I don’t know if they get a share or if they get a flat payment for every device that has crap preinstalled. Either way, not doing it would reduce profits and therefore go against the interest of the shareholders who would then have grounds to the CEO for failing to do their job.

I’m very much unhappy with how that works but it’s a consequence of how publicly traded companies work. Companies that make it their legally binding goal to maximize shareholder gains attract more investors, have more money, and are thus more effective in increasing their market share. Over time they outcompete their rivals until the market is dominated by maximally profitable companies.

At that point, shit-free products are only available if there is a clear indication that they will generate more profit than shitty products. And the handful of major players will happily collude to make sure only shitty products enter the market, increasing profits for everyone. Welcome to cartelville, population: the three companies that make up 95% of the world market.

It might but most devices only use HDMI. DP is pretty much only used by PCs.

Maybe the GPMI consortium decides to make their standard open; that might help. But I don’t see DP catching up to HDMI; HDMI is too entrenched.

Would be great but the manufacturer would be at a disadvantage because that bundled bullshit effectively subsidizes the device. So you’d have to either raise prices or accept a lower profit margin.

Due to the high barrier of entry (e.g. because of patents) it’s unlikely that a privately owned company can make a big market entry, especially across countries. And a public company will be forced by the shareholders to maximize profit so either you bundle crapware or they fire you as CEO.

Of course if you look outside the TV market such devices already exist. High-quality digital signage devices can easily be had – for about three times the price of an equivalently-sized TV.

They’ve been refusing open HDMI 2.1 since 2017. I don’t think that being afraid of Linux becoming the dominant gaming platform plays a role here; it’s more likely that they’re afraid people might find new ways to get at protected content.

I always describe pansexuality as “bisexuality with more politics and an ugly flag”. The basic idea is the same (not being attracted only to one gender) but pansexuality is more explicit about there being more than two genders and liking most or all of them.

Yeah, it’s not terribly surprising that the essay was failed. That’s barely high school level and even there it wouldn’t be a good effort.

And due to social media dominance, the far-right party (AfD) is set to become the strongest power with the next election if things don’t change.

Mind you, that party has been confirmed to be radical by the constitutional protection agency; that assessment has only been temporarily retracted because they got an injunction against it that now needs to be resolved. Court procedure is the only thing keeping them from being recognized as a threat to the democratic order.

The other major parties see no reason to comment on this, especially not the conservatives. Those same conservatives refuse to rule out a cooperation with the AfD, instead wanting to “face them on content”. That means parroting their talking points and then acting surprised when this doesn’t drive voters away from them.

In previous elections I voted for the pan-Europeans who, in a saner world, would be steadily on track towards beating the 5% cutoff. Unfortunately, right now the far-right threat is too big for me not to hold my nose and vote strategically. I’m not happy about that.

But hey, who knows how long that’ll even matter? Like always in such a situation, I expect the AfD to use bullshit delay tactics to stretch that injunction until after the next election, get voted into power, and then kill the investigation. Because rules don’t apply when you have enough backing. And I’m deeply afraid of what they’ll do to the country as the governing party with a conservative lapdog rubber-stamping everything they say.

[email protected] posted a link to the essay. In case they’re blocked for you here’s a copy of the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qxnVi_yaJ-Fb9u1-A1Vy2vQT3Aiw8Nix/view?usp=drivesdk

For most cases you can use Rider, which has a native Linux version. It doesn’t do database projects so if you use MSSQL without an OEM ORM you’re gonna want at least VS Code, but other than that it works fine.

Of course if you’re a .NET developer in a corporate environment you probably don’t have a choice as you’re already using a Windows VM through Azure Virtual Desktop just so that your company can chain itself harder to daddy Microsoft.

I’d like to point out that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution declared them a “proven right-extremist endeavor” back in May – until the AfD got a preliminary injunction against that. Until that is resolved they’re not officially considered dangerous.

Of course the injunction hasn’t been resolved yet and the AfD will probably try to stretch it out until the next general election.

Due to highly effective social media work (probably with some help from abroad) and the traditional media continually being goaded into talking about their preferred topics (and not, for instance, their laughably terrible fiscal policy), they currently stand to be the most powerful party after the next election. And you can guess how much that “proven right-extremist” declaration would mean if they get to form a government.

Until systemd-pussy is released, that is.

That’s what happens when you get distracted while posting. Thanks for the correction.

Mind you, changing the sleep logic to “if there is no signal and the menu isn’t open” shouldn’t be all that difficult. Neither should be waking up when a button is pressed.

To put in context how much they are driving up demand: OpenAI just bought 40% of the global wafer production from two of the three major RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix Micron (best known for their Crucial brand) decided to drop out of the consumer market entirely.

Of course the other AI companies are going to try to nail down supply as well. If they get similar deals, 10 € per GB of DDR5 will look cheap.

This will increase the cost of computers, phones, and laptops, both directly and indirectly (e.g. GPUs will also become more expensive; VRAM doesn’t grow on trees). We’re already at a point where Samsung Semiconductors reportedly refused to sell RAM to Samsung Electronics. I fear we might enter into an age of 2000 € basic office PCs and 1000 € mid-tier phones if the AI bubble won’t pop first. Even when it does, the repercussions will be felt for some time.

A shorthand for 000a:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:000s. It’s part of the alphabet v6 spec.

Oh, AI can be very useful. Just not the generative stuff that is currently trying to consume all resources of the entire solar system for nebulous potential benefits.

A good example of AI that just works is document scanning. Get a picture of a document, locate text, OCR it, figure out which parts of the text correspond to entry fields, auto-populate the fields. That works pretty well and can greatly speed up manual data entry. It’s not perfect but the success rate is pretty good due to the constrained problem space and even if you have to check all fields and manually correct 10% of them you still save a lot of time.

An early example of this is the automated parsing of hand-written postal codes. That iteration of the tech has been in productive use since the 90s! (Yes, that’s just OCR but OCR is considered a field of AI.)

It’s one of those unexciting applications of tech that don’t make major waves but do work.

And not only is she capable of scaring Picard and Odo, she also becomes one of very few people who truly accept all of Odo’s weirdness and social awkwardness and just let him be himself.

Sure, Kira also accepted him in a similar way but that took years of time and romantic feelings. Lwaxana was just cool with it pretty much immediately. DS9 did a lot to show us that there was more to her than just an incredibly loud personality.

I predict incremental quality increases. Qwen4 will probably be a somewhat better Qwen3 (and a dud if we’re unlucky). I do agree that it’ll probably come out; there’s not enough life left in this AI boom for a Qwen5, though.

The biggest change will probably come from figuring out where LLM use will actually benefit us. Right now the industry zeros to answer that with “everywhere” and concludes that it’s prudent to spend money equivalent to the GDP of an industrial nation on compute-only data centers.

For example, I expect the use case for coding to be more like “autocomplete a code block based on known patterns” rather than “build a public-facing web application from a prompt”.

Gotta be honest, though, a locally hosted 70B model with basic RAG functionality isn’t exactly playing in the same league as the market leaders, which can be bigger by two to three orders of magnitude. And a model that size is already around the limit of what a beefy gaming PC can do with reasonable performance. We’re unlikely to ever beat the big players on quality with local models.

What might happen is that the market collapses, the big players all go bankrupt, further LLM development ceases, and locally hosted Qwen3-80B will be the pinnacle of available text generation for the next thirty years.

I love the suggestion of “Picture a sunset” at the bottom.

“Gemini, I want you to picture a beautiful sunset… and then fuck right off into it.”