Windows is everything people don't want: a surveillance platform, an advertisement billboard and now an unreliable "agentic" piece of shit.

But worse of all, Windows is mostly what people have to put up with at work.

And finally, there's another negative factor working against it: Microsoft is a company headquartered in a rogue fascist country. My company for one is actively exploring option to ditch Office 365, Teams, WIndows and depend on Microsoft things as little as possible. I'm sure it's not the only one.

They go from 0 to 100% Nazi in less than a year!

Boycott products that make Musk money.

I hope it works out for them, but I suspect they are shortly going to encounter the phrase "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". All of Maduro's people are still in place, and Trump has little incentive to try and remove them.

I'm pretty sure Trump's plan is to let Maduro's government (less Maduro and his wife, of course) continue doing everything exactly as they had been, as long as they give US oil companies access to the oil fields. Trump couldn't care less about drug trafficking or democracy or human rights; he just wants that sweet, sweet oil.

"Just accept mediocrity and don't resist, it'll be less painful, because we sure as hell won't stop trying to make money off of AI."

Nothing says "fact" like posting fact-checks from X.

Whatever it was you wanted to demonstrate, I don't have an account on this Nazi-owned platform so it's lost on me.

I suspect there is a market for them as a design/visualization tool for professionals. They aren't cheap or easy enough for casual entertainment, but for people with corporate budgets and a need to see what something will look like in 3D space before committing the money to actually create it, they are good deal.

Sadly, the great country I've known for decades is but a memory.

On the bright side, this is Europe's moment: Europe is a much, MUCH better societal project than the US ever was - if they can get their shit together at this pivotal moment.

Series from when I was young(er): they're usually easy to find for download, and they're just as good as new stuff. And I found the funny stuff of the past funnier, but maybe I'm biased because of age. Probably actually...

Also - at least in the case of American series - it depicts an America that no longer exists, and it feels good to see it again.

Well you know, "crunch" is something in the videogame development industry, and is not limited to Ubisoft... It even has a wikipedia entry.
A topic more specific to Ubisoft is the continuous rise of Tencent as a shareholder.

So, like Dungeons and Dragons and Judas Priest before them, AI models are now blamed for underlying mental health issues that they have nothing to do with.

Bring on the AI moral panic. As if we didn't have enough of those these days.

You're not wrong, but I think the last few decades have demonstrated what peoples' de facto priorities are. Maybe after we've lost the great majority of biodiversity, we'll regret not having done more to prevent that loss, but for now the common mindset is "I want my goods and services today, and if there's any tradeoff at all between my day-to-day comfort and the natural world's long-term existence, then I'll take the former now and hope that the latter works itself out somehow". :(

The people don't want it, but the companies do. As for why the companies want it, I'll just quote a bit of dialog from a Douglas Adams novel:

It's not "overwhelming the biosphere" that's the primary cause for concern, though. The primary concerns are human-centric: cities flooding or catching fire, crops not growing, hurricanes and tornadoes destroying infrastructure, people dying of heat exhaustion, etc. All of these things are problems already and will get worse the higher the CO2 concentration is allowed to get. Knowing that the total amount of carbon on Earth is finite doesn't help with that.

Is it an AI trying to mimic human artistry, or a human artist trying to mimic AI's mimicry of human artistry?

In the end, does it matter which?