Well yes of course, at least outside of the workplace. Just go outside, you will see that most people with laptops (which I'm counting as "desktop" here) that aren't Macs, run Linux. Go to non-business conferences and look at what the presenters have. I mean it's roughly 30 years past the "Year of the Linux desktop". It's mainstream, particularly for client devices.... and I'm not talking about Android and such.

If you look into the market, you will find that PCs are now offered with Gigabytes of RAM. That doesn't make sense for MS-Dos and Windows.

So essentially if you are using ad-blockers or Javscript-blockers you are not counted. Since those tools are not evenly distributed, it is very likely that Linux is severely undercounted. That's why the absolute numbers are so bonkers compared to everyday reality.

EU technical regulations are not just there to replace power bricks with confusing and utterly incompatible USB-C variants, they can make sensible decisions, too. The obvious next step would be to promote a fixed number of standard battery sizes.

There's kdenlive which works very decently.

Hmm, typically compilers on modern unixoid systems are not language specific, instead you have a language specific front-end while most of the compiler is generic.

So for example there's gcc which offers ga68, the Algol-68 compiler.

For example there are much fewer random ware packages running under Linux. There's also much less ad-ware. There's also a severe lack of "very low quality" software, though Ubuntu and the Free Desktop crowd sometimes seem to try and mitigate that.

Exactly that's why it's also on the rise in Germany, despite the current government trying its best to stop it. I just makes so much sense that it cannot be stopped. It's just so affordable that at least home owners can simply invest in it.

It's a microeconomic decision, it will rise from the bottom up. It's not like macroeconomic decisions you can just dictate from above to suit the needs of some big companies. (like it's done in Germany with cars)

... kinda never was valid. After all, countries like the US can already force Apple to comply to their will... and companies like Apple or Google have no motivation to admit that they are doing it. Mock trials can be arranged easily while, in the background, such cooperation is already happening.

Or to put it differently, Apple can already get at that data.

The car industry in the "west" has a big problem, the market doesn't grow. You won't be able to sell twice as many cars as you do now in X years, as your market is saturated. The only way to increase revenue (without doing anything difficult) is to increase the price of the cars themselves. If you don't grow, investors will get angry.

Car manufacturers saw the switch to electric vehicles as a way to increase car prices. That's why they offered them at higher prices than comparable ICE vehicles.... even though the costs to make an electric drive-train are now smaller than for an ICE. (which was predictable and predicted of course)

Chinese manufacturers don't have that problem. They sell more cars every year. They don't care about raising car prices that much. That's why they now offer affordable electric cars.... BTW the total subsidies the Chinese government puts on Electric cars there... are in the same magnitude as car subsidies in Germany. (Germany is obviously a much smaller market)

Now how to get out of this problem? It is similar to the problem the photographic film industry faced. The successful example of a company managing to deal with this change was Fuji-Film. They realized that they had lots of "side projects" that came out of the film manufacture business. They made special plastic sheets for LCDs, they were making chemicals for the pharma and cosmetics industry. They had consulting businesses for emulsions. They realized that they could strengthen those "side-quests" to get through the storm. Today Fuji-Film not only still exists, but it's a strong company again... and yes, they still make film, but now it's just a small part of their business.

Could this be a model for the car industry? In theory yes, however, at least in Germany they went through extreme outsourcing. There is virtually nothing left that is not directly car related that is non-trivial to do. They don't have knowledge about rubber... since the tires are outsourced. They don't know about semiconductors... since they outsourced that.

We are talking about $400k for a movie. That's an insane amount of money, only very few movies can recoup that much money. The cost of AI video generators is likely to go up, once the companies start trying to move their business model from "burning investor money" to "not making to much of a loss".

In fact such systems have existed before fiberoptic cables... however there is a problem they have called "weather". While microwave links, which BTW can also reach 10 Gigs if you plan them right, will fade a bit in rain, laser-based systems typically fail completely and much faster.

For decades it never managed to get out of its niche, and there seems to be no progress on the horizon to change that.

I mean that was one of the big things with Chicago when they wanted to re-rejuvenate Windows with Windows 95.

Particularly if you have a system that supports multi-agent teams, you can just spin up a bunch of them, create a harness that makes them talk to each other in real-time and tell them what you want to do. It's not hard to do that.

For companies like Amazon that probably makes sense. They want to prolong the bubble of "Frontier model" companies. For the rest of the world, price hikes will eventually make them creative. My prediction is that we might see something a bit more clever than current coding agents that can deliver good, if not even great, results with comparatively tiny models. The smaller the model the easier it is to train, so maybe... future models will be so small you can train them for your project, on your own computers, for a fraction of the price of current solutions.
Nobody knows, but at our company, the next Anthropic price hike will mean very substantial costs for the company I'm working at. The kind of cost that gets you a substantial number of programmers.

Yes, but you can easily achieve that by just slowing it down. It's CMOS after all. Considering you get speed anyhow by having lots of parallel chips, that's perfectly doable.

It's not that hard to build such an SSD. Yes, cooling can become a problem, but there are established ways to deal with that. Essentially it just boils down to comparatively simple packaging. You just put more chips onto boards and cram more boards into your case. Putting chips onto boards is something that scales very well.

The hard thing is to do that cheaply.