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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, they bought a modest, niche product with a likely viable business case, and then bet they could make it an everyman’s device for all their socializing and experiencing events like sports and music…

    The people that actually wanted the device got to take a back seat to them chasing non-existent markets for it… Their aspirations so impossibly high that a niche device could no longer justify itself against the money spent chasing that non-existant market… So something that should have been for some VR nerds to be happy and sustain the business while the rest of the world shrugs and say ‘I don’t get it’ becomes an ‘Obviously this is a failure of a concept and no one should bother doing this’.



  • Also kind of bad for VR that they bought Oculus and buried it under a ton of stuff no one asked for and will likely kill it entirely for failing to be the everyman’s gateway to socialization like they strangely imagined it to be.

    The true target market for Oculus is relatively niche, but probably could have sustained a more modest oculus. Meta’s demands exceed what that market can give them.

    Biggest hope for VR future right now is Steam Frame.


  • Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today

    This is hilarious, because every single facility of note, and especially datacenters has local, grid independent generators. Datacenters in particular have been noteworthy for pushing for ‘off-grid’ power plants to give them more control over their power and costs. In the more reachable territory, residential solar promises value by mitigating your exposure to eletrical rate changes, and in some cases combined with home energy storage, people are going off-grid. A lot of commercial interests also pad out their facilities with solar panels, because it is cheaper than sourcing entirely from the grid, and this was before the recent rate hikes inflicted by datacenter buildouts.

    His analogy is bogus because he implies off-grid energy generation is a thing of the past while AWS itself is a huge driver of off-grid energy generation in a world where off-grid energy generation is actually increasing.


  • You can’t to the same degree. If you let the user use a typical desktop environment like gnome or plasma., then they can set their wallpaper.

    Now if you want to make a kiosk thing, so much easier in Linux. But if you want to have a general purpose desktop experience but restrict stupid stuff like wallpaper, windows has got you.

    I would rather use and administer Linux systems at scale any day, but if you hated your users and wanted to lock personalization, then Windows has done the work to enable that.




  • Issue is that there’s one thing that organizations love about Windows that isn’t really catered to in any Linux distribution: Nannying the users and not letting them do their own things with their own systems.

    For example, no Linux distribution out there will help you prevent the end-users from changing their own desktop wallpaper, or what to show when the user locks their screen. When my company hands out laptops, the users are blocked from changing out the ugly propaganda slides they make our systems display. Just the tip of the iceburg for how much the enduser can be screwed with by a microsoft admin that just isn’t possible in any significant Linux desktop environment.

    So user may love Linux, but their employer still wants to make sure they are running Windows.


  • That seems to be the thing the administration fails to understand, accountability through apparent investigations and prosecutions mollify the anger. Even if consequences are by any reasonable measure are mild, people are still mollified at an acknowledgement of wrong doing. Deny them this, and the anger rises…

    Similarly, being able to lose an election has similar value. Your opponents “won” they don’t need to extract more out of you. Deny them that and again people are going to potentially break.

    Anecdotally, I know of a few people that seem shockingly close to violent uprising that I never would have guessed. I can’t imagine the volume of people closer to extreme views and when they will snap…








  • Note that 5th grade papers are always just horrible to read. This is why I don’t like LLM output, because it sounds just like 5th grade papers. Not a soul wants to read middle school papers.

    So I think broadly speaking the LLMs can generate middle school papers generally fine, at least they fit in.