Yeah, I'm extremely dubious that the open source version will "sync" with the operational version. I expect the general codebase to be truly represented, but not the "levers" that can be pushed on an operational system.

. You can't just decide you don't like the algo and that you'll modify it and use a different one;

I mean, on any decent social media platform you should be able to? Bluesky has had this feature for years. Not just algo choice, but the ability to outright create your own algos and share them with other people.

It's IMHO a red flag when a for-profit company wants to force everyone to use the same algo.

And if someone at the bar thinks you're an asshole, they'll do the RL equivalent of "blocking" you.

Once again: nobody has an obligation to listen to you, and if you think you have a right to force other people to listen to your views, you're the asshole.

I'll take "Things I've Never Once Seen On Bluesky" for $1000, Ken.

The part of the sentence you omitted: "even if we don't necessarily like some of what's in Win11."

And yes, obviously yes. From IPv6 to NTFS to WSL to ASLR to PowerShell to inbox drivers to 64-bit memory addressing to being dramatically more stable, there's plenty we want. Maybe not every member of we but still yes.

Retail and OEM are not the same thing. OEM was legally not for sale in the retail channel. It was only for system builders. Yes, you could legally buy a single but only with system components. Also yes, presumably there were bulk discounts... but those should be reasonably consistent between then and now.

Will anyone even be able to get games that are 10 years old or so in 10 years? That's how you save money on games.

Generally, yes. This is one area where a physical game might not be available or get extremely rare. If it was a game that did well, then there will be reprints (all those "game of the year" or "classic" editions), but if a game didn't do as well, they often get heavily discounted and then destroyed. Though they usually only get a really small print run.

The question of whether 10 year old games will be cheaper, is a completely different question, however.

Digital games cost basically nothing to keep online, so if there are no licensing issues they generally stay online for ages.

This would also mean the PS6 would be a console I wouldn't need to get first day - because any game I would want to play will be available to purchase later on. There's no need to scramble and find a physical copy that sells out in minutes as they do nowadays - if it's digital, it's forever, so the rush to buy a game on day 1 is basically gone. Might as well wait for a game to go on sale.

It's a policy I apply for PC games - I generally wait until a game gets below $10 with few exceptions. Sure it means I play the game a few years after it comes out, but it works remarkably well enough. I mean, why pay $70 when a few years later I can pay $10. It's also not like I'm hurting for content since Steam has been around for over 20 years now. It's one of the biggest advantages of digital.

I only expect to pay maybe full price for 1 game on each platform every year. Everything else I expect to buy to cost $10. Maybe $20 if I really wanted it.

To be clear: anyone can join Bluesky, regardless of their views. But if your posts are mainly, say, calling black people monkeys, calling trans people groomers, things of that nature, yeah, a lot of people are going to block you on sight. That's not "censorship", that's just people finding you to be an arse and having better things to do with their time online than be forced to listen to you. Everyone has a right to show anyone else the door; nobody has an obligation to face harassment.

If you feel the need to force other people to listen to your views regardless of whether they want to hear from you or not, you're the asshole.

Meanwhile, here's the reality of Bluesky user numbers (drag the range to the full range). Funny how everyone always wants to truncate the timeperiod for the "user base" to have a start date of that last big spike.

The simple fact is that with any site, most people who visit don't end up sticking around, and there's a dropoff rate. The persistance rate at Bluesky is actually unusually high**. The reason for the spikes is that Bluesky's users joined in waves; you can track each wave to specific events. Those two big spikes in new users were the US election date and the US inauguration date, respectively. You can find various other spikes related to for example various things that happened with Twitter.

** The typical retention rate for a new "consumer-social" app is 40-50% for 1 day, 20-30% for 1 week, and 10-15% for 1 month. Compare that to the Bluesky data. Again: persistence has been very high; the new-user join pattern has just been extremely "spiky".

That depends on what they were trained for. Was it to uphold the law or... not? If the latter then yeah, sure. If the former, then no. The LLMs are trained on a fat core dump. The training corpus was produced without a thought even for accuracy, let alone honesty or fair play.

Yup. A little Google tells us an OEM Win11 home is between $120 and $140 US today. An OEM Win 98 license in 1998 was between $50 and $70 USD. That's between $100 and $143 in today's dollars.

So yeah, the average price has crept up a bit. But we also can't ignore that you got less functionality in the box with Win98, even if we don't necessarily like some of what's in Win11.

Ideally we get rid of MS in a cleaner way.

(To continue the discussion... Naturally they are different from IBM and cloud services are different from IBM's consulting services, but still services, if in no way other than in the sense of "being serviced".)

Portables are trash. Mini-splits don't cover a window, the connection between the inside and outside units goes through a fairly small hole, and they are much more efficient. Window units exist for stupid reasons to begin with, the solution is mini-splits.

An AC posted above about waiting for this inevitable type of comment posted by idiots and here it is!