Communists want to guarantee access to basic resources. Nazis want to kill millions or billions of people.

You: I see no difference.

This is a "water is wet" article. Something that's widely known but needed an actual study to prove, and now other scientists can properly cite it.

Similarly, meta-analyses and introductory summaries tend to be very well cited, even though they're just telling everyone what they already knew.

Look, I know each user is making us -$67.51 on average, but look at the size of our user base, we'll make it up in volume!

Mastodon isn't funded by VCs. Eugen Rochko explicitly rejected VC funding.

Same here, probably. We dropped Windows as our default choice after 7, and now run most day to day stuff on some flavour of Linux. A lot of the businessy applications that used to have a lock-in effect for Windows have gone online now anyway, so it doesn't really matter what OS you use as long as it can run at least one safe, modern browser. We still get situations where having a "genuine" Office document that will definitely be compatible with someone else's system matters, but only occasionally. I can't remember the last time someone sent us graphics in an Adobe format instead of one of the online tools or some standard file type they'd exported to. Permanent documents for distribution are 99% PDFs. The modern, online-first world not always be progress in the right direction, but it's certainly done a lot to break the MS stranglehold over both personal and business computing.

But modern Microsoft is very binary in its approach, so really that's just a fancy way of saying it goes up to 3. My Apple laptop is already on 14 and my Linux workstation is on 23, so they must be much better.

That's why standards matter. It's a good bet that I can take a tool written in C and using POSIX APIs from last century and compile and run it on a modern Linux or BSD with few if any changes. Even if it's a graphical application using X for the UI, a lot of it will still just work. If it's trying to talk to other software running on the same system or to another service elsewhere on the network, those foundations are very stable too.

Backward compatibility is important. Microsoft used to understand that. It famously went to extraordinary lengths to make sure new versions of Windows could still run old applications, sometimes even if those old applications relied on undocumented APIs they shouldn't have used. Sadly those days seem to have passed, and Microsoft 2023 is on the same bandwagon as the big Internet firms, more interested in how much they can exploit their users than in providing a good product that the users want and are willing to pay for. It'll take a while, but I don't think this is going to end well for Microsoft. They're slowly becoming IBM, still a big tech firm with a big war chest, but also a shadow of what they used to be.

And how is any normal person or even any normal small business going to even get Enterprise level Windows 10+ onto their computers, never mind maintain it in Enterprise fashion?

IMHO one of the biggest missteps Microsoft made with Windows 10 was nerfing Pro so it was basically just Home plus a feature or two but still with all of the downsides that power users and professionals don't want or simply can't accept. Until 7 or even 8/8.1 the Pro edition was a step up and suitable for professional use by individuals or small businesses that didn't need all the Enterprise baggage but still needed a system with the power user features and most importantly under their full control.

The Schadenfreude will be almost as strong watching Microsoft's control over the desktop market fade away as it has been watching how quickly credible competitors to Creative Suite have appeared since Adobe went subscription-only. It takes time for an entire tech market to shift away from a dominant incumbent product that was a clear industry standard, but that doesn't mean the shift isn't happening, and once the formerly dominant product no longer has a big enough market share that everyone else has to have it because of the networking and lock-in effects and actually has to compete on merit, it's basically game over.

It is? The same source has Windows (all versions) on 68% of desktops and macOS on 20%, which in combination with the other stats would mean macOS now has a greater share of desktops than Windows 11. That doesn't surprise me. Plenty of my friends and family have Apple laptops now, and I'd guess the majority of the tech businesses I work with do as well. Obviously I'm the kind of person who reads /. so the people and businesses I interact with might not be representative of the global market, but there has definitely been a big shift everywhere I look over the past few years and it's not difficult to imagine reasons why that might be.

For comparison, Linux (excluding ChromeOS) currently seems to be at around 3%. Not a huge percentage, certainly, but if you consider that maybe 250-300 million new PCs are sold globally every year, that could still represent tens of millions of Linux desktops out there. Not so very long ago, Apple was in a similar position and Windows was basically everywhere.

They want globalization when it's USA's corporations taking over businesses in second and third world countries. It's imperialism. Always has been.

You can tell that China is a dictatorship of the working class because the police bust unions, right?

I wonder if it would be productive to analyze China in terms of mercantilism.

A large base model (roughly terabyte scale, I think). The file you receive is a transformer on top of that model plus some input data. It's a curiosity, not something we'll see in production in the next ten years.

You'd distribute the base model (100GB to 5TB) first since it's useful for a lot of inputs. Then you'd download files that have the transformer plus the compressed data.

The texts they're testing with are 1GB sections of English language Wikipedia dumps, and they're getting poor compression until they use very large transformers, like 100MB.

They also have some weird comparisons for partially decoded data and I don't get the point of it. Like, they show intermediate output of gzip that's basically text with the Burroughs-Wheeler transformation applied and point out that that's not very comprehensible compared to some "equivalent" from their compression system, and it's like, no shit. So this is pretty useless.

We're in another giant COVID wave and our employers want to force us into poorly ventilated boxes cheek by jowl with 30 other people, few of whom wear masks.

I work better from the office. I would commute by bike, and that's better for my health. I benefit from the automatic body doubling and having a focused zone for doing work.

But I won't benefit from getting COVID twice a year, so I refuse to go to the office.

There are a bunch of open source game engines. Most of them are oriented toward 2d games, but there's also stuff like Godot and Urho that are more general. The Quake 3 engine is open source. The Source engine is available for no charge (but the associated tools cost money).

So there's no reason to pay that much.