At this point, I have come to the conclusion that relying on any sort of proprietary software for your service is a bad idea and that all open-source options should be thoroughly examined first. Eventually, once a proprietary piece of software becomes essential to production environments (via lock-in and/or inertia), the squeeze is guaranteed to happen.

And yes, this also includes cloud darlings such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure (whose value proposition, contrary to popular belief, is in the software, not in the remote servers, AWS even offers an on-premises version of their AWS software called Outpost). I mean, if I told you to migrate your production away from AWS EC2 or AWS EKS (including downloading any data, rewriting any Terraform files, and migrating any Ansible scripts or Helm charts respectively so they aren't AWS-specific), can you even give me an estimate when you'll be done?

And this comes from a person who uses mostly proprietary software at home. At least when it comes to the home, you can pirate stuff/bypass broken DRM, and even use discontinued stuff such as Nvidia 3D Vision (or even entire discontinued OSes such as Windows XP) for as long as you want.

Does it come with a bundled H.264 decoder? Currently, only Chrome for Linux has that.

Not a chance, in standard dimensions at least.

Any merger happening now (while both companies are private) will affect the perceived value of the acquiring company when the merger happens, not when they go public. Aka, any gains or losses from the merger will be priced in when the merger happens, not when or after the go public.

Finally, someone who understands what he is talking about: Both SpaceX and xAI are private companies, there is no "grandma" here owning a couple of shares in her Robinhood account, Elon Musk only has to answer to the relatively few people who hold shares in the private companies involved.

From my outsider's point of view (note: I'm from Greece), the amount of political capital and time the Democrats wasted in defending the right of Lia Thomas to compete in women's swimming was absurd, given that organizations like FINA exist to handle eligibility issues for athletes. But anyone who dared point that out was called "transphobic". Similarly, all the policing around pronouns was absurd. Just choose a pronoun ("he" or "she") and be done with it, nobody cares that you identify as a gender of your own invention that has its own pronouns (good for you, but nobody cares), just choose one of the two pronouns that have well-understood grammar rules and be done with it. Unless you are Queen or King of England, you aren't special enough to have your own pronouns.

Imagine if the Democrats had shown the same passion for adjusting the federal minimum wage to match CPI inflation as they did with the above niche issues.

A cartridge that is just a bottle of ink has no (legitimate) reason to include a circuit board.

Guess what? The manufacturers agree with you, they have introduced "tank"-style printers that you pour ink into them from a bottle. The bottles have no electronics at all on them. But guess what? Average Joe will keep buying printers using expensive cartridges with a tiny amount of ink in them and DRM circuitry on them because Average Joe doesn't think when buying stuff and doesn't plan ahead.

Because the markets for inkjets and lasers are different. The kind of crowd that buys inkjets usually wants the cheapest possible printer and doesn't bother to look at how much the ink cartridges cost or how much they can print before they go empty. Instead, if you buy a laser, you are probably not the average clueless Joe and have probably done a minimum amount of research in your purchase. That said, "tank"-style printers do exist for people who want an inkjet (for example, if you don't want conductive toner dust in your house that houses your retro computer collection) but you aren't a clueless Average Joe.

But yeah, nothing about lasers specifically that could prevent toner cartridges from being infested with DRM if it made business sense to do so. However, taking out the drum is very complicated and would be difficult to make simple, so that ain't happening.

Not so much as you think, they will do something similar to what Apple did to work around "right-to-repair" laws: They will provide an "official" unlocking service to unlock the DRM in their ink cartridges, but charge so much for the unlocking service that remanufactured inks made with the manufacturer-blessed process won't be significantly cheaper than first-party HP ink cartridges.

To any people who think this will force printer manufacturers like HP to open the DRM in their cartridges: No, it won't, they'll simply create an "approved" unlocking system where they'll charge so much for the unlocking service that the remanufactured cartridges made with the official unlocking process won't be any cheaper, kind of like what Apple does with the iPhone replacement parts that they have to make available to third parties as part of various "right to repair" legislations.

I see it slightly different:

- When CRTs were the hot thing, Sony's Trinitron TVs ruled the market

- When LCDs were the hot thing, Samsung's "premium VA" LCD TVs ruled the market

- Now that OLEDs are the hot thing, LG's OLED TVs rule the market

It's not easy for a manufacturer to abandon a profitable product line they have poured tons of R&D into it, especially when the new technology is unproven. Let's not forget that early LCD TVs had issues with low contrast and luminance, and OLEDs had (and still have) issues with burn-in. Then the technology becomes popular regardless of the issues, and the manufacturer that stuck to the previous technology has to play catch-up. Ideally, the manufacturer would invest heavily both in proven and unproven technologies, but that's not what the board wants to hear because won't anybody think of the shareholder dividends?

Still, at least those people understand what they have built. Even if you get AI to spit out a codebase that covers your needs, it can't make changes to it (to cover a new need, for example), you can only tell it to spit out an entirely new codebase (that may or may not still cover your other needs the previous codebase did). The example that you mentioned (of developers failing to make a change) is an outlier, most software undergoes a lot of changes and additions over its lifetime.

Also, let's not forget that most of the bad designs you see are always the result of MBAs mismanaging people: They don't hire an experienced lead architect to come up with a good design but hire only kids fresh out of college (or even coding bootcamps), the impose too short timelines (they basically mistake agile to mean "we can do this with half the people in half the time"), and don't give developers time to write documentation (or they don't have a management structure to enforce documentation-writing, or they don't test applicants for proficiency in writing English before they hire them as employees).

Basically, MBAs look forward to AI as a way to get out of the mistakes they love to make when managing people. Forgetting that the codebase AI will give them is far less maintainable (and more often than not far less secure) than even a mismanaged team of "coders" gives them. But anyway, I am always looking to be proven wrong, so let's see if AI will actually deliver software that is at minimum as useful, maintainable, and secure than the average mismanaged team of humans.

MBAs don't understand that "coding" is a term we software developers invented to make the job look less scary (and risky) to MBAs. In reality, coding is by far the easiest part of software development. Software development isn't "coding", software development is the design of systems to automate complex tasks (as much as possible), it involves a thorough understanding of the problem at hand (aka domain knowledge), complex organizing of components, and managing trade-offs.

Unless it's some crappy website, software developers don't "code", they design.

What most people here forget is that, unlike countries like Greece or France, the US owns the central bank that defines the interest rate for the US dollar. So, all the government has to do is appoint someone who wants low interest rates to the chair of the Federal Reserve, and the interest rates will go down. So, the US government doesn't care about the interest rate because it knows it can always print more money (which also increases the GDP).

tl;dr: The US governments are treating money as fun coupons and will keep printing more of it, prepare for the dollar to keep sliding against any scarce asset (housing, farmland, gold, etc) beyond what official inflation figures say.

Because Japan's citizens buy all that government debt, something the average American will never do. And even then, the Japanese government is slowly running out of ideas.