You're just looking at one axis of their capabilities.

They absolutely have gotten better, remarkably so, in the "desktop and visual use" categories. Coding? Not so much, since GPT5.5/Fable. Being able to create useful 3D models and animate them in blender, or create a fully scripted movie? Very much so.

No, you don't understand the business.

The business is harvesting training data: data that can be used to iteratively improve their models - billions of GB a day sent to them by users, data only they have.

Then they use that data mostly to do more research and create more investments and companies before their customers can make use of it.

If you're not shipping code with AI faster than ever, it's 100% a skill and/or organizational problem.

In fact, it might be the organizations themselves which are the problem. Plenty of solo devs are doing amazing work with AI.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but, couldn't they satisfy "reducing how long compromised or incorrectly issued certificates remain usable" by revoking the ones which are found to have been compromised? That data gets collected somewhere, right.

Isn't automatic renewal less than that with ACME automation, anyway? And how does ACME just 'go away' on systems which have been compromised?

That's it, I'm done with Ubuntu.

So many shitty things are being done "with AI". I love AI, but it doesn't help that the devs doing all these AI Rust tools seem to have little to zero experience with development, or thoroughness.

And for encryption? Fuck outta here.

From my math, once you account for inflation, Silicon Valley (and broader tech industry) compensation has declined about 23-30% since 2000, relative to the national average. I know multiple companies where it's basically been flat since 2012, particularly for support roles - $90-100k then is only making $105-110k now in the same roles (with some of the same people, granted, but also new blood).

Considering how many foreigners from specific countries I see in places like Omaha, NE, I'm pretty sure it's not just a problem in Silicon Valley.

That may be true, but it's irrelevant.

They'll 500 500+ Americans from Division A while hiring 500 Indians to Division B.

And then the next quarter, it's fire 500 from Division B (all Americans, mostly white men), and then hire 500 Indians into Division A - because they had a shortage, don't you know.

How was it not fraud?

H1B is/was intended for worker shortages: for roles you couldn't fill domestically. It was not supposed to decrease the wage of the role, but (in theory) keep it at parity. It was always a ruse, but that was the premise.

If you're firing people and then hiring others at a fraction of the pay, you're literally abusing it. You've applied under false premise. That's fraud.

This 'study' was clearly constructed to create narrative, not to do actual science.

"The study was conducted with 189 people."

And what was the distribution of men and women in that sample? Because that's a very important criteria.

I promise you the results would be significantly different with all-male vs all-female groups, and depend heavily on the attractiveness of the 'male' or 'female' AI persona (assuming it had visuals).

That's not the important metric. It only tells you the percentage of users, not the percentage of people who play games on Linux (or buy games).

For instance, I have a Steam account. I've got the client installed on my phone and Mac. I don't really play games anymore. I'm sure this counts towards something.

What's meaningful to those who might target a platform is what percentage of those people buy games. It might just be that Linux users are the only ones who play dungeon crawlers, for instance - which could be meaningful information.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.

France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.