"We're going to make ourselves absolutely dependent on a rabid dog for a thing we have to have and can never actually turn off so that if the rabid dog attacks our neighbor, the rabid dog might be slowed down by us turning off the thing we can't ever actually turn off" is logic that could only ever exist in European parliaments.

Idiots. Arrogant, cowardly idiots with the blood of millions on their hands, now.

It wasn't a momentary, passing thing. Activism in the west against civil nuclear power, especially in Europe, has been heavily driven by Russian intelligence for decades precisely because - surprise! - kneecapping European energy independence serves Russian goals and makes the Russian petrol empire more money. European energy policy was under sustained attack, and once bad actors got into various drivers seats, the Euros were too proud and arrogant to listen to anybody trying to send up warnings. Now they're paying the price.

Oh, and the previous German prime minister who oversaw most of the major German nuclear energy drawfown (Schroeder) was probably either compromised by Russia or a full blown Russian asset; he went from the PM office to a board seat at Gazaprom. Merkel is heavily suspect as well at this point just based on the blatantly obvious results of her policies, including the ones she continued from Schroeder.

Whatever. They can eat the consequences of their own arrogance.

Today I learned that the states proposing these insane 3D printer bans, California, Washington, and New York - some of the most rabidly liberal states in the US - are, in fact, "red states".

I mean, if you mean USSR red, then... yeah.

(Yes the irony of 'stopped reading' was deliberate)

We can ignore them.

Anyone who tells you reading is a problem wants you to be less smart than you would be if you were reading, and does not have good intentions.

I don't care if somebody is an immigrant or not. Their actions are what I care about. Either they hold to and live by values I respect and am compatible with, or they don't. That's not immutable characteristics, that's choices. If they hold to the values I this country hold, they're my brother, full stop. If they don't, they need to go somewhere else that works for them, because that place isn't here and I'm not okay with terraforming it to fit them instead of us.

That makes exactly zero sense.

We handle criminal citizens internally because they are family, not guests.

We deport criminal guests precisely because they are guests, not family.

It's so painfully self-evident that anybody arguing otherwise is probably being deliberately obtuse, and that's being generous.

I mean, you're right, but stop and look at it from Microsoft's perspective. They don't really care. They're pushing Windows with every release to be more like a mobile OS because that's what the average casual tech user knows and uses daily. They've moved productivity software from local machines to the cloud as subscription software, which is basically OS-agnostic. It doesn't care if you log in from an iOS tablet or somebody running Haiku or FreeBSD.

They're actively trying to replace most of their actual, human developers with AI, so losing their larger developer ecosystem is clearly something they no longer consider a major risk.

They have major vendor lock-in in the large corporate spaces because of regulatory and compliance lock-in, plus inertia. PwC, Goldman Sachs, and Lockheed Martin aren't moving their office drones to Linux Mint any time soon. Some of them can't even if they wanted to because Windows + certain security solutions are required as part of various regulatory compliance modes for their field.

Basically... Microsoft is only doing Windows anymore because it sort of gets them other things they actually want, and the days of it still being the key to those things are very much on the downswing.

I think part of the problem is that even Microsoft doesn't really care about Windows anymore. It's an obligatory means to their actual goal. The key computing markets are corporate customers and gaming; mundane everyday users have shifted mostly to mobile or web stuff (like Office 365), and corporate customers are the 900 lb gorilla because gamers are vocal but small as a group in comparison. Big data centers are mostly running some flavor of *nix (even MS or Amazon ones), and let's just skip the MacOS folks. Don't get involved with cults.

So for MS, Windows is a thing they have to do to keep large corporate customers who buy tens of thousands of licenses and service contracts every year for hundreds of millions of dollars. They don't even really care about Bob Smith, basic PC Owner. There's no money for them there and it's a shrinking market anyway.

You can either use the flexibility of a free project - not driven by profit motive - to displace an uninterested party with motivations elsewhere, or you can threaten their piggy bank by displacing their larger cash cow (corporate level bulk use). But gamers as an OS market will not swing Microsoft. Microsoft will just keep doing Xbox stuff (possibly even on Playstation). They're too sclerotic to meaningfully tackle a smaller market like PC gaming. Maybe 20-25 years ago, but not these days.

Quit selling dual-use technology to a nation that wants to destroy us with it, Huang. It's pretty simple.

Your quarterly earnings won't matter if the West Coast takes AI-coordinated cruise missile strikes from the Chinese Navy.

I have a strong suspicion that historians 100, 200, maybe 500 years from now won't look at Apple as a technology company and Jobs as a leader and inventor, they will look at them as harbingers of disastrous unforseen consequences, like Whitney and the cotton gin or Nobel and nitro.
Jobs created a device that has directly and indirectly unraveled centuries, and in some cases millenium, of painstaking civilizational growth and development... and he will be remembered for that, not one company or a UI innovation on desktops.

Also he was an asshole.

Altman is the most flat-out sociopath of all the techbros and it's not close.

When even Elon Musk thinks you're a lying two-faced snake, that's called "a clue".

Look up their concept of "help vampires".

Basically, if you ask for "too much" help or don't try "hard enough" yourself first (which is entirely subjective), they ban you.

Utterly toxic elitist bullshit and I actively steer new Linux users away from Arch because of it.