Software systems are by nature more complex than physical systems. They also lack any tangible interfaces beyond code and diagrams and collective knowledge in the minds of the humans who build and maintain them.. The rapid evolution of software is no help either..if anything AI is accelerating that rapidity as well.
So a few years ago Nadella was a God among CEOs capturing OpenAI at the right time etc..but yeah laying off thousands of tenured folks surely is great strategy, god I hate the tech industry.
Btw does everyone see how insanely crappy Windows 11 is compared to MacOS
I made the switch to Linux Mint and it’s wonderful and almost triples my battery life. I’m also in the process of switching to a phone with graphene os which runs like butter and feels so much more secure, safe and private.
It's been three months since I switched to Arch. I've had a couple of hiccups that I couldn't resolve with an agent, or that I simply didn't want to spend too much time troubleshooting. Other than that, performance has been absolutely amazing. My terminal and browser open in milliseconds, not seconds. Even the heavy system I work on builds and loads in seconds instead of minutes. If I don't like a particular configuration, I can simply ask my agent to change it. Linux is GREAT in the agent era.
Battery gains on laptops are insane. Swapped a month ago on one, still need windows stuff on the other, but same model and one last all day and one has to be plugged in each session.
and that's crazy because traditionally Linux would drain your battery faster because it was lacking all the power optimisations. It still is, but windows must've gotten so bloated it's worse now.
I tried few distros including Mint but in the end CachyOS was one that works for me best. But I still got this W11 virtual machine where I can see how the system "evolves", and it still baffles me that Microsoft has the audacity to throw message saying "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" and having "Energy recommendations" that "Lower your carbon footprint" where background processes continue to drain machine resources at random intervals since W10
I don't understand how basically everything has languished under Nadella. Apple doesn't sell MacOS, so it should be less incentivized to keep improving it, but it is way better than Windows and the gap keeps widening. If I didn't use MacOS, I would just use Linux.
Windows does always cater to backwards companility and making IT departments happy, so that explains some of the lagging technology and systems. I can't believe NTFS is still the default file systems. That's generations behind Apple's APFS.
The stock has popped, and that's what Wall Street cares about, but I could see a world where this chronic underinvestment and mismanagement basically implodes the entire company in the coming years.
>>Btw does everyone see how insanely crappy Windows 11 is compared to MacOS
This is just an anecdote, but I have the exact opposite experience. I'm a C++ games developer working on Windows 11 every day and other than the micro frustrations with stupid UI, the system just works. I know I can rely on it day to day. But I was also given a MacBook last year for our iOS ports and I don't understand how anyone considers it a serious operating system for work - it's full of bugs to a point where I started using AI to work around some of them. I thought maybe MacOS 27 would fix some of them and sure it did - but then it introduced a whole bunch of new ones. As a developer it's probably the worst OS you could pick - if you hate windows for whatever reason go straight to Linux, at least you have actual control over your OS compared to MacOS where basic things like spotlight are broken and there's no way to fix them other than add to the thousands of complaints on apple forums.
> hate windows for whatever reason go straight to Linux,
Honestly, for personal machines the M series is wonderful hardware, and I have young kids so no time to tune Linux (I ran it at home for around a decade or so).
But yeah, the interface has many, many bugs.
My "favourite" (new) bug is that sometimes you can't move a window from the laptop screen to another screen. It goes away if you full screen the app, but it's bizarre to me that it made it to production.
Nadella's AI fumble is a true generational fuck up. They had OpenAI, they had complete access to GPT models before any one, they even had the first coding assistant concept.
Then due to typical clueless management and lack of taste and complete buffoonery, they just fucked it all up. I'm not complaining because I think everyone is better off, but it's just amazing to have witnessed that even when they luck out on a bet, they manage to fuck it up. Copilot started as a coding assistant, and before it could breath they destroyed the brand by shoving the name into literally everything without thinking or taste. Ignored the coding part, because that's lame, and instead focused on half assed Windows or Office apps and integrations that no one will ever use. Once claude code dominated the scene, they realized the major fuckup and tried to catch up, but it's too little too late.
> instead focused on half assed Windows or Office apps and integrations that no one will ever use.
I actually know quite a few (non-tech) people that love to use Copilot in those apps. So I'm not sure it's as big of a fuck-up as you think it is (or as I certainly used to think it is).
We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are profitable and useful. People prefer something that's expensive and useful over something that's just expensive. For some reason though it's only the people who are making useless things who are making anything at all. Nobody else tapped into the Cybertruck market segment at all.
I'm not really sure I'm understand what you're trying to say tbh. Though tangentially what even is the Cybertruck market segment to begin with?
On profitable products though; sure as a general concept, but the rate of return, opportunity cost and market competition factor into the profitability equation too. You could go waste your time building a desktop app for a chatgpt clone and make some "profit" in the same time your competitor threw similar resources at making a claude code and that makes 100x your profit. That would mean you actually lost despite the profit. The opportunity cost isn't only in building the wrong thing, but also in the human resources you allocated to the task that deprived other areas. I see no world where the 6 dozen copilots we got from Microsoft have any good ROI beyond diluting a brand and making them more of a laughing stock.
We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are beneficial to society as a whole. Not "profitable." Profit just means more money going from the many to the few. That's what's gotten us into this awful situation.
What good is thinking about the most beneficial things to society if you and your faction will never have the power to implement them or even to persuade those who do have that power?
Well, one of the things that I'm very, very certain is beneficial to society as a whole is getting the fascists and those who think that profit should be the first, last, and only concern out of power now and forever.
So fortunately, there's not really an incompatibility there.
If the Cybertruck were making good money it wouldn't be getting canceled a few years into its run on the market. No car company does that to successful products.
Crappy as in doesn't need third party full access to all accessibility untrusted toold for stuff like mouse scrolling the currect direction, volume control on external hdmi monitors, being able to navigate the UI using a keyboard, having the computer staying running when connected to a power source, etc?
One has to spend more on third party tools for getting MacOS to feature parity with a windows than a Win Pro license...
Linux is fine on the other hand, but you compared to a joke of an operating system.
I mean forget Picard, the leadership we have in much of the world today is full of egotistical narcissistic, blowhard or mob style and courrpt people -it feels like no one cares that such people ascend to power either via populism or via corruption -forget shithole countries..it feels like we have become a shithole planet
Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Erdogan, ... and so many others. Social media has only intensified this
It's a great question. Adherents to the Old Testament point to Original Sin.
But even without religion we can use today's standards of morality to be sure that at some point in human development there was a first time for a person to commit an abjectly "sinful" crime of inhumanity against another. Not having been there to witness the event, I can't tell you the what or why of it. Fratricide, parricide, abuse, and more, I think we can be sure there is a first time for all of these.
Speculation leads to many answers. One, absent religion, is that because we seem to be derived from pond scum "inhumanity" developed somewhat before morals and ethics did, and has found its niche in us.
No that is not a correct read -it might be based on this past few months or so state of the art, while instead that state of the art is moving forward every month- and at the rate these ai coding systems are improving and our harnesses for managing them- bug handling and brownfield codebases are becoming increasingly accessible to AI coding
Ie you are making the mistake of assuming the tech is static when it most assuredly is not
If we assume that AI coding is just beginning- we can assume that humans will create systems to help
Manage the increasingly complex interactions that machines will code - ie we are still early like when we first introduced the industrial revolution to the peasants (which led to decades of chaos- for sure)
But Just like a 787 is not flown by hand either - doesn't mean anyone is qualified to autopilot it
Complex engineering systems will require sme humans to help manage the underlying complex interactions in way that is comprehensible to human intelligence
No one except for a smaller group of specialists for example these days does much understanding of assembly or compilers.. but we build complex SaaS apps all the time without that knowledge
reply