While the pattern is the same the world has in fact changed a bit. Consumers generally expect things integrated. OSes need to include browsers, it's expected cloud storage to be included (an Apple innovation with iCloud closely followed by Google with Drive), and lets face it Microsoft was completely late to the party for any attempt to integrate an assistant at an OS level, they just slapped AI on it.

I suspect courts would not find these things anti-competitive in today's world. It's the unexpected bullshit that gets found anticompetitive, like Teams bundling with Office. Actually this has been explicitly tried in Europe, where a complaint to the EU commission directed at OneDrive bundling was eventually withdrawn in 2025 after the commission collectively yawned, ... and then proceeded to issue a ruling against Microsoft on Teams.

That is an insultingly accurate stereotype sir!

People seem to be forgetting that Ukraine is still a nation-state. That's how they can defend themselves. A guy in the basement isn't going to be able to do jack shit. First off 99% of those guys will get identified and taken out long before they get any drones built. For the remaining 1% they won't be able to throw enough drones at the problem because they're going to be too busy scrounging up food.

I don't think folks have realized just the scale of poverty that the Epstein class has in store for us. Go look up what it was like living on an American Indian reservation back in the 1800s. Think that. Maybe worse.

That a fine upstanding company like Microsoft would engage in potentially anti-competitive behavior? Perish the thought. Quick fetch me my fainting goats!

On a more serious note elections have consequences. If you like having choices when it comes to software 45 years of zero antitrust law enforcement is one hell of a consequence.

Boring AC. Stop boring everyone.

ChaptGPT being useless because the answer to that question as well is "vote Democrat for the next 4 cycles" or at least you have a chance with Democrats versus zero with Republicans.

Good for browsing and side by side though.

Companies don't care about the quality of your work or your skills. There is a small number of people who have unique and irreplaceable skills. They are a very small number. These are mostly people who are genetic freaks of one's kind or another. People who have amazing recall and focus and can learn incredibly complex mathematics or people who have incredibly good vision and hand-eye coordination who can become surgeons. Things like that.

For literally everything else good enough is always good enough.

Now if companies still competed against each other good enough wouldn't be good enough. Higher quality talent would produce a higher quality product overall and customers would flock to the better company.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law over 40 years ago. You can find the charts showing you the seven companies own basically everything. And those seven companies are owned by a handful of people when you look at who actually owns the stock.

So that gets you enshitification. I don't need to make a good product. If somebody comes along making a better product because they overall have better people I buy that company or I run it out of business. This is what Facebook does. You can look up the company's Facebook has bought and it's a who's who of up-and-coming social media competitors. Amazon did the exact same thing and it's how they became the number one retailer. It wasn't impressive tech it was buying their competitors and being allowed to do it by toothless regulators.

We broke one of the fundamental aspects of capitalism and they are downstream effects. In this case there's drastically less employment in our economy as a result and your wages and mine are substantially lower as a result.

It's a chesterton's fence. Don't pull the fence down if you don't know why it was put up

California is a large state. Is the state responsible for every paved surface? How about the counties, cities, or municipalities? Are the roads better in the deep red regions of California?

Record a video of yourself doing it then.

Post a video of yourself doing the exact same thing and we can judge.

The organisation, after Musk took over, became a cesspit of far-right extremism, in which anything the far-right "disagreed" with (such as facts and other inconveniences) were censored.

The EFF has, by this announcement, basically said that censorship did not bother them at all, that extremism did not bother them at all, that death threats against the left didn't bother them, that the only thing they were bothered by was the fact that the intellectuals had all left.

That does not give me overwhelming confidence in the EFF as being concerned with freedom.

How about they spend that time and money on improving Plex? I haven't seen meaningful improvements in their software in ages and it needs quite a few.

And we're expected to believe that can just flip a switch and rebuild a nuclear program that took them decades to build? What a laugh,

No country has ever created regime change with air power alone. It's a pipe dream.

The compounds of the ruling elite that own all of the capital and AI will be thoroughly shielded against EMP attacks of any kind.

Nobody is coming to save you. That includes mother nature. Although there is a distinct possibility that these idiots will get their hands on nuclear weapons and end our species.