I think major factors in people bitching about the Windows 10 EOL is that a) Windows 10 was explicitly marketed as the final version of Windows and b) Windows 11 is so unappealing that even companies are reluctant to upgrade.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a big problem. We had dud releases before. Windows Vista had few friends due to compatibility issues but was workable. Besides, 7 was launched shortly after Vista’s EOL. Likewise, Windows 8’s absurd UI choices made it deeply unpopular but it was quickly followed by 8.1, which fixed that. And Windows 10 again followed shortly after 8’s EOL (and well before 8.1’s).

Windows 11, however, combines a hard to justify spec hike with a complete absence of appealing new features. The notable new features that are there are raising concerns about data safety. In certain industries (e.g. medical, legal, and finance), Recall/Copilot Vision is seen as dangerous as it might access protected information and is not under the same control that the company has over its document stores. That increases the vector for a data breach that could lead to severe legal and reputational penalties.

Microsoft failed to satisfyingly address these concerns. And there’s not even hope of a new version of Windows releasing a few months after 10’s EOL; Windows 12 hasn’t even been announced yet.

It’s no wonder that companies are now complaining about Windows 10’s support window being too short.

I would take a screenshot of the invite and deliver a ten minute lecture on how this meeting is keeping me from actually doing my job.

Second picture is a screenshot of my team’s backlog.

Locations don’t matter; they’ll throw me out of the meeting at the second picture at the latest.

In stereotypical winter you can’t add enough layers since if you do add layers so your face doesn’t hurt you get accosted by the police because going to public places in a balaclava hasn’t been legal since the late 50s.

In winter as it actually happens you need fewer layers but they need to be waterproof because winter means rain at +2 °C.

Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).

At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.

Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.

I agree. I cannot condone the killing of a person.

However, I can appreciate the irony of someone with his opinions on gun control getting gunned down. Even if I still prefer it hadn’t happened.

Auto-writing boilerplate code doesn’t change the fact that you still have to reimplement the business logic, which is what we’re talking about. If you want to address the “reinventing the wheel” problem, LLMs would have to be able to spit out complete architectures for concrete problems.

Nobody complains about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how do I test a method”, they’re complaining about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how can I refinance loans across multiple countries in the SEPA area while being in accord with all relevant laws”.

Mind you, a lot of this reimplementation is because those 1000 other implementations that came before all haven’t had their source code released to the public. No amount of vibecoding is going to help there because those LLMs were never trained on code that was never publicly released.

Note that, as far as I can tell, the “Second Kowloon” depicted in the show is a much nicer place than the original Kowloon Walled City was.

While we’re calling out improper arguments I could accuse you of using a motte and bailey argument there as you’ve gone from “there’s no indication that will happen” to “there is no indication to make it more or less likely that they will”. But I think this is more a case of communication being inherently imperfect, in both directions.

I didn’t say that they will inevitably enshittify, just that this has been the case with all mass-user services I am aware of, especially ones with VC funding behind them. Investors generally don’t throw big money at a company unless they expect some kind of ROI in the future. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that BS has a similar potential for enshittification as other social media services and to want it to be robust against that.

It makes sense to focus on an unhappy path here as the whole point of federated social media is to prevent or counteract that; the happy path is that they offer a great platform forever and federation barely matters. The AT protocol can provide a safeguard against certain types of platform misbehavior but not if one single service controls so much of the market that in the event of a split any other service immediately becomes irrelevant.

By the way, I chose the scenario I chose because I do consider it a likely path towards enshittification. If they need to monetize their user base because the investors want their money back, alternative AT services can break that monetization – e.g. if they were to aggressively push ads, other services could offer an ad-free experience and siphon off users, especially with AT’s account portability feature. That’s nice for the users but not so nice for the company. So how can they make the investors happy? By keeping people from fleeing, such as by breaking federation – or just account portability.

Of course, instead of a hard break, they could just pull a Kerberos and simply add important features to their implementation of AT that other services don’t get. Either way, the point is that any overwhelmingly large actor can undermine a supposedly open system. They don’t have to, but hey can.

That’s a failure state of the system itself; it can’t properly bring its strengths to bear. And that’s precisely the issue here. AT is in theory more robust than AP but in practice features like account portability rely on everybody playing by the rules. If BS control 99% of the AT market, they can choose to ignore the rules without significant repercussions.

While being overly picky about federation can harm a platform, so can putting all eggs in one basket.

I’m not sure I can follow your argument here.

One the one hand you argue that because they haven’t enshittified yet, they will never do so in the future. That doesn’t square with how any platform ever has worked out, especially when VC money is involved. Sure, BS is run by a benefit corporation but even they have to turn a profit at some point. Besides, the best of intentions can be quickly diluted or even forgotten when a leadership change happens.

You also argue that if BS defederates from everyone, the rest of the ecosystem can just go on without them. The problem there is that in that case, the rest of the ecosystem has little reason to do so. Bluesky minus 99% of its users and content has very little going for it; the network effect is huge in social media. The third-party AT services would go from being part of Twitter’s greatest rival to being Mastodon but with fewer users. Also, BS would have little to lose in that scenario; virtually all users and content would still be there. In comparison, if BS only had a 60% market share, defederating would lose them enough content and activity to be a very unappealing prospect.

Also, the argument you’re going against is not that BS is inherently bad, it’s that the AT market is currently centralized to a sufficient degree that the benefits of federalization can’t fully come to play. The argument is not “fewer people should use Bluesky”, it’s “more people on Bluesky should be using third-party AT providers”. There’s a subtle difference here: The argument people are actually making isn’t aiming to diminish the AT ecosystem, it’s aiming to make it more resistant to unilateral enshittification.

If someone can spin up a replacement, even at great cost, it means that if and when the service gets bad in the main instance people can create a different big replacement. Whatever made the original viable remains in place, so the incentives should be the same.

That assumes that the biggest player keeps playing by the established rules even after deteriorating otherwise. But if the biggest player controls virtually the entire market, they can change the rules at will.

For instance, let’s say BlueSky suddenly switches to a new protocol, which happens to be proprietary (or they extend AT in a proprietary manner that breaks compatibility). Can you still offer a competing AT service? Sure. But the 90+ % of users who are on BlueSky aren’t going to drop everything to switch to your service, which has virtually no users or content, just because you use the protocol BlueSky used to use. Most users are there for the content, not because of the technical implementation.

That’s the point of the whole federalized service thing: To keep one single party from being able to dictate terms to everyone. But just like in any market, that relies upon no one having an overwhelming market share. Right now, BlueSky has an overwhelming market share. They currently aren’t abusing it but they have the power to do so.

I fully agree. LLMs create situations that our laws aren’t prepared for and we can’t reasonably get them into a compliant state on account of how the technology works. We can’t guarantee that an LLM won’t lose coherence to the point of ignoring its rules as the context grows longer. The technology inherently can’t make that kind of guarantee.

We can try to add patches like a rules-based system that scans chats and flags them for manual review if certain terms show up but whether those patches suffice will have to be seen.

Of course most of the tech industry will instead clamor for an exception because “AI” (read: LLMs and image generation) is far too important to let petty rules hold back progress. Why, if we try to enforce those rules, China will inevitably develop Star Trek-level technology within five years and life as we know it will be doomed. Doomed I say! Or something.

They are being commonly used in functions where a human performing the same task would be a mandated reporter. This is a scenario the current regulations weren’t designed for and a future iteration will have to address it. Lawsuits like this one are the first step towards that.

I think Sisko only got so hung up about Eddington because he pulled his Maquis shit right on DS9, under Sisko’s nose.

Yates tried to deal with the Maquis adjacent to his nose but she didn’t fuck with station operations in the process. Also, she wasn’t very subtle about it.

That’s literally how many German private houses are built: Autoclaved aerated concrete with a brick cladding. Looks nice and provides a lot of thermal insulation.

Water hardness matters a lot, too. When I visit my family and shower with their super soft water, I could use industrial degreaser and my hair would be just fine.

But when I’m at home where the water is super hard? I better use a shampoo without sodium laureth sulfate and condition regularly or my hair will become an uncombable abomination within a few days.

Of course it’s more normie. As more people from more diverse communities join, the average becomes more, well, average.

For instance, not everyone who moved over from Reddit is a communist trans furry cybersecurity expert in a chastity belt – some people even somehow manage to be none of those things.

I think there is room for them and there’s even room for them thinking the original crowd is weird. We need to maintain that “weird” is good, though, and that people can just look away if a topic makes then uncomfortable.

It works with .ml and friends – they can spend all day living their understanding of communism and everyone who doesn’t share that understanding can just block them and move on with their lives.

In this case it’s just the adjective odd, not some acronym.

What happens instead is that the established parties decide they can win the voters back if they adopt far-right policies. We get extra-shitty governance and they still lose voters. It’s a lose-lose situation but they’re committed.