Start a new site called oldiefans

You only think that's not political because you're confusing centrists with leftists.

No, it's because of all the idiotic enablers. We could just solve the problem by walking into the halls of power en masse and removing them but you can only get that kind of energy from total fucking clowns who want anarchy, and not the good kind that doesn't exist (as it leads naturally to feudalism) but the bad kind with only chaos.

Web apps make at least some sense when you are delivering the exact same app via the web and as a local application. But Microsoft isn't doing that, so they make none...

Best isn't the question. Sales is the question. If you do a poll of photographers, the names you'll hear when you ask what they shoot with are almost always going to be Lexar and SanDisk. Sony won't be in the top five. IMO, that's mostly because they spent a decade with their own Memory Stick nonsense while other manufacturers were claiming the SD and CF card market for themselves. It's hard to force your way into an already crowded field where everyone has already picked favorites.

Yeah, but approximately nobody uses CFExpress. It was an attempt by the CompactFlash folks to stay relevant after the SD card standard ate their lunch. No still camera I've never owned, nor any camcorders (including fairly high-end 4K gear from major manufacturers) uses it. Everybody uses SD. Even most cinema cameras (which as far as I'm aware, are approximately the only gear that *ever* used CFExpress) mostly use SD cards now, or else have removable backs with SATA SSDs or similar.

Put another way, today I learned that somebody still actually made CFExpress cards. I thought the standard was thoroughly and completely stillborn. This is a tiny niche of a niche. And saying that Sony is price-comparable on something that is so niche that it is compatible with only maybe a dozen cinema camera models built by two or three companies within a narrow range of years doesn't exactly contradict what I said about suspecting that nobody uses them because of the cost. I doubt any other CFExpress cards are affordable, either, because economies of scale basically don't exist for a product that's so low-volume.

When I go to buy SD cards — and yes, at this point, almost everybody uses SD cards — I'm not even looking at products made by Sony. I'm looking at products by SanDisk and Lexar. I would be okay with Kingston or Transcend in a pinch. I guess some folks also like Samsung, though I've been burned by other Samsung gear often enough that I don't trust them with something critical like an SD card. Sony isn't even on my list. And pretty much every photographer and videographer I know does the same.

Given that Sony screwed around for more than a decade with their own proprietary "Memory Stick" format, they basically missed the market for SD cards, and other companies claimed that market.

Based on that, at least in my mind, I kind of assume that the people who buy Sony flash cards are probably the ones who have always bought Sony, because it's the only name they know and trust. Most of those folks probably started on Sony back in the 1970s when their products were actually built to last for decades, were top-tier in features, rather than being hobbled by pressure from their entertainment division, and when repair parts weren't priced so high that a power switch costs more than a whole new camcorder (not kidding). They're probably the ones who used to buy overpriced Sony headphones for $150 that fell apart instead of the $50 Koss headphones that didn't. They're also probably the ones who still have analog land line home phones, and most of them are probably retired or dead by now.

*Maybe* some of their mirrorless camera purchasers from the last few years buy Sony cards out of some bizarre sense of brand loyalty, but I'd imagine most of them talk to other photographers and ask what to buy, and again, I'm pretty sure Sony won't be on anybody's list.

I'm just struggling to imagine them having much of a market except perhaps in niche products like CFExpress or in cheap CF cards sold at Walgreens or CVS for high margins to people who don't know any better.

But maybe I'm wrong.

No, they would only consolidate their product line if they thought that doing so would make it more profitable. That would require a high enough volume of sales to matter. Companies don't usually cut entire swaths of products because of the price point. They usually do it because the product line makes so little money that it isn't worth the extra effort to keep it going.

That really depends on the type of work one has to do. For me, for example, AI is quite helpful (if frustrating at times) because I have to be a jack of all trades and know a shitload of different systems, but that also makes me a master of none. So I am not able to keep all the details about all the different systems in my head, but I still know enough to either do the job reasonably well but slow without the AI, or do my work quickly with the help of an AI and still know when it screws up.

Thanks for making my point for me there bro

I'm going to go ahead and assume bad faith on your part, because otherwise you're very stupid. But nobody in your potential audience is stupid enough to believe there aren't lasting effects to being bombed to shit.

I take your point about this being before the dawn of ubiquitous tech companies, but what kind of chilling effect did the Bell monopoly have?

Do you think about me when you're jerking off, too? I know you do.

This. Constructive thinking is like searching a problem space using good heuristics. To quickly recognize and reject the blind paths and pursue the productive ones. Practice is what produces and re-enforces these heuristics.

You've got to do repeated design, build, test loops to get good. Problem with AI to date: It's up to you to "spot the hallucinations". So that learning loop is split between the AI and the developer. Nobody "gets good".

Poster seen at IBM:

THINK
or THWIM

Funny. I thought they all ended in BSOD.

It would take an AI to not get bored trying to construct working configs for SElinux