Don't forget about responsiveness! All these bloated pieces of shit are slow to start, slow to react to clicks, get into CPU usage loops or just hang entirely.

Or the fucking blight of PWAs that almost every time you start them give you a "Found an update. Restart or Later?" question that is just retarded to ask. 1Password and Signal are examples of this.

TFS (TFShittyS, I should say) is 1 anecdote of 1 dude that was cranky after having worked for 15 hours on the same thing. That 'brain fry' has fuck all to do with AI.

The end of THS and TFA even gives data: "A BCG study of 1,488 professionals in the United States actually found a decline in burnout rates when AI took over repetitive work tasks."

Best isn't the question. Sales is the question. If you do a poll of photographers, the names you'll hear when you ask what they shoot with are almost always going to be Lexar and SanDisk. Sony won't be in the top five. IMO, that's mostly because they spent a decade with their own Memory Stick nonsense while other manufacturers were claiming the SD and CF card market for themselves. It's hard to force your way into an already crowded field where everyone has already picked favorites.

Yeah, but approximately nobody uses CFExpress. It was an attempt by the CompactFlash folks to stay relevant after the SD card standard ate their lunch. No still camera I've never owned, nor any camcorders (including fairly high-end 4K gear from major manufacturers) uses it. Everybody uses SD. Even most cinema cameras (which as far as I'm aware, are approximately the only gear that *ever* used CFExpress) mostly use SD cards now, or else have removable backs with SATA SSDs or similar.

Put another way, today I learned that somebody still actually made CFExpress cards. I thought the standard was thoroughly and completely stillborn. This is a tiny niche of a niche. And saying that Sony is price-comparable on something that is so niche that it is compatible with only maybe a dozen cinema camera models built by two or three companies within a narrow range of years doesn't exactly contradict what I said about suspecting that nobody uses them because of the cost. I doubt any other CFExpress cards are affordable, either, because economies of scale basically don't exist for a product that's so low-volume.

When I go to buy SD cards — and yes, at this point, almost everybody uses SD cards — I'm not even looking at products made by Sony. I'm looking at products by SanDisk and Lexar. I would be okay with Kingston or Transcend in a pinch. I guess some folks also like Samsung, though I've been burned by other Samsung gear often enough that I don't trust them with something critical like an SD card. Sony isn't even on my list. And pretty much every photographer and videographer I know does the same.

Given that Sony screwed around for more than a decade with their own proprietary "Memory Stick" format, they basically missed the market for SD cards, and other companies claimed that market.

Based on that, at least in my mind, I kind of assume that the people who buy Sony flash cards are probably the ones who have always bought Sony, because it's the only name they know and trust. Most of those folks probably started on Sony back in the 1970s when their products were actually built to last for decades, were top-tier in features, rather than being hobbled by pressure from their entertainment division, and when repair parts weren't priced so high that a power switch costs more than a whole new camcorder (not kidding). They're probably the ones who used to buy overpriced Sony headphones for $150 that fell apart instead of the $50 Koss headphones that didn't. They're also probably the ones who still have analog land line home phones, and most of them are probably retired or dead by now.

*Maybe* some of their mirrorless camera purchasers from the last few years buy Sony cards out of some bizarre sense of brand loyalty, but I'd imagine most of them talk to other photographers and ask what to buy, and again, I'm pretty sure Sony won't be on anybody's list.

I'm just struggling to imagine them having much of a market except perhaps in niche products like CFExpress or in cheap CF cards sold at Walgreens or CVS for high margins to people who don't know any better.

But maybe I'm wrong.

No, they would only consolidate their product line if they thought that doing so would make it more profitable. That would require a high enough volume of sales to matter. Companies don't usually cut entire swaths of products because of the price point. They usually do it because the product line makes so little money that it isn't worth the extra effort to keep it going.

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.

That's what campaign donations get you, if they are large enough.

This is why congress occasionally bullies the big tech companies. We all think they might want to have some regulation or to punish them. Oh sweetie... they're saying "nice company you have there... would be a shame if something happened to it..."

The best time to leave github was when the evil empire bought it. The second best time is now.

Seriously. Anyone who thought MS wouldn't fuck it up in the same way they fuck up everything they touch can't be helped. It's Microsoft for crying out loud.

Thanks for making my point for me there bro

I'm going to go ahead and assume bad faith on your part, because otherwise you're very stupid. But nobody in your potential audience is stupid enough to believe there aren't lasting effects to being bombed to shit.

I take your point about this being before the dawn of ubiquitous tech companies, but what kind of chilling effect did the Bell monopoly have?

Do you think about me when you're jerking off, too? I know you do.

It would take an AI to not get bored trying to construct working configs for SElinux

Perhaps you did not buy a Tesla. They are probably the most service-hostile vehicle ever sold in the US. Not sure about the UK, I haven't heard stories (horror or otherwise) about service for Chinese EVs yet. They would have to try really hard to be worse than Tesla, though.

Google xkcd extrapolate

s/best/only/