many additional points of failure. But for what benefit? So I can turn on various washing machines on remotely… after loading them manually anyways? Why not have a washing machine that doubles as a cabinet so I don’t need to load it and unload it?

So I can have a lawn watering system that automatically waters when the soil moisture gets too low? To have a lawn mower roomba that automatically deploys when some sensor sees the grass get a bit to long? I’d rather not have a lawn, or at least some sort of native plant lawn that doesn’t need watering and constant mowing.

I don’t hate clever gadgets, I hate brain dead gadgets, automation of pointless systems. Why automate something that could be avoided entirely with better design. You have perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

I to have a modular electric vehicle but, mine already has a massive variety of after market options to modify and upgrade it to me needs with.

It’s called… my bicycle that I put a motor on.

it’s so amazing, the absolute brain rot it takes to think that a LLM is a better way to operate a vending machine than simple if-then logic. “If the value of money inserted is equal to the price, then dispense the item”.

Like, why? What is even the point? It doesn’t need to negotiate the price, it doesn’t need have a conversation about your day, the vending machine just needs to dispense something when payed the right amount.

“ Shit, we need more cash to keep the bubble inflated, quick squeeze customers for more revenue! “

they’re gradually reducing the amount of vehicles sold while increasing the margin per vehicle. They’re approaching the limit of 1 vehicle sold at infinite margin.

That all, and they raised the price when the core demographic has less disposable income than ever.

Because it’s not about the companies being profitable, it’s not about making products people want to use or pay for.

It’s about riding the hype cycle to maximize share price. Because the people making decisions are not payed based on the success of the company, but on the success of the share price and market cap.

Their current business model is not “not very profitable” it is deeply unprofitable.

They aren’t just loosing money on free users, they’re loosing money on payed users. Publicly traded for profit companies are legally obligated to provide accurate reports of the nature and source of their revenue. As of this summer (Second quarter), OpenAI was paying roughly twice as much servicing the demand of paying chat GPT users to publicly traded companies, like Microsoft, as OpenAI claimed to make from subscriptions to chat GPT.

And that’s not even counting the costs to train new models, spending with private companies, or their spending on building data centers with Coreweave or Oracle.

I highly doubt that adding advertising revenue will close that gap, especially since paying users might cancel their subscriptions if they start getting ads.

I think the steam deck might be worth it for the sake of giving her the option to play stuff that’s isn’t on switch.

Like, sure, maybe she never ends up caring about anything but first party Nintendo originals. But, giving that option opens up a world of possibility.

I have a little cousin, he’s not exactly the most technical, not the most patient with such things, he calls me a lot for help with stuff. But he’s on a laptop instead of a switch or a console because he wanted to play modded Minecraft, i’ve seen him grow a lot in being willing to understand this stuff because he was given an opportunity and a reason to engage with it.

Everything to do with living as a person in a larger community, part of which is using technology.

puts a bunch of AI features in, turns them on by default without user’s asking for them, mandates employees use it when ever they can.

“How could this be a bubble? Look at all the demand!”

Sounds interesting, but, I do worry, if such a system were to get any sort of significant adoption, it would create a financial incentives for projects to do questionable things.

Like, even the best intentioned dev would have a very strong incentive to intentionally make their software run in the background in a way that made it look like it was being used. And if a lot of projects did that, then, suddenly there is a bunch of always on stuff eating up system resources.

There is also potential complications around one project pressuring or paying off others to do stuff that gets them more run time. Like say, pressuring a distro or desktop to include their project as a default that turns on when ever the system starts. Or simply include their project as the default even if it’s not well suited to the task.

The incentives created by the system for devs and projects would need to be considered in aggregate, like what down steam outcomes could be created for the entire software ecosystem.

KDE is avalible for most distros. It being just a desktop environment. It’s well supported on Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Arch. As well as many of the various distros based on those. Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, and fedora both have a version that installs with KDE out of the box, and the arch install script has it as one of the main options. You could also install it on mint, but, like, half the point of mint is the cinnamon desktop.

If you’re interested in customizability, are willing to read some wiki pages, and never want to wait for support for some new feature, arch is great.

If you want a system that’s incredibly stable, will run on basically any computer made after 1995, and is generally just very reliable. Debian can’t be beat.

Fedora and Ubuntu are both fairly easy to use, new versions are released fairly often. If you don’t want to think much about it, they’re good options.

As for game compatibility, most will work without any effort, some stuff will need a bit of puttzing with settings. The only situations where you may need a VM or duel boot would be certain competitive multiplayer games that specifically use kernel level anti cheat. If you play one of those, check it on ProtonDB . Notionally Proton DB is for the steam deck and steam games run through proton, but generally what’s on there also applies to any other game run through wine.

You shouldn’t need to replace any hardware. If you have an Nvidia graphics card you will need to install the drivers as they don’t come with the kernel, but it will run just fine. I’ve heard of some issues regarding specific brands of headphones, and I had to fuss a bit to get my microphone and it’s audio interfacing working.

Adobe products, a lot of popular music production software and a few popular CAD programs will have issues. Most of them can be run on Linux, but they don’t like it, and finding an alternative would be better.

That’s “Werwolf the Apocalypse” plot line if I ever saw one.