Companies like Amazon seem to be betting on the AI taking over theory. It's probably the only explanation that makes sense now, because their reputation among skilled technical people will be permanently damaged by moves like this. It won't suddenly repair itself whenever the pendulum swings back to being an employee's market, if the great AI revolution turns out to be just another hype cycle after all.

Working at a FAANG used to be attractive to a lot of highly skilled technical people and having employment history inside that bubble used to be a positive thing on your resume. I'm not sure how true either of those things is any more. Maybe those who are still there and making premium TC in a big US city are still getting a decent deal out of it. For others, most of those big brands seem to be increasingly unattractive, and having history there seems to be increasingly regarded as neutral or even negative when employers outside that bubble are hiring.

FWIW, I'm a little more optimistic. In the UK, we don't have the kind of pork barrel politics that is endemic to some other western democracies. The ICO are, like many government regulators, under-resourced, but they are basically trying to do a decent job and I think moves like the one we're discussing here today are going in the right direction.

Your argument doesn't represent "effort" anyway. We have protestors against Israel because we are funding Israel. We aren't funding Putin yet. When we are, we can have protests about that, too.

Your whataboutism is whataboutism because you're ignoring obvious facts in order to support your argument. What about this? The answer is obvious. But you're sure that there's some other answer.

It's really whether or not government is in control of corporations, and of course the answer is yes. And that's where the "both sides" argument becomes non-fallacious: both Democrats and Republicans are united on giving them that control, and capital doesn't maintain the commons. It only wants to exploit it.

Indeed: The military-industrial complex has been the home of technology since time was time. Many technological developments have come out of military research. The space program is also essentially military, so its developments can be counted here as well.

You're asking Valve to cut itself off from sales, and make itself unfriendly. What makes Valve appealing to gamers and license holders alike is that games can be on it almost no matter what (they even allow adult games) and there are only some labeling requirements.

What would be more beneficial to me than banning games is to provide in-app compatibility information, so I don't have to go to protondb.

https://xkcd.com/927/

We got here from somewhere else. But for the record, I blame Microsoft, and I blame 3dfx for enabling them. If 3dfx had done MiniGL from the start instead of GLIDE, then we would probably have never had Direct3D. Microsoft had a basic, software-only OpenGL renderer which was famously used for screensavers like "pipes" and would have likely gone with OpenGL if it was already dominant.

But in the early days of PC video accelerators, everyone had to have their own API, and there were a ton of competing GPUs. There were around half a dozen versions of Mechwarrior II which supported different video cards — I had at least two of them, as I bought a whole bunch of those different cards to try them out. Besides VooDoo 1 and 2 in their times, and then eventually tnt, tnt2, and a gf2mx which are all kind of after the period in which this story occurs, I had a Mystique (ugly), and a PowerVR (slow), and a Permedia 2 which was actually the best of all of them at the time but just a little slower than 3dfx. I know I'm forgetting another one that I had as well, and I didn't even have all of them! Now we have all of three GPU makers, and Intel is looking shaky again...

I'm super thankful that we have Vulkan now and didn't start going back to vendor-specific standards. I think you can chalk this up to complexity. Nobody wants to have to support such things when it takes so much work to switch APIs.

Nobody said it was an invalid comparison. That is not what defines whataboutism.

It's whataboutism because the comparison is not relevant to the conversation.

You don't get to decide what is or is not a mic drop when you don't understand the words being used.

Why aren't there Tamale Trucks? Somebody should look into that.

Initially I thought it would be more prudent to wait for the next model, but the tariff threat got me to buy asap. It seems likely this is a big part of the surge.

Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.

In fact we had that here fairly recently, some older people who lost their home and had nowhere to go squatted in it and burned it down with a candle, with themselves inside of it.

Wars they didn't start, except with terrorism?

What you said didn't contradict what I said in any way, so it was purely worthless whataboutism.

I learned to recognize that kind of shit in grade school.

Wise up.