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.

She’s being a shrewd politician, keeping her self generally aligned with the base, but distancing her self enough from the leadership that she isn’t dragged down with them when the base sours on them for presiding over another 2008.

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

Newsome keeps trying to reach out to younger voters, but it’s always in such… performative ways. It’s never him listening or signaling he concurs on issues they care about.

It always feel like an effort to inform them that he exists, become a familiar figure, as if the issue that Democratic candidates have been having was lack of visibility.

But the issue is a misalignment of values and goals, not that people haven’t seen them get interviewed on a popular platform. Visibility will rise on new media as they adopt talking points and positions that align with the bases values, just forcing them selves in to these places without changing their stances is going to just make them a laughing stock.

If that’s the case, it was a really dumb strategy because they were asking for the subsidies to be extended until right before the 2026 election, so that if republicans choose not to re-up them then, they’d be an even fresher wound for the election, now it’s going to be a year out of date by then.

Actually, Walmarts probably gonna be hemorrhaging money without SNAP. Like, they’re the single largest recipient of money from the program, by way of people using SNAP at them to buy groceries.

It’s actually supper perverse since a lot of their employees are on SNAP due to the poverty wages they pay. Walmart employees buying food with snap at Walmart is a non trivial part of their revenue.

A lot of conservatives argue that we shouldn’t have snap since it makes it possible for companies to pay poverty wages and not have their workers starve to death, and that without it employers would have to raise wages. Conveniently ignoring the fact that companies like Walmart would rather let their workers starve than raise their wages.

A tax to contribute to SNAP on companies that pay wages so low that their employees end up on SNAP is the better answer to the problem.

You can have tone, and write with sarcasm, and distain towards idiots, with out abusing subordinate clauses like they said something rude about your mother.

I said that academic literature can be incomprehensible.

Where did I say that this piece is incomprehensible?

I can comprehend it, it just has a bunch of elements in it’s construction that are not conveying any meaningful information, and are redundant in tone.

“at a place called” “you’ve perhaps heard of” and “his name is”. Any one of those would have been plenty to add a layer of jovial snark to the tone, all three is like putting a sentence in bold italics with an exclamation mark. It excessive and it forces the use of that very awkward “ of those there”.

Academic writing, at least In my experience, does the opposite of that kind of thing. It’s painfully dry, overly analytical, and devoid of much in the way of tone.

There is a difference between getting to a conclusion obliquely and swerving all over the road.

I don’t exactly have the most concise writing my self, but I try to keep the subject in the same hemisphere as the predicate.

There is something to be said for the incomprehensibility of some academic writing. Usually though that comes from obscure terminology, or struggling to fit all the relevant parts of a thought in to a cohesive sentence. But that sentence is 90% filler, and is structured in a needlessly confusing way.

I get what the guy is saying but his writing is a chore to read. Lugubrious and unnecessarily complex sentence structure.

i taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you’ve perhaps heard of. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

What road kill of a sentence. It reads like it was blown apart and taped back together with some extra padding mixed in. Could easily just have been “late in my 16 years at Bowdoin Collage, Zohran Mamdani was a student”. Or “ Zohran Mamdani happened to be one of the students in the tail end of my 16 years at Bowdoin collage”.

He put out a video a few weeks back basically endorsing Mamdani.