The problem with the vast amount of hardware turf that Microsoft covers is different from say, Apples, because Apple highly controls their hardware platforms, and Microsoft by its nature, cannot.

Add in driver components, software legacies, and Microsoft users continue to pay this tax, generation after generation. So indeed these issues ARE similar.

When Oracle updates key functionality, they risk a domino effect, just as Microsoft does. The QA feedback loop can help, but all old code must become crusty because of physics. Reinventing the core code then causes its own ripple effects.

There are ways to fight this, at the risk of business partners going away-- the hardware makers and software vendors with huge installed bases.

Every time a change is made, it would be wonderful to do regression testing. That's why there are "insider" programs, the little beta site for these changes because regression testing today is impossible because the installation platforms are too diffuse.

There is truth in the aphorism, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall.".

Have you ever noticed why no one celebrates Patch Tuesday in the pub? It's because they're waiting by consoles waiting for stuff to break.

Windows, client and server, are a house of cards. This goes far back in history. The citations you challenge are each provably wrong. Ever wonder why the cloud isn't rife with Windows servers? There's a reason for that. Cloud Native Windows is almost an oxymoron. Linux and to a lesser extent, BSD, have taken over that space.

In so many ways, Windows is now a legacy data OS in data centers and for good reason. It's developer community has all but collapsed. It's backwards compatibility with other house-of-cards platforms like dot-net have put ball-and-chains around its neck.

The additions of tawdry pre-release-in-production AI with Co-Pilot causes new train wrecks each and every day.

No serious services developer uses Windows as a new development platform. The metaphors you diss are a dodge. You know exactly what the remarks are about. Windows continues to be a sieve for security. Linux and BSD are far more difficult to breach, correctly configured-- and it doesn't take much.

As a developer, if you are one, Microsoft is putting you to the pasture. Have fun eating oats.

And rightfully so, IMHO. The IA has legitimate goals for fair-use, but I don't think that fair use extends to bulk copying of an archive and for profit.

It's also my belief that the Internet makes it really convenient for outright theft of other intellectual property.

You can't have it both ways; kleptocracy is evil.

I know who the maintainers are and what their responsibilities and trajectories are. While no one was looking (Linus), lots of diverse platforms became supported. Provisions were made for both very progressive (if often never ever ever used) modularity.

On the app side, an enormous number of apps found their way inside, often stuff that users (remember users?) didn't ask for but they got The Big Gulp anyway.

I indeed wrote operating systems before Linus Torvalds was born. Wrote in Byte about Linux long ago. Watched a ton of operating systems grow and fail for want of a practical purpose or momentum.

I've surfed the wave of FOSS and Linux (and various BSD) developments for a long time. I have an engineers sense of less is better, and that attack surface involves anchoring unmaintained yet still distributed JUNK into fun attacks. Or watching users (remember users?) become dogged by sheer inode displacement.

Distros don't use Darwin as their set of choices, or even public demand for their content choices. They simply shovel in stuff. More is better. This policy is provably a poor choice.

The relationship between enabling interesting stuff in the kernel and the bloat of distribution apps is highly intertwined. The kernel and app payload enable each other.

Philosophically and relating this to the OP, bloat is bad. It eventually serves too many at the price of integrity and TCO.

Bullshit.

The kernel is built around features, resources, and libs that will touch it within the kernel. This 100% disciplines the "features" that distros shove in, often with seeming hydraulic pressure, into distributions.

Yes, it's a "Swiss Army Knife" with incredible flexibility. And it is a blimp. Then there are untold lib bloats to feed edge case use of distributions. It's my contention that you could slice the entire beast in half and still have great functionality for the bell-curve use cases.

I watch kernel development. There is so much goo inside the kernel that it no longer floats, it sinks under its own weight, and drowns the OS with barnacles and lead.

Like other seemingly simple solutions, this one is wrong.

The major distros have become unbelievably bloated, with Ubuntu leading the pack. LinuxMint needs ozempic in the worst possible way.

The kitchen-sink approach is just wrong and increases attack surface, while those having no choice but older hardware with fewer resources have to cringe.

Although lightweight versions are possible, the sheer sprawl of inodes has become ridiculous. No OS should need a half-million files installed from core executables and libs and sheer goo.

If you have to use W11, it's one more thing to add to your scrape script. This is a sorry last-ditch attempt to make Xbox relevant again. Easy scrape and joins the piles of crapware that doesn't belong in an operating system.

And Linux distros could go on a diet, too. Hey Linus, it's getting FAT.

> You can't fix it by "not letting stupid people breed", you have to fix it through not letting people become stupid

This sentence seems to be somewhat self contradictory. Despite decades of trying to make it not so, it seems that intelligence remains primarily inherited from parents/ancestors.

Socioeconomic status, education, opportunities, etc all have no ability to improve iq. Nutrition only matters in the sense of malnutrition. So environmental factors can reduce IQ, but they cant do anything to raise it.

Attempting to "fix" it, which we have been doing in the first world for a while now, seems to be causing average intelligence to drop precipitously. the peak IQ in most nations is now firmly in the past 30-70 years back. I think we just have to give up on the idea that this is something to "fix" per se, and let people make their own choices as individuals.

Zhao forgets what quality, supply chain, consistency, scalability, reliability and lifecycle worth mean. His remarks are self-serving, and facile at best-- and a symptom of a deeper disease that permeates capitalism: Cheap Tricks That Don't Work.

This is Darwinism at work.

Structure, revenue, stature in the rise of developer networks.

You forget that Microsoft built itself on its addictive developer network. They harnessed hundreds of thousands of coders into an army that developed much code, some good, some bad, some hobbled by Microsoft mistakes and bad business partnering.

Now Microsoft wants to bypass coders and admins and go direct. Direct to those that would become dependent on AI related contexts, each a silo, each a house of cards with unknown dependencies and life cycle.

The idea of traditional data processing safeguards gets tossed out the door with it. Even the madness of Microsoft run-times evaporates, because each bit of code is unique, and by definition, not homogeneous and lacking interoperability with other code. A million little bits of non-related code creates a wasteland of stuff that can no longer work. Who's going to fix THAT?

That's silly.

The largest objection is the panopticon, and people's nose in others business with out the warrant or need. Remember probable cause?

What about liberty and freedom? Freedom of association? Oh, wait, that must be another constitution.

Speed cameras, red light cameras, cameras in general need to go. Raise taxes, employ competent LEOs to give fat tickets for witnessed offenses. Soon, you're going to be convicted based on AI, which as a non-human, is unable to be challenged in a court because it can't be cross-examined. What of that constitution?

This'll happen while the kleptoclass are flying over you in their drones or private jets, as you battle the streets, waiting for you to spit, so you can be fined because you're the new profit center. Yes, you.

It's not about your politics, it's about basic privacy and functionality issues. A commonality among those that don't want to be the product, is finding ways that prohibit being involuntarily monetized.

The AI rubric serves only the tech bro fortunes, and not those of the individual. It appears on the surface to be of value, but AI inconsistency, and the addictive quality of short cuts then strangles users and their needs.

This isn't about anybody's lockstep. It's about values and liberty, and human worth as opposed to shipping one's value to somebody for their kleptocracy purposes.

> The most important part which is wrong however is the idea that people who never contributed much would easily find economically equivalent work.

There is a name for that opinion: luddism.

Every single new technology shifts jobs and work, and every single time people fantasize about permanent structural unemployment, and every single time people just move into new types of work and there is no such thing as structural unemployment. Luddites back then could never imagine a world where less than 95% of people worked in agriculture, and today's neo luddites cant imagine a world without hordes of graphic artists, paralegal functionaries, music techs, and such, but its coming regardless.

Fundamentally, what people are willing to pay for always comes down to work done by others. Things that are automated, at best, shape how people work, and what work attracts more or less pay. Just as a shovel helps you to dig, a DNN helps you slop out boilerplate text with errors, so you dont need to pay as many people to do it.

These two fundamentals never change when a new tool or technology is used

* some people get more productive to some degree using the new tools
* That frees up labor to do new things, and the economy as a whole grows, because the new things have value

Its possible there will be a growing field of content curation; The DNN's & LLM's basically explode when their outputs are fed back their inputs. So instead of making tons of derivative works de novo, many creative types will instead become art critics; helping to curate an input set to train the machines that synthesize generated works.

paying taxes is also negative growth, so that part doesnt even matter.

The reason for "AI" causing zero gain is because its not "AI"; its not people, its not independent economic actors with agencies.

The name "AI" is nothing but a marketing gimmick, a lie.

What we have are just tools; helpers. And like any tool, the best they can be is productivity enhancers for people. But what these tools excel at is mostly economically unimportant work; shoddy art, boilerplate text, remixed music. So they make something with nearly no impact require fewer people.

Even if every single B-grade graphic artist, musician, and every contract and legal functionary gets put out of work by these babble generators, no real economic impact would be felt because those fields never contributed much, so the people freed from such work would quickly find economically equivalent work of any kind.

If there is to be any gain from the whole overinvestment bubble, it will be improved search engine answers. Like today, they will still be questionable, full of random errors, and politically slanted by the local jurisdiction. But they will be slightly better for what they are.Just like with search engines, people who are adept at prompting queries and filtering through the results will be slightly more productive than people who are not.

But it will take an awful long time for their meagre gain to measurably exceed the insane overinvestment lost in "AI".