Pretty much this. They started to realize they spent too much on tulips, and now, to keep the money coming in, they have to find a way to force everyone to continue believing that buying tulips is the best deal ever conceived by humankind.

In fact the agents simply copied fragments of C compilers from the internet until they ended up with something that (barely) works. I would consider it noteworthy if they only had the specification of what the compiler would have to do and no ready-made compilers to use as examples.

The problem lies with CEOs and the people around them. Most engineers and developers haven't been fooled, but CEOs are seriously vulnerable to accepting absurd ideas if someone “important” (or who can pass themselves off as important) swears that the idea in question will fill the company with money. Right here in my company, every now and then some director stupidly wants to copy the ideas of the “market” (which nowadays boils down to maximizing value for shareholders even if it DESTROYS the company) and no one can convince him otherwise because “the market said so.” I feel like tearing apart every son of a bitch who says “the market wants this” or “the market wants that” as an excuse for really stupid ideas.

When all this hysteria surrounding “AI” ends and people realize they've been deceived into yet another "tulip craze"... the crash will be ugly, very ugly.

The point is that while he is working, he is physically close to his father. So if any problems arise, he can act immediately.

Now they are appealing to “scientific articles” trying to claim that “AIs” (in quotes because they have nothing to do with actual intelligence) think, reason, and are now similar to what the human brain does. Not only that, but they are also paying a lot of people right here on Slashdot to downvote anyone who goes against the hysteria.

Look at the situation from a South American perspective. China has been proposing trade partnerships in exchange for access to the region's resources. What does the US offer? The US sticks a gun to your head and demands that you only do “business” with them, where the terms of the "agreement" only benefit the US.

Imagine which partner we here in the South will prefer?

Even the orange guy himself admitted that his motivation is venezuelan oil. He will invent the most absurd excuses to attack Venezuela, and he won't stop there. Soon it will be Mexico, Colombia (Argentina has already surrendered for a piece of bone). I wonder what excuse he will invent to invade Brazil, the "terrible" Brazilian jabuticabas?

My “friend,” I'm not the one saying that Windows gets some things right and others wrong. What's saying that are more than 30 years of improvements (and mistakes along the way), to the point that the vast majority of the market uses it (and it's not just “Microsoft's imposition” as you fanatically believe).

Same thing about the Linux desktop. Today we have more than 300 different distros (and counting), but even so, all of them combined don't account for 6% of the market. If Linux were as good as a desktop as you religiously believe it to be, it would be the dominant desktop on the market and Microsoft wouldn't have much to do about it.

So, stop shouting from the rooftops that Linux isn't taking off just “because Microsoft won't let it”; the facts tell a different story. And as long as Linux developers don't get their act together, the year of the Linux desktop will continue to be "current_year + 1" and that worries me too, despite what you may think, because as you so rightly pointed out, the Windows after Windows 7 is going down the drain, and with the Linux desktop in its current state, we may end up without any desktop that's good enough.

Nah, you're just being like a religious fanatic right now. You can only see the flaws in the Windows desktop (and there are many) but you're blind to its strengths, while you only see the strengths of the Linux desktop (which, honestly, I've seen very few so far) and can't see the flaws that prevent it from being genuinely good enough to replace Windows.

Tip: We will have a Linux desktop truly capable of replacing Windows when Linux developers finally recognize what is good about Windows and copy those good parts, fix the bad parts (or avoid doing the same mistakes), and most of those developers agree to focus their efforts on one or two good desktops instead of each making their own because their egos are too big to collaborate with others.

You're probably just trying to find a reason to offend me, but I'll make an exception this time.

What the other commenter completely ignored is that I am NOT saying that Windows (currently version 11) would be the best option, far from it. What I am saying is that Linux is failing to be a viable alternative for the average Joe, because if you have three Linux developers arguing about how they should make a desktop, you end up with three distinct desktops where none of them are good enough, thus forcing the average Joe to continue using Windows even though it is getting worse, as you have noticed.

You came here to comment with such fanatical hatred that you couldn't even make a single meaningful comment? Tsk. All you managed to do was reinforce my point.

It's partly because of childish attitudes like yours that people continue to use Windows or Mac. And I'm not going to bother explaining why this time, because you obviously won't understand.

I currently know of a pretty good one called “Windows 7”... You know, the one with over 30 years of refinement behind it? (And the one that Microsoft is foolishly trying to abandon in favor of a phone interface?)

You can hate Windows as much as you want, but there's no escaping the fact that it's a good desktop (well, until the newbies took over and started the disaster that is Windows 10/11). And being unable to recognize its strengths is one of the reasons why the Linux desktop continues to be the disaster it is today.

You are looking for “malicious motives” where the reason is simply something more practical. Assuming I spend “x” to produce a Windows application, I have to spend “x” to produce the same application for Ubuntu. And then probably more ‘x’ for Slackware, meaning I have spent “2x” to support Linux. And while my “x” spent on Windows will probably last for years, what I spent on Ubuntu will almost certainly be lost in the next major version of Ubuntu, and I will probably have to spend another ‘x’ on Ubuntu, bringing my cost to support Linux to “3x”. And note that the market size for my Linux application is only a tiny fraction of the market for the Windows application.