This is typical Slashdot "I hate something, I can't explain why except vibes, so I'm going to pretend it's dead" fantasy nonsense.

It's never been the case that ix86 is the only architecture that can do things on the desktop or server. IBM "proved" this in the 1990s with POWER and PowerPC. DEC "proved" this with Alpha. HP with PA-RISC. etc.

However, ix86/amd64 remains the primary platform for desktops and servers. Indeed, it basically ran over all of those platforms in the 1990s and became the standard.

Could ARM supercede it? Why would it? There is no installed base of ARM server software, and the only reason it's kinda viable is most GNU/Linux stuff is open source. ARM desktop? Forget it. It's not just games, almost all non-Microsoft applications are ix86/amd64 and the source is usually not available.

It's not even as if Intel is the only company developing or pushing ix86/amd64. There's clue right there in the "amd64" bit - that whole thing came from AMD, not Intel.

So what's the reason for everyone suddenly deciding to ditch decades-worth of software and switch to ARM? Is it more performant? Seems maybe about equal right now on a power-per-watt basis - slightly more efficient at low power, slightly less at scale? Those desktop Apple ARM chips aren't powerful because ARM, they're powerful because the memory is in the same package as the CPU. But equal isn't going to cut it, it has to be significantly faster to move people away from it.

And ARM has significant limitations. It's cache and memory bandwidth unfriendly (which is exactly why Apple had to work on hooking up the memory in such an upgrade-unfriendly manner), using much bigger instructions than ix86/amd64, and needing more of them to express the same algorithms. RISC isn't some panacea, it's a technology that was great in the 1980s, and now ARM has basically had to adopt the same logic that CISC ISA chip makers did in the 1990s to make their own chips run at a decent speed. But less efficiently.

So, no, unless an open architecture non-RISC ISA gets implemented and starts making serious inroads, ix86/amd64 isn't going anywhere right now. And no, it's not because of games.

A 4yo's views aren't really relevant here. And my teenage daughter has never expressed a preference.

Disney+ is largely watched on TVs. Unless there's been some radical change the "youngsters" have been doing lately, those are still horizontal. People subscribe to Disney+ primarily to watch content that was originally created for cinemas or TVs, both of which are horizontal. Vertical videos are still ridiculous in that context, even if some people watch them on their phones.

Yes, we post-Zoomers (millennials, Gen X, and boomers) complained when people started making things vertical, but we did so not just out of habit but because vertical video is obviously stupid to any species whose eye sight is based upon two eyes mounted next to one another horizontally. Zoomers and Gen Alpha may not have realized that yet, but they will do too.

Lenovo et al make ChromeOS and Android devices. It would be very, very, hard for Microsoft to come up with a licensing condition that forbids SteamOS devices but not ChromeOS and Android.

A good question though is does it matter? If Valve is going to build SteamOS devices anyway, then they'll be available, and be available from a corporation with the power to market them effectively.

If Lenovo gets too scared to release a SteamOS device, then it doesn't mean SteamOS devices won't be available.

The other issue here would be that Valve is making SteamOS devices in form factors that Windows has yet to support. Is Microsoft going to tell Lenovo not to make a VR headset because it won't run Windows? What about a console like the Steam Machine? Does Microsoft have a TV-friendly user interface for a games machine that isn't XBox (and therefore not available to third parties?)

The other thing that bothers me is... how important is Windows to Microsoft these days anyway? Obviously they can't just drop it, it makes profits, but since the late 1990s their primary revenue has been from Office. A typical Windows user pays $50 every 3-5 years to Microsoft (via their OEM) for the operating system, but $50 a year to Microsoft for the office suite (yes, some pay nothing and do not have Office 365, but most Windows users pay way North of that making up the difference.) Server versions of Windows have been clearly deprecated in favor of Azure, and I've been kind of surprised that Microsoft hasn't just cloned ChromeOS, centered it around Edge with a Microsoft login, and improved Office Online enough to work well on it, it'd be a great way to make a free operating system for barebones hardware that someone else does almost all the support for.

And my reason for wondering that is... I just don't see how relevant desktop windows is to anyone right now other than a small group of us nerds, and gamers who hate consoles. Microsoft presumably knows that too, and they've been doing their best to switch to other revenue streams, and from what I can see have been very successful at it. So why bother having a pointless war on SteamOS that won't help them much and will attract anti-trust scrutiny in those parts of the world that have functional governments?

No it won't.

If they could make money from paywalls, they'd have more paywalls.

And many of us would welcome paywalls as a replacement for ads anyway. So I'm not even sure why you're putting it the way you are. I'd rather be the customer of the media I consume. You prefer to the corporations to dictate what you read. I like my option better.

The best way to do these renewals using an advanced autocomplete system rather than a regular, non-AI, logical algorithm is why exactly?

My concern is that the replacement really isn't sustainable. ChatGPT is not going to get better, the concept is ultimately technically limited to the level of reliability we see today, and without people publishing answers to more current questions, it's going to get stale and lose its usefulness pretty quickly.

I still find it hard to understand why that's so difficult for generative AI boosters to grasp. How will it be more accurate in 2035 if most of the information it bases its output on comes from 2025?

And if, like some, you're all going to pretend that people will still post anything but political rants and other non-technical stuff to the Internet in 2035, explain why StackOverflow is dead.

Congrats Altman, Nadella, Musk, and Pichai - we had a good thing going, you killed it. Assholes.

It doesn't feature in the John Boorman film, but it's certainly a feature of one strand of the King Arthur myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

(I would assume it's merely a detail in the original stories, as it's rather obvious Arthur *would* have a shield, but all focus would be on Excalibur because of its origins and its link to Arthur himself and his powers.)

> I think this is actually why giants like google have been enshitifying search engines, to promote the use of AI which provides better results.

I think you misread what you quoted. They didn't say (paraphrased) "AI was better than search engines", they said (paraphrased) "A rival to Gemini is better than Gemini".

I have no idea, to be honest, they're both fucking awful.

Google search was enshittified much earlier than Gemini, it was already falling apart in the 2010s, it's largely remained popular because the rivals insist on copying it, rather than trying to build something likely to give you relevant results on the first try. Why enshittify it? Because if it can give you hundreds of thousands of irrelevant results on your first try... you'll sit there for 5 minutes trying other searches. Engagement, baby. That's where it's at. Make you sit on a site for longer, and you'll see more ads.

AI had nothing to do with it, it's just adding a new layer of shit to the pile.

For the umpteenth fucking time the "Mainstream Media" is not a loony-right-wing-conspiracy debunking organization. It's a group of outlets owned by billionaires and, less frequently than in the past, giant corporations, who have no interest in truth, just serving a demographic, and most of them repeat the same shit Fox News does, and if they don't they usually are talking about other topics.

You don't know this, because you don't actually follow the MSM, you just assume what's said on various right wing sites or even Fox is true.

At best, the "liberals" have MS Now. That's not because MS Now is a liberal organization - its morning show is literally headed by a man who was considered a far right Republican in the 2000s. It's just that MS Now is pandering to "liberals". Curiously, it's also slightly more honest than the other outlets, largely because most liberals - gweihir being an example of an exception, prefer to know that what they're repeating is true and get embarrassed when called out on it if it isn't.

But no, the MSM isn't sitting watching Fox News saying "Gosh, another lie, we should debunk that". If that were the case, obvious lies, like "gender reassignment is being done on kids!" would be debunked every few days when Republicans make that lie, rather than quoted without pushback.

That's giving them far too much credit. Even if everything on the Internet was accurate, you'd expect generative AI summaries to mess up regularly because the algorithms are based upon statistics, not reasoning and logic.

If it were merely the Internet that was wrong, you'd expect a much higher proportion of AI summaries to be accurate: after all, just as Google's PageRank system made its search engine revolutionary, you'd expect similar algorithms could be used to filter out sites and pages less likely to be factual, and you'd have expected Google to implement that by now. But right now? One third irrelevant, one third inaccurate, and one third... might be accurate, but how do you tell? That's a symptom of a much bigger problem than someone on the Internet being wrong.

I am patting myself on the back for making a rare call that everything tech was going to rise in price, albeit largely based upon Trump's rhetoric about tariffs, which turned out to be even more complicated than I thought. So late 2024 I built and finished the network servers I wanted, and early last year got my main PC as much memory as the mobo will take.

This one we all have to ride out. What's infuriating is the helplessness I feel as every other article on Slashdot is about someone adopting generative AI for something it's not really capable of doing sanely, knowing it's pushing along this trend, causing people to lose their jobs - often permanently, not because their job was ever obsolete, but because the businesses that switched to AI will never recover - and seeing the entire thing crash.

Between the rise of fascism, the enshittification of businesses in general, and the damaging fads from crypto to LLMs, it's hard to figure out whether there's an end to this nightmare that doesn't ultimately end in the collapse of everything. Who knew the post-apocalyptic fiction we read as kids would end up being so wrong about the cause of the apocalypse: in the 1980s, I'd have said Nukes, not mass stupidity and con-men who are good at marketing.

ASUS has pretty good products, their mobos are great. I can't comment on the support because I've never needed it.

Regardless, it wouldn't be another reason to avoid them even if it was a legitimate complaint because everyone else is doing the same thing. You think ASUS is the only company affected by the world wide shortage of memory and other storage chips, thanks to AI and crypto and other techbro frauds?

Fiat currencies don't claim to have assets, instead they have the backing of a government and a mandate to use them.

Bitcoin basically destroys assets and then pretends they're backing it (spoiler: no, because they've been destroyed!), and other cryptocurrencies are usually worse. Indeed, only the stablecoins come close, and usually they're fraudulent. But in all these cases, the crypto-boosters pretend the unique advantage to their fake currency is that it's "backed" by something, when it clearly isn't.

Bingo, that's what it is.

If you go to the source, the words "described the consortium" (rather than just "described") are the link. The link then ends with a symbol that has an alt text of ", opens new tab" on it, which means if you cut and paste and don't look at what you're doing, you get this:

described the consortium, opens new tab,

So someone cut and paste this, noticed the link was missing, but somehow didn't notice the new clause added to the sentence!

I'm fairly convinced that despite the "Coffee is good for you!" reports on Slashdot on a regular basis, caffeine is probably a bad thing - I mean, it's the drug equivalent of overclocking your heart, how can that end well.

That said, there's a massive difference between nicotine, which creates anxiety shortly after it's been taken and then "solves" its own anxiety next time you take it, giving the victim the false believe that nicotine somehow calms their nerves, and caffeine which just stimulates the central nervous system. One is a fake, and is bad for you (nicotine lowers your defenses against cancer, which is even more awful considering the primary delivery method for the last 100 years has been carcinogenic) the other is real but may ultimately be bad for you in ways that haven't yet been proven.

I'm all for discouraging nicotine intake by all means possible. It's been proven to be a problem and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Caffeine... until it's proven that it's a problem, it should be left alone.