Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?

Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.

Ok, but… what if the bank asks where you got the gold? Or they ask if you have proof you came by it legally, and then the IRS notices you have a bunch of outstanding loans collateralized with an asset they have no record of you obtaining or paying taxes on the income used to obtain it.

Like… with the cash, you just… spend it on stuff. If you need to pay for something not in cash, then just open a cash based business and overstate your sales.

Or you could… just… list those things as unspecified income and pay taxes on it and not worry about slipping up and going to jail.

It must remain unharmed

I don’t think these companies are worth the value of the paper that their charters are written on. I don’t think many of them are going to last much longer, but he might actually be on to something here in terms of diffusing a massive financial fraud that’s about to happen in broad daylight.

The common wisdom right now is to just “put your money in an index fund, it’s safer and outperforms actively managed portfolios.” Which is to say, a fund that just buys a little bit of everything from a given list, rather than trying to pick stocks that someone thinks will do well, it creates a very diversified portfolio that is protected from anyone company fucking up by having the value spread over as many things as possible. Because many people just put their money in index funds now, getting listed in an index kind of guarantees that lots of people will be buying the shares consistently and thus consistently causing the price to rise over time.

To get in to these lists, normally, a company has to have been public for a while, generally about a year, and show profitability for a prolonged time. These rules have recently been changed though.

A bunch of the AI companies are doing initial public offerings (IPO meaning putting their shares on the public markets for the first time) in the next few months. And stating absolutely insane valuations. Because of the rule changes, they’re basically all getting immediately listed in index funds. And since they’re all targeting insane valuations, they’re going to automatically suck up a bunch of retirement money by default.

I’m not sure about anthropic and openAI on this next part, but SpaceX (which just “bought” Xai), is only going public with about 5% of it’s shares, so theoretically they can just trickle more shares on to the market to get bought up by index funds, and because supply of actual shares is artificially constrained, it will lead to massive overvaluation of those shares, taking up a disproportionate amount of money going in to index funds.

It’s actually fucking criminal that this is being allowed to happen, but because the rules for index funds and IPOs are set by financial institutions and stock exchanges, with very limited oversight by the government, they can just do this.

If the government were to take these 50% shares, it would kind of throw a wrench in the plans, since it would give the government the ability to sell those shares on to the market and stop the over valuation that allows them to take disproportionately from the index funds.

Asahi is still getting a lot of work and development done, but since they’re reverse engineering everything without proper documentation from Apple, they basically get kicked back to square one on any component that Apple makes big changes too with each new generation of chip. They’re more focused on polishing off support on older chips and keeping what they have up to date rather than jumping on every new chip release and leaving stuff unfinished on the older ones

So right now M1 and M2 Macs are fully supported. M3s are mostly working but very much a WIP, and M4 hasn’t really gone anywhere yet.

I’d say that if you find the advantages of the M chips really compelling, but want to stay on Linux, an M2 running Asahi is still very competitive, and the work to support the M3s is chugging along.

If you want the newest hardware possible, then yah you’re probably better off with an AMD or Intel based computer. There are also some other ARM based desktops out there, and Linux on arm is a thing, I have no idea what’s going on over there though.

… shut!

the leadership at a lot of companies have a very poor read on public sentiment, kind of strange given how much data they collect and how much they like to talk about how good they are at using that data.

And a lot of high level leadership at collages run in the same circles are executives at big companies. These speech events are sort of a benefit for both sides, the leadership at the collage gets to advertise what a good job they’re doing that they were able to get someone so influential to speak, and the speaker gets a sudo-academic platform to state their ideas and an ego boost from the huge in person captive audience.

A lot of them just kind of write off the discontent they see as “a vocal minority”, so when mass confronted with actual public sentiment, i do think it kind of blind sides them.

“ NOOO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BRO! OUR BUSINESS MODEL DOESN’T WORK IF WE CAN’T DO MASS SURVELIANCE BRO!”

Gondwana, Laurasia, Pangaea.

Arch is fairly easy in my experience to install. I did install in manually once and that took a while but wasn’t difficult.

Since then I’ve just connected to WiFi then just run the arch install script which is prepackaged in the ISO now.

Actually using it has had minimal issues except for the time I didn’t use the machine it was on for a few months and couldn’t get it to update because the signing keys for stuff was out of date. That and an issue with running out of memory when trying to compile a browser from the AUR (I just installed it through flatpack instead).

… I kind of like that actually.

So, CD-Rs in particular are very bad with regards to stability because the thing you are writing too is a layer of dye. Some are better than others, but basically all will have that dye brake down and fade over time. The type of plastic in the disk as well, a few Japanese disc producers were notorious for using plastic that had a tendency to absorb moisture form the air that would rapidly cause the disks to degrade.

There are other methods of writing though. CD-RWs for instance are much more stable as instead of burning away a bit of volatile dye layer, they are writing to a layer of metal alloy by melting it a little to change it’s crystal structure.

The same is true with recordable blue rays, with Low to High disks using the same sort of dye burning as CD-Rs, High to Low disks use a variety of different mechanisms to write, but some use a similar melty metal as CD-RWs.

They do have their own App Store, it’s just only got like… 14 apps in it. Mostly just the stuff they’ve made them selves that they’re super confident in the security of, as well as a couple of other app stores like Accrescent

To start allowing submissions of any third party app to it would ether require them to do a ton of vetting to ensure it meets their standards, or for them to drop the standards for security and privacy for it. If you want more than that handful of defaults, Accrescent and the google play mirror are there ready to be installed

“No! We swear we can make money! Seee! Phone? Phone make money! We make phone! Please give us more money to throw in to the money shredder.”

Exactly, this is the problem. This is anticompetitive behavior.

It’s not anti competitive if it is litterlay also what all the competitors are doing, and have been doing since the very dawn of digital markets for software. It also dubious if they could legally even set up such interoperability even if they wanted to, as it could potentially violate parts of the DMCA.

They’re not doing anything to destroy their competitors, they’re not a monopolist, and the repeated failures of court cases against them all over the world shows that. There are a few on going cases against them, but, there are far far more cases that have already finished that failed to show any monopoly seeking behavior.

Public companies do not actually have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. That is a myth based on a misreading of the Dodge V Ford decisions. That specific reading of the precedent of that decisions has never actually been used in a court case to charge a CEO.

The difference was that people pretended like Google ever had an option to “not be evil”. At the end of the day, they were a publicly traded company, and thus, line must go up, or else the collective hive mind of the public market would vote the leadership out and replace them.

Steam is private, thus, the current leaderships can ignore the demands of the public market hive mind. Private companies can be evil, but it depends on who owns them. They’re not guaranteed.

A monopoly is when all competitors have been destroyed, not when competitors aren’t particularly competitive. At least, under the letter of US law.

If they start being stupid, they’re suddenly on par with the competitors already being stupid. Suddenly they have viable competitors.

They do have competitors, they competitors just aren’t very popular. There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.

To be declared a monopolist requires that a company already has destroyed or is actively seeking to destroy competitors through anti competitive behavior. Even if people mix terms, the general idea is that they’re not doing anything unreasonable and anti-competitive to gain their position in the market. They have competitors, they’re just not popular, and steam has not done anything to make them unpopular.

The real danger is that if steam decided to suddenly start being externally anti consumer, like many of it’s competitors already are, it would be difficult for people to migrate away due to a lack of interoperability between services. Users can’t transfer licenses to play games between services, nor can they easily interact with social features on other platforms. But that’s not really steam’s fault, that’s how all the competitors (for the most part) work as well.