Years ago I owned a highly renovated one room brick schoolhouse (ground-source geothermal heat pump, radiant floor heating, two stories). The attic was cooled with a power vent (at some temp (I think it was like 115f) a central fan would come on and push hot air through a single top vent and pull it up through the eves). In the summer almost every afternoon when it was sunny you could hear the power vent come on.

About 10 years into ownership I installed a metal roof with a slate-like look. The company claimed that the roof would make the schoolhouse more energy efficient by reflecting a lot of the incoming solar heat. Well, the power vent *never* came on again in the 3 years after I installed the roof. At one point I even checked to make sure it was still working. In fact the A/C would only come on maybe a couple of times per summer instead of almost every day.

The install cost was about double what shingles would be, but next time I have to install a roof I'm doing the same thing. These things have a lifetime non-prorated warranty unlike shingles which are prorated. I don't have the house anymore and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way.

Hobby game developer here - same thing applies. It doesn't matter how good the game you make is. If nobody knows that it exists, it won't sell, simple as that. And there are literally a few hundred games published EVERY DAY, so no you can't hope to be somehow discovered by accident or through the Steam (Epic, GOG, etc.) recommendation features. Well, not at scale. Maybe a few people will randomly find you, but without some marketing efforts, it's just that - a few.

Marketing, no matter how much we techies dislike it, is an essential part of any at-scale business. Customers need to know you exist. They need to know your product exists. They need to know your product can do something they would like.

There's a fine line between advertisement as manipulative exploitation and getting information to people interested in it. For a while, I had hopes that the Internet and search engines would solve that problem. Imagine if there were no advertisement. Anywhere. At all. But you had a magic machine on your desk or in your hands that, if you need something, can tell you where to get it. Need new dishes - here's all the shops selling dishes in the vicinity. Need a new computer - here's all the places you can look at computers and here's all the online shops who'll send them to you. Need a blowjob - here... well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, it seems I massively underestimated how much advertisers like to keep their jobs, and the whole shit became even worse online.

You utterly misunderstand what consciousness is or, for that matter, what 99% of the universe are.

If you grind the universe to a fine powder and look at the result, you can also claim that trees don't exist. Or planets. Or, really, anything.

It is clear to everyone not a complete idiot or fanatic, that consciousness, whatever it ultimately is, is something where structure, organization, patterns and connectivity matter a whole lot. It's not just matter, it is also how that matter is organized in space and time. The exact same molecules can make a pile of trash or a car.

More than that. A simulation can do things like introduce randomness, recursion, non-trivial dependencies or emergent behaviour that are not easily expressed in equations. There's a huge area where we use computer simulations because either the equations are not known or a calculation of the equations is computationally impossible but a simulation is possible.

"lock-in" is the word you're looking for.

People can't switch without considerable cost in money and/or convenience. That could be as simple as using two different systems at home and at work, which adds to the mental load.

Windows has been winning for 30+ years because it's familiar shit. Everyone knows it's shit, but at least you already know the taste. Consumers know that if they use Windos their skills trained at work transfer. Businesses know that if they use Windos then new hires don't need basic computer training. Software developers know that if they support Windos, there's a huge market that runs it.

Everyone is locking everyone else into the shit, and Microsofts sits in the middle and laughs.

I would bet that there's an internal competition among the various teams how much utter crap they can put into their respective parts of the OS before the public rebels against it.

Been a non-windows user for two decades now, and don't miss it one bit. Sometimes sad if a cool game is out only on Windos, but I anyway don't have as much time anymore as I used to.

It's not just Windos, though. DOS was equally horrible. I replaced MS-DOS with Novell DOS on one of my PCs for utterly different reasons (better to run a small BBS system on) and that was miles ahead of the Microsoft shit.

It keeps getting worse because we are not the customers anymore, we are the product. Your data is sold, your user habits are monitizied, and the main reason Windows still rules the games market is so kids grow up on Windows PCs and will demand them in their jobs (businesses are the main buyers of the OS).

And probably because Bill Gates is sad if market share falls. And who can stand old men crying?

It's 2025. We've known for a couple of decades that Win32/Win64 and Windows and its main ecosystem only work because various hacks into the kernel to make it all run more smoothly. Even the video driver architecture basically has built in restarts when buffers blow up.

It's a shitty proprietary operating system which somehow, every time they try to clean it up, it gets worse under and on top of the hood. I stopped using Windows for my own personal devices four years ago, and will not go back. Ubuntu, Debian and MacOS offer cleaner UIs, and even if the software libraries are a bit smaller, at least I'm not a prisoner to endless ads.

Christ I had to set up a Win11 laptop yesterday, and between setting up the OS and Edge I had to turn down "offers" and additional tracking functionality around seven or eight times. Actually more, because then I set up a non-privileged user profile, and had to do it all again. And that was Win11 Pro. I can only imagine how much worse the Home editions are.

he is.

The minimum that I can't think of a good argument against is that AI needs to disclose that it is AI.

The problem of access for minors is, of course, how to check someone's age online, where as the old saying goes, nobody knows that you're actually a dog. That's nearly impossible without serious privacy intrusions.

Unlike cars, escalators (or airplanes, as one commenter used as another example) are not driven by amateurs. They are either automated or operated by professionals.

The trade-off we had to make was between allowing only licensed chauffeurs to drive, or allowing everyone to drive after a short intro course that teaches you only the basics and very little about SAFE driving. Oh, and you get qualified for life. Not further tests, requirements for courses, experience, etc.

Are roads safe? Fuck no, not by a huge margin. But you'll understand why if you give the task of designing a road network as safe as commercial air travel to a PhD student or a couple of students as the master thesis topic. Surprise: The result will essentially be a rail network. Very little driver autonomy, changing lanes and turning after prior announcement at defined spots only, etc. etc.

To this day I can't understand how we let the general public - for which we know the statistics of how many are suicidal or mentally unstable - into a 1-2 ton vehicle and on a road with opposing traffic not seperated by a solid barrier. So yes, there's a big part of design, but that design is not an accident, it's what apparently people want. Or when is the last time you've seen demonstrations against it?

SAYING that security is your #1 priority and actually ACTING that way are two different things.

The fact that the stock price didn't immediately plummet makes it very clear that at least the investors understood the message correctly: It had an implicit "but only if it doesn't get in the way of profits" added to it.

I mean, if you bet so much on words people say, let me assure you that your upcoming birthday is the #1 priority on my mind and I can hardly think of anything else. ;-)

the Internet was still used mostly by universities and very few businesses had e-mail or a website. Heck, probably more business had Gopher pages than websites.

You are right, though "inertia" doesn't quite describe it. There were also all the anti-competitive actions MS took to lock its customers in. There literally was a lawsuit about it that found them guilty.

Is it though?

For fun and giggles, I've put

preview windows security vulnerability exploit

into Google. Every result on the first page is an actual security issue. I've also put

preview macos security vulnerability exploit

and nothing on the first page is an actual preview vulnerability. The first result, for example, is a vuln found by Microsoft (of all people) that triggers only if you load untrusted third party kernel extensions (what a surprise). All the other results appear tangential or theoretical at first glance. For Linux it's a bit inconclusive because there are multiple desktops, etc. - but using "KDE" instead of the OS name yields two results that seem to be preview vulns, the rest isn't.

So no. Not all horses run equally fast, even if they all run. Some definitely have only three legs.

Nowhere did I claim that it's an easy task. But if your software engineers are not aware that the user path to a preview is very different from the user path to opening a document, and offer you fewer or no opportunities to ask for confirmation or make security checks, then again that's a manufacturer fault.

And let's stop letting people off the hook for security fuck-ups with the "oh, but it's all so complicated" excuse. If it's too complicated for them, they shouldn't be writing software.

The problems with underwater data centres are: Cost to build a facility at scale that can exist underwater (pressurization, leak detection, etc). Inconvenience of access for operational maintenance and repair. Cost to mitigate against corrosive salt water in your chilled water loops and pumps. Damage to marine ecosystems and the effects of warming localized water. Etc.

We keep trying to do it because the siren song of almost unlimited free cooling is such a draw. A PUE of 1.15 is very impressive, but you can get a PUE of 1.35 in Arizona with only air-cooled chillers (so not consuming any water). Microsoft famously experimented with this from 2018 to 2020 and claimed it as a success due to a low failure rate (they filled the container with nitrogen before submerging), but AFAIK have done nothing since.

There's no speculation that increases CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lead to the more heat being trapped. We've known that since the late 19th century.

When your preview function can compromise the user, you know that you've fucked up. Again. Why is anyone trusting MickeySoft with their business secrets? I'll never understand that. They are literally known for making insecure crap.

I guess the "features over everything" attitude somehow does vibe with the right market segment. Which I fear has influence on purchasing decisions far beyond what their competence justifies.