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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2025

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  • I’ve watched a video of hers before. My takeaway was that Microsoft is a heavily bloated company that suffocates internal development but with the OG Xbox and early 360, they were like a side bet that didn’t have a great deal of oversight from MS Windows/Office/Server mega money eyes.

    They didn’t have a great deal of internal dev studios but they were really good at identifying third party exclusives to pursue and early on managed them and the few studios they did fully acquire well. It worked well for the first Xbox and first half 360. It differentiated the Xbox/360 from Nintendo and Playstation

    Then I guess success led to changes in leadership aimed at growth and using Xbox as a platform to push more MS services and they lost the focus and ability to identify and secure great third party exclusives. That coupled with not having internal game dev teams in numbers and experience like Nintendo and Sony meant if they didn’t hit with their living room smart device dominance ambition, they’d just have a worse PlayStation. That’s what they ended up with with the XOne - a worse PS4. Then it happened again with the XSX because of lack of execution with their internal studios. An XSX just became a PS5-lite library-wise



  • Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I’ve seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email

    At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you’d regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures

    Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it

    Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker

    Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux

    Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else

    To me there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.

    Then there’s national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn’t seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now

    Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming. Steam Deck 2 is hopefully a way more available in retail than the first deck. First product work out the kinks and prove viability. Second product and possibly AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc are way more interested in low power gaming than before as well as first class Linux support

    Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal.












  • I always find these articles being so popular in western social media weird and subtly braggy. It’s like the Lyndon Johnson quote about about making white feel better than black people so you can rob them of whatever. Such a distraction that makes people feel like we’re better than them/at least we’re not them. Yet pretty much every trend I’ve seen about Chinese ennui was at the time true of Americans and western Europeans just articles being written about the ennui would not be mainstream for a couple more years. Like minimalism during the financial crisis or recently quiet-quitting in the US were celebrated in US social media as great workers movements that are positive social movements and a sign of cultural strength while lying flat in China in US social media is a sign of societal decline. Whatever either is, it’s the same shit. It’s always weird exoticism to me. You don’t get popular articles about youth expectations about young people in Romania or Greece







  • I’d have to read more to see if I had any faith in its potential, article paywalled for me.

    In my experience with friends, family, and coworkers when people show me crazy loony shit, it’s a YouTube video or a podcast. YouTube was always the #1 crackpot incubator but I think podcasts have passed up Facebook at #2. I don’t know what goes on in the lands of twitch.tv and if that gets categorized as social media and does it even matter since you don’t need an account to view

    For a while I thought of Reddit as regularly trading position with 4chan as an anglosphere mass shooter’s favorite social media

    Not long ago I finally saw clips of early 2000s Alex Jones 9/11 conspiracy vids. They were like the crazy stuff you’d see a coworker going off their rocker would start showing people on YouTube. I think I’d expect crackpot peddlers to adapt faster than government regulators for how they reach mass audiences