OK. Old man rant. But I've been saying this for years about streaming apps. How is the overall quality so awful?

It is *stunning* how bad they are and people just put up with them. If you have two or three streaming apps, you will be constantly playing whac-a-mole with the same basic set of player bugs all the time. And somehow, even trillion dollar companies can't handle syncing where I am watching a show across multiple devices, it's the software challenge of our time.

When I press the "next show" button in a series, I really, really, really . . . don't mean the episode I just watched two days ago, I mean the next one. Apparently no one is able to even come close to doing this reliably.

For years now, Apple has introduced a big feature everyone seemed to think they want: a unified queue across many apps. The thing is, it's terrible. In theory, it shows you where you are in a show/movie, in a list, across multiple apps, on multiple devices. Watch half a movie on my phone, then launch it on Apple TV, it should go to that same spot. This ridiculously simple shortcut feature, from this trillion dollar company, works, at best, 50% of the time.

And the thing is . . . streaming is supposed to be the hot new business every tech company can't stay out of. Amazon and Apple, huge software companies, spend tons for shows, and produce terrible software. Disney is basically staking the company on it, same for WB. *How* is it so bad, while also being so basic?

It should have been two minutes long. It should have included John Hodgman. It should have come out a least a year ago.

To an extent, maybe they really do. I mean maybe they are fine with literally doubling the Linux desktop market share if it overall turns Windows into what they want, a SaaS/app store platform.

But it really seems they are wildly overestimating just how captive their audience is.

It reminds me of when they got all that bad press for trying to kill physical games on the Xbox. At the time it was like, an understandable move from a big company leveraging their control of a platform.

That was ten years ago, and I'd draw a straight line from there to the rumors today that Xbox is literally going to die, this is its last generation of hardware.

Sounds familiar. Five, maybe ten years ago, we hit the peak of Stack Overflow Cut and Paste.

I was fortunate to mostly retire from tech a few years ago, but it was already becoming way, way, way too much of my job to walk on egg shells code reviewing junior people who would submit large PRs, and then clam up and get real awkward when asked any questions about them, because well, they hadn't written more than 10% of it. Being diplomatic about it was a never ending challenge.

This just seems like the next, much worse step in what had already begun. I'm . . . really glad to not be dealing with it.

(I worked in the edtech industry and higher ed for about fifteen years before totally burning out.)

This is the natural end game of the horrible way we've structured education for decades.

When you pump public money though grants and guaranteed loans into a system of quasi-private universities, they are incentivized to take every student they possibly can.

For decades universities have been trying to admit everybody, while maintaining that they are elite and valuable precisely because they don't admit everybody. So overtime, grades and tests have become more and more of a sham. They are now truly teetering on the verge of being completely meaningless.

Even worse than the system being dumbed down, is how biased the system we're left with is. The more nebulous the grades get, the more they really just become a reflection of how much your teachers like you. White girl students dominate a K-12 system that is in turn dominated by white woman teachers, weird. Probably no connection.

I mean wait, kind of the quiet but most interesting part of this:

One of the lawsuits names 4chan and X as defendants, *alleging that they allowed bad actors to spread users' personal information*.

It might be the most ironic lawsuit ever. How many people can turn around and sue . . . Tea . . . *alleging that they allowed bad actors to spread users' personal information*.

This is truly the most ridiculous timeline.

This is the problem that doesn't get brought up nearly enough. They all act like they have some huge moat and will eventually dominate some huge market, but it doesn't seem like they will. They don't have some intellectual property portfolio like Microsoft, or some opportunity to make GPT a monopoly like Windows. None of their brands have any value, they're all so easily replaced. You can run a successful business at a huge loss for years if you have some way to make it hard for your customers to leave you when you start enshiffifying things on them. None of the AI companies seem to have that.

"GPT" will almost certainly never be a verb like Google. Somehow the hype train rolled right past the Deepseek scare but it . . . shouldn't have.

I'm old. I consume all kinds of content at variable speed depending on how interested I am in it and what I need out of it.

Because I'm *reading* it.

More and more young people *only* listen to and watch videos. You skim some articles? They're doing the same thing, but reading less.

The other factor is, especially on YouTube, videos are garbage. The algorithm/ad model rewards length. There's lots of really interesting, informative stuff on YouTube, but dragged out to an hour for five minute content. It's going to make AI summaries seem way more useful than they should be to the same crowd.

It's already night and day using a Linux desktop with regard to how vendors support it from a few years ago. Not that long ago, expecting things like Netflix and Spotify to work was out of the question, now you can pretty much assume they are all aware of and support Linux.

More and more hardware vendors, peripheral makers, are contributing their own support, directly to the kernel. I bought a PS5 controller a few years ago but no PS5, because I saw Sony had contributed the drivers directly to the kernel, and they work great. It seems extremely likely that in another 2-3 years, it will surpass 10%. At that point, you'll really be able to expect to go and say, buy a mouse or a monitor or some USB speakers, and have the hardware manufacturer be paying attention to Linux. At that point, I don't really care what the market share is, but normal people can have a big tech alternative without a lot of hoops to jump through, and that's a good thing.

It's hard not to think the surge in Linux desktop users wasn't a big factor in this.

Weird times.

https://jangernert.gitlab.io/b...

NewsFlash is excellent if you're a GNOME user, or probably even if you aren't.

Use it every day.

Yeah. I mean a few weeks ago on github, I accidentally clicked the preconfigured "generate me a Pong game" prompt and played around with it for all of ten minutes.

So I mean, technically I've tried Copilot . . .

And it was alright, pretty cool even, but come on. It's not as if I was flocking to it, they put it in front of everyone on Github, a thing they bought.

For sure, but it's definitely just part of it. They break down the hardware and distros used. SteamOS is a bit under 30%.

The momentum is undeniable. At this rate it could pretty easily break 10% in 3-5 years. It's already having a lot of subtle but important effects. Peripheral makers like 8bitdo, Hori, and even Sony, are all supporting Linux all of a sudden. Tons of game publishers are too.

Oh yeah, it absolutely played a big part. This timeline of 2FA even has a special section about it:

https://www.newamerica.org/in-...

Basically Apple had to scramble, to both insist that their systems were not hacked, but also that they were doing something about it. So they finally started pushing 2FA, and where Apple goes, the industry goes.

There's a cyber security angle to this story that I don't think is getting talked about nearly enough.

I think it was the Target breach a few years ago, where a huge number of non-techie people just stopped caring about data breaches. They gave up "I just assume my data is out there anyways" and the like became a normal line.

But with this . . . people are going to get mad. The "fappening" moved the needle. In about a year suddenly every big company adopted 2FA. Will this finally make the US adopt some serious data protection rules? Will the class action against Tea that's likely coming actually drive them out of business?

Big precedent setting events are likely on the way.