What I understand is that you have an insatiable taste for boot leather.

And what you don't understand is that facts don't care about your feelings (for example, facts don't care whether you feel that "I have an insatiable taste for boot leather"). The cold hard facts are that AI (LLMs) have done nothing so far to increase productivity for those essentials needed to satisfy "the basic needs of the living". LLMs haven't eliminated (or even reduced) the amount of labor it takes to make clean water or electricity flow into houses, they haven't eliminated (or even reduced) the amount of labor it take to produce food, and even factories that pump out vehicles and AC units still rely on the same amount of labor they did 10 years ago. All AI has done is eliminate jobs in CGI and sales, jobs that are "nice-to-have" jobs anyway. But when it comes to essentials, there is no increase in productivity to share, sorry.

We got those because union members fought and died for them, not magically

Yes, I've already said that, you'd have noticed if you didn't immediately jump on the reply button, search for "not automatically obv" in my previous comment. But first, there needs to be an increase in productivity to share it, and this simple fact escapes your glorious mind.

It's worker productivity, not GDP. Though if the bosses can't make more with more worker productivity, then they are fuckups.

See the first blockquote.

And what you don't understand is that there is no general "increase in productivity", different sectors receive different productivity boosts from automation at different times. Just because your sector received a productivity boost from automation, it doesn't mean the economy as a whole did. When the economy as a whole does, you get things like the 8-hour workday and weekends (not automatically obv, but you eventually do), but just because some CG artists lost their jobs to automation doesn't indicate that AI (LLMs) substantially increased the productivity of the economy as a whole.

Consumers didn't buy Unix workstations that cost as much as their car, or even Unix variants for the PC that required a ton of RAM (by the standards of the era), Microsoft's competitors were IBM (OS/2) and Apple (MacOS), with a little bit of AmigaOS (they still had a toehold) and an even less bit of BeOS at the very end. Desktop Linux was still an experiment then, only arrived on the scene in the late 90s when the OS war had already ended in Microsoft's favor and software had consolidated around the Windows ecosystem (with a little bit of MacOS).

Then what on Earth was their position?

BTW the Luddites were wrong, companies shouldn't have to engage in pessimisation (aka the use of clearly inferior processes on purpose) just to offer someone employment.

The problem CG artists have is that not everyone's job is being replaced by AI (LLMs), it's just their job and some others that are being replaced by AI. In your terms, CG artists still need the labor of others to fulfil their "basic needs of the living" (aka have water and electricity flowing in their apartment and food on their table), but nobody needs their labor anymore. It's the same shock the luddites suffered when textile machinery was invented.

Oh, my sweet summer child, OOXML is technically an ISO standard (Microsoft managed to get it approved as an ISO standard somehow, despite OOXML not adhering to ISO conventions in things such as dates and not having a reference implementation), which allows governments to upload docx files for citizens to use as forms and pretend they are issuing a standards-compliant file.

So, LibreOffice has to care about OOXML because governments issue OOXML files. You can choose to not interact with private individuals and corporations using OOXML (in theory at least), you don't have such an option when dealing with governments.

That's one of the two big complaints about OOXML: that Microsoft took their old binary formats (which, as you alluded in your post, were a essentially memory dump of the application's memory with new features overlaid on top of old ones), gave the fields meaningless names, and dumped them into XML. This was beneficial to Microsoft because they didn't have to write any complex conversion code (from the old binary formats to OOXML and vice-versa), but it's not the ISO-class format they promised the world (yet still managed to get it approved as an ISO standard somehow). The other big complaint about OOXML is of course the lack of a reference implementation, OOXML is defined exclusively in the form of English text (which makes the definition vague).

I am coming from the consumer side, and from there, Microsoft did help prevent a hardware monopoly of either IBM (which is what OS/2 was all about, aka taking the market back from the clones) or Apple (Macs technically did have clones at some point but Apple changed its mind and axed them). In plain English, the whole PC clone ecosystem existed because Microsoft provided an OS to run on it. And then you have Direct3D breaking Glide's stranglehold, and the Xbox and Xbox 360 rewriting the rules on consoles (no more weird architectures requiring custom programming). In the consumer space, Microsoft has shaped the industry, dare I say for the better, even if they never matched the ideal expectations people had.

On the corporate side, my experience is with CentOS (yes, I know, but the place was locked into CentOS long before the whole IBM acquisition), so we never had to deal with OS licensing at least for production stuff. Only salespeople run Windows.

When I think of Microsoft, I think of Windows 95 (which was better than OS/2 and classic MacOS for most people, sorry IBM fans and Apple fans), the first 4 versions of Internet Explorer (remember when Netscape was something you had to buy?), Microsoft Office, Direct3D breaking 3dfx's burgeoning monopoly in consumer accelerated graphics (in the form of the Glide API), the OG Xbox making the PS2 and its reliance on memory cards look old, the Xbox 360 humiliating Sony's silly Cell/SPU architecture, Windows XP laptops with Pentium M CPUs making PowerPC Macbooks look lame, Direct3D 11, and Windows 7.

But you see, I actually used Microsoft products.

Microsoft's problem's is that their biggest hits are really old. Their iPad envy during the Windows 8.x era, their Google envy during the Windows 10 era, and their current chasing of AI fairies means that the core experience is either in maintenance mode or even worse crappified with unwanted additions. The fact SteamOS is a mainstream hit shows how much of a stable (stale) target the Windows API has become. And the Xbox division also appears to be in maintenance mode.

At least salespeople don't make stuff. There is of course the argument that you don't want your salespeople to be a bunch of ruthless desperados (and get hilarious cases like that one in MiniScribe), but a little bit of competition among salespeople is understandable. Pitting engineers (who design the stuff and hold knowledge they are supposed to share with others) among each other by laying off the perceived "bottom 10%" on a regular basis is asinine.

Sure, but Google is reachable by an IPv4 address too. Which is the problem with IPv6: If you go IPv6-only, your service is unreachable by users whose ISPs only assign IPv4 addresses to users. Which means your service needs an IPv4 address too in order to not lose those users. Which makes some businesses wonder why they need IPv6 in the first place when their service needs to have to have an IPv4 address and being IPv4-only doesn't cause any adverse consequences.

And the cycle perpetuates itself.

Never mind that even Windows can be set up with a local account, aka be set up as a "real OS". Yes, even Windows 11 if you know how. And you can uninstall all the online service-oriented (cr)apps it ships with. Don't get me wrong, Windows has degraded since the Windows 7 peak years, but it's nowhere near bad enough to make me abandon all the backwards compatibility with software and hardware drivers it offers, for now at least, I can't speak about how Wine and Proton will be in the future.

For the case of IPv6, I find it amusing how the market has collectively decided it's cheaper to trade IPv4 addresses as rare commodities (the price of an IPv4 address has risen 10x during the past 10 years, currently sitting at around $60) and also put home users behind a CGNAT (and charge home users who want a real IPv4 address -dynamic or static- extra fees) than move to IPv6.

Something, something... backwards compatibility. But hey, we are told those EU bureaucrats will spend the time and effort to convert all those dox and docx files to odt (and xls and xlsx files to ods) in the name of digital sovereignty. I'll believe it when I see it.

And what you don't understand is that vroom-vroom lovers are AMG's main clientelle, and accountants and actuaries don't care how many of them have "empty" or "full" brains.