Yep. Whole society doing enshittification.

On the other hand, I wonder whether that slop will get any listeners.

The way to make money on it is to buy stock in those companies. Or stock in their customers, who are selling more stuff.

If you manage to get the timing anywhere close to right you can sell that stock and then buy real estate at foreclosure sales.

If a society can't adapt to post-scarcity then that society should get eliminated. That's just about the dumbest reason for self destruction you can imagine.

The cotton gin. It was all down hill after that.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

Apparently, "safeguards" mean "don't let the AI say something that hurts feels" rather than "don't let the AI act in a manner that is dangerous and unlawful." I say this because, apparently, Anthropic's systems have been leveraged by nation state actors for hacking campaigns (though details of this are minimal and read like marketing spiel about how awesome their tools are rather than giving information on what actually happened).

Sure. Everyone should learn Latin in school. Greek first though. You don't properly apprciate Latin if you don't already have Greek. Then a few modern languages, at least one Romance to follow the Latin plus a Germanic and some form of Chinese. Better throw in Japanese and something with click consonants too. Practical math absolutely, and shop and don't forget home ec. Advanced math too... none of this "choosing" to take calculus. Science classes should cover physics, biology and chemistry for everyone, to an advanced level. Some economics, sociology and anthropology too, and definitely comprehensive history. Every child should graduate knowing how to fix a toilet, maintain their brakes and perform competent Japanese joinery.

Irrespective of the nationality of the people making decisions, I think what the GP is getting at is that there were different philosophies over the decades at Microsoft. Amongst the things Ballmer is most famous for is his "Developers, developers, developers, developers" mantra...and the idea was to make Windows the easiest platform to develop software for, and the developers would write software that would encourage the proliferation of Windows in the market. It was a rare case of growth by "trickle-down economics" - take care of the developers, and the developers would grow the market for the platform.

Microsoft's method of increasing shareholder value during the Ballmer era was indirect - value was sought after by market capture, which was fulfilled more so by third party developers than by Microsoft itself. By contrast, the Nadella era has been about "increasing shareholder value" by pushing everyone to Azure and Office subscriptions and by putting ads into Windows and by data harvesting.

Neither era was some sort of pinnacle of customer care; both were concerned about increasing shareholder value. I think the GP is at least somewhat justified in having concern about Microsoft's shift toward increasing shareholder value by making the Windows platform being actively-user-hostile, rather than developer-friendly.

Agreed he's truly despicable. I'll also agree with dangerous as anyone who has that much money is dangerous by definition. There is nothing wrong with my understanding of ethics or principle. I also think SpaceX succeeds in spite of Musk and not because of him.

With all of that said, I fail to see how anyone's proclivities or politics play into whether or not a company they own will succeed at any given objective. I'd further argue that if you believe that someone is dangerous, you're fucking stupid if you pretend that they cannot achieve things that are clearly within their (demonstrated) capability to achieve, and the only thing you accomplish is convincing people they're less dangerous than they are.

Nice bunch of extreme lies you have there. Not any surprise.

Here is the first one: In actual reality, the industrial value of gold is not far from its market price. Typically about 50% of it. Do you really think it would get used in industrial applications if it was 100x more expensive than the value using it provides?

That comment is so dumb and disconnected, you are clearly just trying dishonest manipulation.

Well, maybe eventually it may make sense.
But not anytime soon: https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

Obviously, Microsoft is prioritizing profits over everything, as usual.

Windows 95 and 98 shipped with "Progman", a UI shell that loosely mirrored Windows 3.1. Windows XP, and even Vista, shipped with a "classic mode" Start Menu. My standards are lower now; if they could stop breaking ExplorerPatcher and OpenShell, that'd be great.

And do what? Develop UWP apps to be sold in the Windows Store that was so poorly implemented and curated that it's useful for almost-nobody - the developers still writing desktop Windows software likely have an established distribution channel at this point, so they don't need to pay the MS tax. The users have no need for it because they're either doing everything in a web browser, or using their existing software that already has a distribution channel of some kind. This means that the software on offer amounts to mostly-shovelware.

Tangential because it's Office...but they could show they're listening by making Copilot an icon in a corner when logging into Microsoft365, rather than spitting the user into a chat window by default. They're still trying to find a use case for on-device AI, and it's pretty telling that they're shoving it into the OS via annoyances, while their best example (Recall) is something that made more people say "that's creepy" than would say "that's useful". Copilot is the new Clippy in Office, there are memes about how plain-English formulas in Excel make obvious mathematical mistakes, and this is all on the backdrop of sucking everyones' data into OneDrive.

...So, by the author's admission, AI isn't a feature that matters? ...Seriously, I'm half asleep and I can still come up with holes in this argument...I don't think it's going to stop until the AI bubble implodes; the best we can hope for is for MS to implement fewer nags about it, but if Edge is any indication, I've got no confidence.

Epstein seemed to have a penchant for putting commas in random places. He used double commas too, for some reason. Epstein seems to have really liked commas and just sprinkled them liberally through his e-mails like glitter.

It probably makes more sense given their scale for them to have their own power generation -- solar, wind, and battery storage, maybe gas turbines for extended periods of low renewable availability.

In fact, you could take it further. You could designate town-sized areas for multiple companies' data centers, served by an electricity source (possibly nuclear) and water reclamation and recycling centers providing zero carbon emissions and minimal environmental impact. It would be served by a compact, robust, and completely sepate electrical grid of its own, reducing costs for the data centers and isolating residential customers from the impact of their elecrical use. It would also economically concentrate data centers for businesses providing services they need,reducing costs and increasing profits all around.