Most of these "limitations" to perpetual licenses are 100% due to changes Microsoft is making themselves to retroactively limit the software: patches making it difficult to use it, making it less stable, adding dependencies. And then, intentionally making data portability difficult by altering file formats.

"Your money constantly being worth less... so that saving is impossible... that's good actually"

Very bad take. You're also wrong.

Countries got rid of the gold standard because gold isn't flexible, and prevented governments from manipulating money supply.

BTC is more flexible but also is resistant to economic manipulations. It's a good thing for stability. Stability, of course, helps dissuade warfare.

The easy money that's been made available by banks for the purposes of war, to plunder? That wouldn't be available with BTC as a standard.

So what if they can't go on the interstate?

Mopeds and under-100cc vehicles (or more -depends on state) are explicitly exempted from requiring DMV involvement.

Consider getting a different/better USB hub. The HDMI chips in those are often shit.

Yeah, the ads built into the OS, obscene levels of slowness to do... literally everything... somehow making Explorer consistently worse... all these things are an immediate detractor. It's been unusable for years and has only gotten worse.

Linux has also gotten worse for Desktop use. A decade ago there were promises of just-around-the-corner Wayland replacing X outright. Now you need them both to do anything, and Wayland is still anything but mature. A lot of this functionality feels like it's regressed. Upgrades on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) to LTS releases all seem to break basic functionality more often than they ever did before (this started becoming more of a problem around 2016 IIRC).

I switched to Mac due to them being provided by my employers (from Linux) around 2017, but I've only bought Macs myself since due to the vastly superior hardware and not having to ever have to deal with Windows again.

The UNIX environment is "OK" and `brew` makes it quite tolerable.

But there are so, so many bugs. In addition to all the points the fine article makes, my personal pet peeves:

* Apple Music is stupid when it comes to switching audio devices. It's not a bluetooth stack problem (which is another, different audio problem that everyone seems to have). Turn a headset off, and Music will switch but then complain that the audio source isn't there. Sometimes this requires Music to be restarted.
* Music "home" glitches out. A restart is required.
* Independent of the above, sometimes Music simply doesn't play despite all visual queues indicating it should be working. Other audio apps work. Usually this means I've got to turn Bluetooth off and on again (why?), and restart Music.
* HDMI support is still unstable. Not really an Apple problem due to how HDMI was designed (stupidly), but you'd think they could do something which would help me NOT have the machine crash.
* More broadly, I can't turn the Macbook screen off and set the attached display as primary/continue to use the Macbook keyboard. Why? This seems like basic functionality.
* Notes will sometimes (and regularly) enter one of a number of different race conditions when it behaves improperly, doesn't respond, or freezes. Fortunately, I don't believe I've lost anything yet.
* Speech-to-text works really poorly when you don't have a good network connection. It's slow. Why isn't this being done locally as a fallback? Android does this very well (vastly better) now.
* Siri is functionally unimproved since 2011. New features? Sure. Very small incremental changes which leaves it feeling lackluster - to the extent that even Amazon's voice interaction on the Echo works better. (Given how universally shit the Amazon software is on all their devices is, and how bad Amazon/AWS UI design is in general, that's really damning.) I turn it off on everything but the Homepod now, because otherwise my phone on the counter will intercept (and do nothing with) requests to play specific music (which is the only thing Siri is even remotely good at doing beside its random 'witty' preprogrammed trivia and banter, IME).
* Time Machine still feels like a marketing exercise. "We did this thing 20 years ago and it still works, checking off a basic requirement of computing." It has a very narrow scope of capabilities. Have they not heard of network backups before? It's conceptually stuck in the 1990s. I know they're trying to push people to use iCloud, but that is not a user-centric approach to computing and definitely doesn't suit business, professional, or hobbyist needs. I do not like the "make everything an appliance" approach of the iPhone, but can at least understand it there. The fact that it's being pushed to MacOS is unacceptable.
* Spotlight has somehow become worse at finding things. Why are you showing me internet results before the apps by the exact name I just typed? Why do I have to wait for the list to populate?
* The "unified" Control Center is also particularly garbage and it's hard to find things now, even by keyword (which often doesn't even work/find things by the exact name). This experience was significantly better than it is now 5 years ago.

While it's inflammatory... I blame DEI hiring practices for most of this nonsense. It's well known in the industry that they've got hiring practices very biased in that direction (and their offices being where they are only makes that more likely). They haven't done much good software engineering since 2015 or so... and I'd wager they've seen an explosion of color-coded Program Managers since that date as evidence.

I personally suspect that if using QT natively on Mac were easier and involved fewer shims/performed better, we'd see a lot more good open source software on Mac than we do. That, also, falls in Apple's shortcomings to some degree. Apps like Cura, VLC, Wireshark, OBS Studio, and Shotcut are all more stable and more responsive on both Windows and Linux than on Mac for some reason.

On the hardware front... they're killing it for personal computing devices (Macbook Air/Pro/Mini), and Studio looks promising but still "behind". We'll see what the future holds, I suppose.

There's one caveat to that.

If your employees all do shitty work slowly, there's very little threshold for getting worse. In which case, getting 50% more work out of them sounds very appealing.

Nevermind air pollution, these artificial fragrances they put on everything from trash bags to hand soap cause cancer. They're packed with phthalates and benzophenone...

You know what this gets you? Cancer. Almost certainly.

They need to stop putting fragrances in... everything.

The crazy thing is there ins't even a "recession". There's a forced cost cutting for stock value, and they are putting off the work needed to produce things in favor of selling things. They're effectively cooking the books and pushing things down the road so that they can reap short term profits.

" again there was absolutely no reason we had to do that but we did it anyway"

No, that isn't how "economies" work.

Economies work on the basis of human nature and a drive for resource gathering. It's the same rationale as a hunter-gatherer taking a deer in the woods with a spear: it's a deer for me, now, and not a deer for you. Fundamentally, it's human nature writ large.

You can't refactor human nature. Even in totalitarian regimes with fully managed economies (eg. Soviet Russia comes to mind), black markets catering to human nature exist. You could get Levis and Metallica albums and Coca Cola - you just had to know the right market.

Everything is zero sum because there are finite resources. Claiming otherwise is silly.

You can buy a low power integrated option from AMD (eg. the mobile or NUC-type devices) which is far better than the Intel integrated stuff. There's an entire line of AI-enabled/GPU stuff now, and has been for a while. Eg. the Ryzen AI Max coming up...

Considering you can re-train a language model for $50 and the right knowledge, and general purpose laptops and desktops (albeit, relatively mid- to high- grade) have enough power to run these LLMs locally, I don't see why it's even a concern at this point.

You can tape DeepLlama or whatever and retrain it from being a milquetoast establishment "global warming is caused by humans only and there is one Chinese government and TS never happened" to be a MAGA flat earth groyper if you wanted to for very little money, and run it locally. (There's no reason why you couldn't also run this as a service.)

The force and velocity I believe. How do they know the exact cause? Would we have record of those additional rocks somewhere?

The ancients (Greeks specifically I believe) told of the gods of the sky being in a kinetic war, with bolts of lightning and all such things.

Given we live on an electromagnet in a large solar system sized electromagnetic system, it's plausible to me that there may have been a comet or something else in the solar system (eg. perhaps another planet, such as the one(s) that created the Van Allen Belt) could've passed the moon and discharged significant (static?) electricity. That would have the force necessary to carve such canyons quickly.

On the scale of 6,000, 12,000 years, during prior civilizations, not probably, but perhaps further back. But maybe the Ancients observed something similar.

I'm still using a initv debian system.

It still works. Switch and leave it.

https://ianlecorbeau.github.io/blog/debian-bookworm-sysvinit.html